Sadness in literature has often been thematically interpreted as an indication of literary originality. Notions of solitude, silence, and alienation contribute to the idea that melancholy benefits the introspective work of the artist. But it is also possible to explore sadness as a more complex literary phenomenon, one that expands the dimensions of affect and influences possibilities of aesthetic and ethical renovation that gesture beyond the usual themes of melancholy and solitude. Sadness thus does not come to be conceived as merely an aspect of mourning, but as a structure of loss that is intrinsic to our concept of the world's composition and insufficiencies. The energies that surround the experience of sadness measure the degree to winch many writers have been able to develop their sense of unhappiness into a way of charting the difficulties and transformative power of their own labours. As well, sadness in literature can be seen as illuminating a loss that writers generate in order to achieve through their art the possibility of aesthetic and even social reparation.

Static and Dynamic Aspects of the Roman Family Abstract: The thesis deals with Roman family law, the core of the research being the Roman family in the Republican era and the beginning of the Principate. However, the archaic rules of regal period on one hand, and of the period of Dominate or even of the times of Justinian on the other, can also be included to present the overall picture of the development of a certain institution. Three main research goals are outlined in the introduction of the work to be reached throughout the following three chapters. The first goal is to define the term of the Roman family; the second is to connect theory and practice, i.e. so-called law in books and law in action. Therefore, we shall first analyze the legal rules and then compare these theoretical findings with their practical application. The practice shall be ascertained mainly from the non-legal sources of literal or epigraphic character. The third goal is to utilize an interdisciplinary approach, i.e. to use the outcomes, methods, and procedures from the research fields other than legal sciences to deepen our knowledge of the Roman family. The first chapter (Family in Ancient Rome) focuses on the Roman family from different points of view. The polysemous terms familia and domus are analyzed. Familia signifies...

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After graduating from the Literae Humaniores course, which after the mid-nineteenth century came to revolve around Plato’s Republic, Walter Pater’s (1839-1894) professional duties spanning thirty years at Oxford were those of a philosophy teacher and lecturer of Plato. This thesis examines Pater’s deep engagement with Platonism in his work, from his earliest known piece, “Diaphaneitè” (1864), to his final book, Plato and Platonism (1893), treating both his criticism and fiction, including his studies on myth. Plato is an ideal philosopher, critic, and artist to Pater, exemplifying a literary craftsman who blends genres with the highest authority. Platonism is a point of contact with several of Pater’s contemporaries, such as Arnold and Wilde, from which we can take new measure of their critical relationships regarding aestheticism and Decadence. Pater’s idea of aesthetic education takes Platonism for its model, which heightens one’s awareness of reality in the recognition of form and matter. Platonism also provides a framework for critical encounters with figures across history, such as Wordsworth, Michelangelo and Pico della Mirandola in The Renaissance (1873), Marcus Aurelius and Apuleius in Marius the Epicurean (1885), and Montaigne and Giordano Bruno in Gaston de Latour (1896). In the manner Platonism holds that soul or mind is the essence of a person, Pater’s criticism, evident even in his fiction, seeks the mind of the author, so that his writing enacts Platonic love. Through close reading, we highlight his many references to Plato, identify Platonic subjects and themes, and explore etymological nuances in the very selection of his words, which often reveals a Platonic tendency of refinement towards immateriality, from seen to unseen beauty. As a teacher and an author Pater helped shape Oxonian Platonism, and through his writing we examine how Platonism informs his philosophy of aesthetics, history, myth, epistemology, ethics, language, and style.

‘Poetry’ insisted Ezra Pound, ‘is a composition of words set to music’: his Cantos remembered ‘Uncle Willie’ downstairs composing, singing poetry to himself. This study examines the nature and effects of W.B.Yeats’s idiosyncratic but profound sense of music. For his poems were compositions set to music. They were saturated with musical themes; syntactically he professed to write for the ear rather than the eye; and he flung himself repeatedly into the breach between music and words, composing ballads, songs, and plays with music, and performing poetry with musical instruments. My thesis is that nature of poetry, spoken, read or sung, obsessed Yeats, and I hold it self evident that such an acutely self-conscious poetry will articulate this obsession: to use his own imagery, will bear the scars of its own birth. What follows is a study of meaning, obsession, and influence, beginning with what Yeats knew and how he came to poetry: his father’s and his own vocalizations of the musical preoccupations of Scott and Shelley, viewed through the annotations of ‘the first book [he] knew Shelley in’ and the solipsistic singers and instrumentalists of his early verse. The theme of chapter two is Ireland: the musical resonances of Anglo Irish ballads and Irish verse are viewed through Yeats’s aurally-oriented canon-formation, as we examine his instinctual recitations and deliberate approach to Irish folksong through the mediation of Douglas Hyde. The aesthetics of Wagner, Pater, and the French symbolistes frame the third chapter, which describes how poetry might approach the condition of music in the motivic organization of The Wind Among the Reeds. In chapter four the impact of Nietzsche’s profoundly musical philosophy is correlated for the first time with the exact moments of Yeats’s discovery of his texts, as Yeats’s plays and poetry move from ‘Apollonian’ languor to ‘Dionysian’ energy, from dream to song and dance. My final chapter uncovers the long history of the practical experiments Yeats made to perform poetry with a ‘psaltery’, and their resonating afterlife in subsequent poetry and poets. No musician himself, Yeats’s musical sense has until now been entirely dismissed: this study shows how central it is to his art and to an understanding of the dominant aesthetic of the age.

