Throughout his career, Percy Bysshe Shelley experimented with the genre of the dream vision in attempts to identify and resolve conflicts between his poetic and political ambitions. Though critics have neglected the importance of the dream vision in the development of Shelley's thought and art, major poems such as Queen Mab, Laon and Cythna, and The Triumph of Life share formal and thematic characteristics that qualify them as adaptations of the genre. This genre study thus aims to close a lacuna in the criticism by reading certain poems of Shelley as examples of a specific kind of narrative that dramatizes visionary insight but places the experience in the context of a paradoxical fixation on materiality. As a pseudo-historical discourse, the dream vision also provides a medium for analyzing assumptions that govern historical discourse and its claims to truth and authority. This study asserts that the formal problems of interpretation in Shelley's visionary narratives disclose the poet's critical orientation to history and reveal an affinity between the dream vision and the contemporaneous emergence of the historical novel in the work of Walter Scott. Because Shelley's dream visions engage the same set of aesthetic dilemmas essential to Scott's formulation of the historical novel, this project argues for the importance of Shelley's generally uncredited contribution to the rise of realism as a dominant mode of expression in nineteenth-century literature / acase@tulane.edu

The mechanics of head injury has been of special interest in biomechanics research. Since experimentation is costly and often difficult to perform, mathematical and computer models which simulate head injury are primary research tools. Previous investigators have formulated finite element models of the human brain and of the human skull. A finite element model of the human head and neck, as a system, is presented which incorporates the brain and skull models of previous investigators and a model of the cervical spine into a single model. The 'exact' geometry of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) space is included, and morphological continuity of the CSF space and brain material in the region of the head/spine connection is maintained in order that the proper 'flow' of material between the head and spinal cavity may take place during a simulated head impact or whiplash. The 3-dimensional geometry of the brain, spinal cord, CSF space, cervical vertebrae, and the intervertebral disks is defined by means of eight-node, isoparametric brick elements. The jaw and the thick portion of the skull in the floor of the cranium are also described by brick elements, but the frontal and parietal bones of the skull and the superior portions of the occipital and temporal bones of the skull are represented by thin shell elements. The falx cerebri and the tentorium cerebelli are partitioned into plane stress membrane elements. Midsagittal symmetry was assumed in the construction of the model Accelerations usually exceed 100 g's during a head impact. Hence, inertial forces will cause large changes in the pressure and shear stress gradients within the central nervous system (CNS) during the contact phase of the impact. The model was therefore made inertially correct, at least to a reasonable approximation, by optimally locating point masses at the surface nodes of the skull in order that the total mass, center of mass, and mass and product moments of inertia of the head/neck system would agree with experimentally determined values in the literature. The point masses represent the additional mass of the system contributed by the hair, facial and neck muscles, and other soft tissue of the head and neck, and therefore care was taken so that the point mass distribution would be anatomically correct The material properties assigned to the brain and spinal cord elements of the model were the standard literature values of E = 66.7 kPa (9.68 psi) and a Poisson's ratio of (nu) = .499, which expresses the essential incompressibility of the brain material. The boundary conditions consist of fixing the spine at the T1 level in order to simulate the effect of the large torso mass on the head/neck system. A half-sine wave contact force of 4 ms duration with a peak load of 6000 N (1349 lb) was applied to the occiput of the skull over an area of 26.7 cm('2) (4.14 in('2)), and the model was exercised using the linear finite element program EASE2 with the split energy option The results gave peak pressures in the coup region of the brain of approximately 93.5 kPa (13.6 psi) at 1.6 ms; the peak negative pressure in the contre-coup region was -100.1 kPa (-14.5 psi) at 1.6 ms. These values agree with the experimental data reported in the literature if they are scaled relative to the magnitude of the contact force used in the experiment (impact study) / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

