Thèse--Université de Paris. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [621]-632) and index.

Inaug.-diss.--Freiburg in Br. / [Life]: p. 140.

Doct. thesis--Department of English--Uppsala, 1992.

[No abstract submitted] / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1930. / Bibliography: p. 138-140.

Two main problems are investigated: Peacock's technique, his aims and method, as a satirical novelist; and his personal opinions, which, often obscured.by irony, can be determined only by reference to biography, and to his letters, memoirs, and serious essays. He aimed to satirize "public conduct and public opinion" and not private life. His characters, in the "humours" tradition, are abstractions of topical ideas, fads, and theories; others are caricatures of contemporary philosophers, politicians, and men of letters. All expose the folly of their opinion while indulging in after-dinner wine, song, and controversy. Peacock believed that pretentiousness and folly pervaded upper middle-class English society. As a satirist, he is a jester, not a reformer. His attack, diffuse and generally superficial, is governed by laughter rather than bitterness. His irony is discernible in his treatment of character and setting, in his scornful attitude towards his reader, and in his divided position as a humorist who sometimes poses as a serious critic. He is a stylist, a creator of witty and pedantic dialogue who is content merely to air disparate and extreme ideas, to pursue folly without attempting to slay it. Peacock's personal opinions and prejudices are determined, thus to interpret his satire, in these broad areas: society, politics, religion, education and science, and men of letters. He ridicules the current doctrines of primitivism and progress. He generally avoids comment on the upper and lower classes, and on the moral and humanitarian problems of the times. His most successful attack is against Tory anti-reform policy; but he also distrusts the political masses and the early Utilitarian appeal for a wide extension of the franchise. He accepts the idea of laisser-faire, particularly the assertion of man's right to personal opinion and religious belief. His religious satire changes with the times: in his early work, some unpublished, he attacks directly the drunkenness and ignorance of certain Anglican clergy; his religious attitude, more pagan than Christian, probably remains, but his later clergymen voice his opinions of classical literature and the "progress" of the times. His view of education is classical and aristocratic: he objects to education for the masses, to the training offered by the universities, and to the founding of Mechanics' Institutes. His real enemy is not "progress" but Lord Brougham, the Minister and educator whom he disliked personally. His attack on Southey and Wordsworth also grows from personal enmity. He respects their poetry but he despises their politics. Both are charged as Tory hirelings. His caricatures of Coleridge, the Kantian philosopher and the lay preacher, are merely facetious. His most successful caricature exposes Shelley's folly as a youthful reformer and lover. He objects to Byron's misanthropical pose in Childe Harold, but he admires him as a fellow-satirist. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

Thèse (M.A.)--Université Laval, 1997. / Texte uniquement en anglais. Bibliogr.: f. 117-122. Publié aussi en version électronique.

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

This dissertation uncovers three previously unrecognized innovations of Thomas Jeckyll in the Peacock Room. At the same time, the dissertation admits that sometimes James McNeill Whistler chose a more conventional path in the design of the room than previously acknowledged. The dissertation illuminates the often overlooked principle of Classical Decor, first described in the first century BC by Vitruvius, and analyzes how it was instituted in the Peacock Room. Four major points illustrate this conclusion. First, the meaning of the sunflower in the West is explored to account for the flower’s popularity and absorption into ancient heliotropic lore. Thomas Moore’s poetry may have inspired Aesthetic Movement designers such as Jeckyll to use the motif. Second, this dissertation demonstrates that the Peacock Room is only a distant descendant of the traditional European porcelain chamber. It was a new idea to turn the porcelain chamber into a dining room. Further, the room lacks two of the three key features of a porcelain room: lacquer panels and large plate-glass mirrors. When Whistler made the surfaces of this room dark and glossy, he made the room more traditional, aligning it with the customary lacquer paneling of porcelain rooms. And Jeckyll’s sho-dana shelving system in the Leyland dining room was without precedent in porcelain or other kinds of Western rooms, with influences from Japan and China. Third, Decor in the dining room was revealed as an established pattern in eating rooms from Ancient Roman triclinia to the present day. Fourth, Decor is present in the Peacock Room in four ways: in the trappings of the table used to decorate a dining room, in the darkness of this dining room, in the use of a foodstuff, the peacock, to decorate the room, and in the hearth’s sunflowers. Through the lens of the history of Western domestic interiors, significant innovations by Jeckyll have been brought to light, and the meaning of specific elements in the Peacock Room has been elucidated. Jeckyll and Whistler gave the world a sensational story in the Peacock Room but also a complex work of art that is only beginning to be illuminated.