This thesis examines Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” as the product of Wilde’s long interest in critic Walter Pater’s literature and scholarship. From its first iteration published in 1889, through Wilde’s ongoing revision and expansion into the version commonly anthologized today, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” is an evolving work that mirrors Wilde’s enduring relationship with the art and ideas of his former teacher. This relationship is explored in three contexts: Pater’s contribution to Wilde’s understanding of the Renaissance period; the steady influence of Pater’s ideas and persona on Wilde’s other major works from the period that saw the publication and revision of “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.;” and the particular influence of Pater’s Imaginary Portraits on the structure and themes of “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” Because of Pater’s extensive writings on art, and Wilde’s passionate interest in the subject, many of these intersections occur around the image of the portrait in Wilde’s work.

The Victorians saw more portraits than any generation before them. While the eighteenth century has been named 'the age of portraiture', portraits pervaded nineteenth-century society like never before. With the invention of photography, coupled with technological advancements in low-cost printing methods, the medium in which faces could be recorded was revolutionised, the classes of society that could afford to be immortalised expanded, and the spaces in which portraits were seen proliferated. These spaces included the public gallery, photography studio shop windows, and personal photograph albums. They also included the art periodical, biography, fiction, and poetry as the experience of portraiture became distinctly textual as well as visual. This thesis draws upon art history alongside literary, museum, and material studies to explore the creative exchange that developed between portrait viewership and reading practices in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Taking the establishment of the National Portrait Gallery in 1856 as its starting point, the thesis tracks the changing idea of the portrait gallery through its literary reception. It takes the portrait gallery to mean the physical space in which portraits were exhibited, and the conceptual idea of collecting, arranging, and interacting with portraits that permeated into the literary world. By focussing on the work of Edmund Gosse, Walter Pater, Thomas Hardy, and Vernon Lee, the thesis forms a 'gallery' of nineteenth-century tastemakers, each of whom looked to the democratic art of portraiture to reflect upon their literary art. How did portraits and texts interact in the mid- to late nineteenth century? In what ways did writers adapt the conventions of portraiture and the portrait gallery for the written text? This thesis seeks to answer these questions and provide new narratives about the complex relationship between the visual and the verbal in nineteenth-century culture. It observes the Victorian 'culture of art' with a more focussed eye to illuminate how the conditions of viewing, circulating, and collecting portraits specific to the period allowed the portrait gallery to serve as a particularly compelling arena for the literary imagination. Gosse, Pater, Hardy, and Lee tested the inherent limitations of portraiture as an art of imitation to realise its imaginative capacity for communicating with close and distant, contemporary and historic figures. They recognised that writing offered a valuable way of constructing the affective conversations that could be had with - and the stories that could be told about - portraits and portrait collections. With the proliferation of portraits came the problem and the opportunity of organising them.

My thesis examines the concept of sweetness as an aesthetic category in nineteenth-century British culture. My contention is that a link exists between the idea of sweetness as it appears in literary works and sugar as an everyday commodity with a complex history attached. Sugar had changed from being considered as a luxury in 1750 to a mass-market staple by the 1850s, a major cultural transition which altered the concept of sweetness as a taste. In the thesis I map the consequences of this shift as they are manifest in a range of texts from the period, alongside parallel changes in the aesthetic category of sweetness. I also assess the relationship between the material history of sweetness and the separate but related concept of aesthetic sweetness. In focussing on the relationship between sugar and sweetness in the Victorian period this thesis examines an area of nineteenth-century life that has previously never been subject to detailed study. Although several critics have explored the connection between sugar and concepts of sweetness as they relate to abolitionist debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, my focus differs in that I assert that other material histories of sugar played as significant a role in developing discourses of sweetness. Throughout this study, which spans the period 1780-1870, I draw on a range of sources across a variety of genres, including abolitionist pamphlets, medical textbooks, the novels of Charlotte Brontë and Wilkie Collins, the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, and the poetry of Christina Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. I conclude that literary cultures in the nineteenth century increasingly use discourses of sugar to relate to the mass market and explore the commercialisation of literature, at a time when a growing commodity culture was seen as a threat to literary integrity.

