This study draws on the theories of pluralism and solidarism from the English School to analyze the approaches of Security Council members towards the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in Libya and Syria. Using Stephen Toulmin's model of argumentation analysis, the study also provides a normative critique of these arguments. The study illuminates the divergent positions taken by the permanent members of the UN Security Council in the context of R2P during the crises in Syria and Libya. The analysis uncovers two starkly different approaches. On one side, representatives from Great Britain, France, and the United States advocate for the protection of human rights, democracy, and freedom. On the other side, representatives from Russia and China prioritize state sovereignty and the maintenance of order and stability. This stark contrast underscores the complexity and challenges inherent in implementing R2P. The study also highlights the concrete arguments and approaches taken by the Security Council’s permanent members. This provides a detailed understanding of how these differences manifest in practice and how they affect decision-making in the Security Council.  Based on the normative analysis, The study found that the normative frameworks of pluralism and solidarism offer distinct perspectives on human rights and state sovereignty, influencing the strength of the permanent members' arguments. Pluralism emphasizes state sovereignty and non-intervention, showing skepticism towards R2P, while solidarism highlights the protection of human rights and supports international interventions, aligning with R2P principles. In practice, examples like Libya and Syria have demonstrated the complexity and challenges of implementing R2P. In the case of Libya, NATO's intervention led to significant loss of life and destabilization, questioning the legitimacy and effectiveness of the actions. This situation has underscored the difficulty of balancing the protection of human rights with respect for state sovereignty. The integration of Responsibility While Protecting is proposed in R2P's third pillar to ensure responsible and effective humanitarian interventions.

My Interdisciplinary dissertation examines illustrations in manuscripts and early print sources and reveals their participation in the transmission and reception of Old Norse mythology. My approach encompasses Material Philology and Media Specific Analysis. The reception history of illustrations of Old Norse Mythology affects our understanding of related Interdisciplinary fields such as Book History, Visual Studies, Literary Studies and Cultural Studies. Part One of my dissertation begins with a discussion of the tradition of Old Norse oral poetry in pagan Scandinavia and the highly visual nature of the poems. The oral tradition died out in Scandinavia but survived in Iceland and was preserved in vernacular manuscripts in the thirteenth century. The discovery of these manuscripts in the seventeenth century initiated a cycle of illustration that largely occurred outside of Iceland. Part One concludes with an analytical survey of illustrations of Old Norse mythology in print sources from 1554 to 1915 revealing important patterns of transmission. Part Two traces the technological history of production of digital editions and manuscript facsimiles back to the seventeenth century when manuscripts were hand-copied and published by means of copperplate engravings. Part Two also discusses the scholarly and cultural prejudices towards images that are only now slowly fading. Part Two concludes with a description of my prototype for a digital image repository named MyNDIR (My Norse Digital Image Repository). MyNDIR will facilitate the emergence of images of Old Norse Studies from the current informal crowd sourcing of material on the web to a digital image repository supporting the dissemination of accurate scholarly knowledge in a widely accessible form. Part Three presents two thematic case studies that demonstrate the value of applying the skills of visual literacy to illustrations of Old Norse mythology. The first study examines Jakob Sigurðsson’s illustrations of Norse gods in hand-copied paper manuscripts from eighteenth-century Iceland. The second study examines illustrations by prominent Norwegian artists in the editions of Snorre Sturlason: Kongesagaer published in 1899 and 1900 respectively. What emerged from these studies is an understanding that illustrations offer insights for the study of Old Norse texts that the words of the texts alone cannot provide. / Graduate / 0362 / 0377 / 0279 / pabaer@uvic.ca

In order to counter what I regard as premature and reductive formulations of a 'native' British postmodernism, I identify a specific tendency in contemporary writing which I name the domestic surreal, and which I trace through the poetry of John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Roy Fisher, Christopher Middleton, John Ash, Peter Didsbury and Ian McMillan. Through close reading and a comparative approach, I uncover key preoccupations with idiosyncratic perception, shared experience, urban space and poetic play. I also describe a network of allegiances and influence among these writers which reveals the domestic surreal to be one of the contemporary manifestations of an imaginative tradition which stretches back through the Surrealist and Cubist movements to Baudelaire and Rimbaud. For the poets of the domestic surreal, engagement with an aesthetic tradition is inextricably linked with their response to contemporary conditions. Drawing on dialectical and poststructuralist perspectives, I propose that the domestic surreal attempts to resist the constraints of social and aesthetic consensus in Britain and America in the period following the Second World War.