Ce mémoire s’articule autour de trois sections distinctes : dans la première, nous examinons la figure divine de Liber Pater et la perception de cette divinité dans l’Italie romaine. Liber ne cesse de surprendre les chercheurs entre autres grâce à son association avec Dionysos, c’est pourquoi il est nécessaire de s’attarder à une question simple, mais cruciale : qui est Liber Pater? Nous soulignons à travers cette section que Liber est une divinité agraire reconnue au sein du panthéon de Rome et recevant ainsi un culte public à travers les Liberalia et la triade qu’il forme avec Cérès et Libera. La pérennité de Liber sur la libertas y est aussi remise en jeu : plutôt que de concevoir une liberté politique, il faut s’attarder à une liberté physique et mentale. Dans la deuxième section, nous établissons une connexion sur le territoire italien entre Liber et Dionysos-Bacchus grâce au processus d’acculturation qui s’est concrétisé avec l’arrivée de Dionysos en Grande-Grèce au VIIIe et VIIe siècle av. J.-C. Nous explorons par la suite, à travers la tutelle de Liber et Bacchus sur le vin ainsi que la répression des Bacchanales, les formes hétérogènes qu’ont pu prendre les rituels et les cultes dédiés à ces divinités. Finalement, notre dernière section se penche sur le culte de Liber en Italie au Haut-Empire. Pour y parvenir, nous utilisons le cadre méthodologique de la lived ancient religion qui s’intéresse au spectre des stratégies religieuses pouvant être mises en place pour communiquer avec Liber, que ce soit à travers le don, la prière, le geste, le sacrifice, etc. Ce modèle d’analyse nous donne l’opportunité de nous intéresser au culte vécu de Liber, nous rapprochant ainsi de l’expérience religieuse des individus. Nous démontrons, grâce à un corpus épigraphique comportant plusieurs types d’inscriptions, que de nombreuses stratégies de communication étaient utilisées, notamment les rituels du votum, de la dedicatio, et de la consecratio à travers le don d’objets tels des autels et des statues. En groupe, ces stratégies se complexifient puisque le phénomène associatif produit une diversification cultuelle significative : plusieurs associations romaines, toutes différentes les unes des autre dans leurs pratiques et leur composition, honoraient Liber et ses bienfaits. / This dissertation is structured in three distinct sections: in the first one, we examine the divine figure of Liber Pater and the perception of this divinity in Roman Italy. Liber never ceases to surprise scholars, mostly because of his association with Dionysus, so it is necessary to address a simple but crucial question: who is Liber Pater? We emphasize in this section that Liber is an agrarian deity recognized within the pantheon of Rome and thus receives a public cult through the Liberalia and the triad that he forms with Ceres and Libera. The tutelage of Liber on libertas is also questioned: rather than understanding it in terms of political freedom, we must rather focus on a physical and mental freedom. In the second section, we establish a connection on the Italian territory between Liber and Dionysus-Bacchus thanks to the process of acculturation that took place with the arrival of Dionysus in Magna Graecia in the 8th and 7th century BC. We then explore, through the tutelage of Liber and Bacchus over wine as well as the repression of the Bacchanalia, the heterogeneous forms that the rituals and cults dedicated to these deities may have taken. Finally, our last section dives into the cult of Liber in Italy in the Early Empire. To do so, we use the methodological framework of lived ancient religion, which focuses on the spectrum of religious strategies that can be put in place to communicate with Liber, be it through donation, prayer, gesture, sacrifice, etc. This model of analysis gives us the opportunity to focus on the lived worship of Liber, therefore bringing us closer to the religious experience of individuals. We demonstrate, through an epigraphic corpus comprising several types of inscriptions, that numerous communication strategies were used, notably the rituals of votum, dedicatio, and consecratio through the donation of objects such as altars and statues. In groups, these strategies become more complex since the associative phenomenon produces a significant cult diversification: several Roman associations, all different from one other in their practices and composition, honored Liber and his benefits.

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