Located at the intersection of the Andes and the Amazon, the piedmont region of Apolo, Bolivia is an interactive frontier that has long been transformed by the movement of persons, resources, and cultural practices between the altiplano and tropical lowlands. Historical documents place the Lecos in Apolo at the time of Inca expansion, and most likely earlier, although the Lecos are largely absent in contemporary ethnographic surveys. Portrayed in the academic literature as on the verge of extinction, Lecos ethnic identity was targeted for revival by the formation of the indigenous organization CIPLA (Indigenous Center of the Lecos People of Apolo) in 1997. The movement to recuperate Lecos identity is explicitly connected to concerns about the land and access to resources through the demand for a Lecos Communal Lands of Origin (TCO) An important premise of my research is that neither the lands being claimed, nor the social actors involved, represent bounded, static entities; instead, the regional landscape of Apolo, and the identity of its original inhabitants have been actively shaped through historical interactions. New ways of understanding cultural variation and change are necessary to replace the essentialist, environmentally deterministic assumptions about indigenous peoples inherited from Steward's cultural ecology, and which continue to guide much environmentally focused research in South America. Rather than portraying indigenous peoples as passively adapted to local environmental conditions, the research program of historical ecology posits that the relationship between peoples and places is mutually interactive and reflective of changes over time. Yet while environments are problematized through an awareness of the constructed nature of landscapes, human societies are too often presented as essentialized givens. In my dissertation, I explore the significance of identity, as a problematic issue, within the research program of historical ecology and focus on the relationship between ethnogenesis and landscape transformation in the interstitial region of Apolo My research was multi-temporal and multi-scalar. Exploring the documentary record from prehistory to present, I reconstruct the ethnohistory of the Lecos of Apolo and trace processes of landscape change. I also conducted fifteen months of ethnographic research in La Paz, Apolo, and three Lecos of Apolo communities, Inca, Irimo, and Santo Domingo. Multi-sited fieldwork among revealed how processes of landscape transformation and ethnogenesis were neither uniform over the region nor consistent across the group. I conclude by arguing that the research program of historical ecology can be useful to contemporary indigenous movements by challenging essentialist assumptions about the relationship between indigenous peoples and places, and replacing these with situated histories of interaction / acase@tulane.edu

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The dissertation explores the role of rape in the 'rise' of the novel, attempting to account for the surprising frequency with which rapes occur in early- and mid-eighteenth-century fiction. Narratives of rape to some degree 'enable' the increasingly restrictive domestic role constructed for women during the course of the century, though at the same time the gradual disappearance of such Stories from fiction is clearly owing to the eventual production of a feminized, Sentimental, masculine ideal. More importantly, eighteenth-century fiction uses rape, in all its ambiguity of intention and experience, to destabilize ways of knowing, and to explore the tenuous boundaries of identity The earliest novelistic narratives, 'amatory' works by Manley and Haywood, demonstrate that rape (as it takes form in fiction) gives rise to shattered fictions of identity and difficulty in representing the self. These authors demonstrate that a victim's physical, social, and psychological lives are violently disjoined by the act--and the consequences--of rape. This conjunction of themes--sexual violence and division of self--carries through the century. The dissertation examines the various uses of sexual violence in examples of popular fiction, moving from the work of Manley and Davys to Samuel Richardson's supposedly 'psychological' novel Clarissa. Sentimental novels by Burney and Inchbald are examined for their depiction of violence in the Sentimental family, while the terrors of Radcliffe's Gothic are highlighted by a comparison to Austen's illusory tranquility / acase@tulane.edu

Non-cemented low-temperature isotropic (LTI) carbon and porous-coated Ti-6Al-4V femoral endoprostheses were evaluated in the canine to determine the comparative performance of LTI carbon. Bone remodeling was assessed with radiographic and both qualitative and quantitative histologic analysis. Additionally, the degree and condition of interfacial bone apposition and ingrowth was determined. Two-dimensional finite element models were developed and used to evaluate the effect of interfacial properties and implant elastic modulus on the stress distribution in the implanted femur. The ability of the models to correctly depict remodeling was based in part on the correspondence of stress and trabecular area fraction changes. Theoretical structural alterations were also considered in the analysis Results indicated that bone ingrowth was good to excellent, but that bone remodeling associated with Ti-6Al-4V implants was typified by significant loss of cortical and cancellous bone. In contrast, bone apposition occurred in limited areas with most interfaces consisting of interposed fibrous tissue, and remodeling around the carbon devices was typified by less cortical bone loss and significant cancellous bone hypertrophy Significant correlations between trabecular area fraction changes associated with titanium alloy devices and changes in maximum compressive stress were found, suggesting valid modeling assumptions. However, the increases in cancellous bone density around carbon devices were not depicted. Importantly, the stress distribution was insensitive to implant modulus, a result which was supported by remodeling around one carbon device with atypically good apposition, remodeling that was similar to that seen for titanium alloy devices. Theoretical considerations suggested that the typical remodeling around carbon devices was indicative of a mechanically loose implant Therefore, on the basis of limited bone apposition, remodeling indicative of a loose implant, and ineffectual stress changes as a result of a reduced implant modulus, it was concluded that the performance of LTI carbon implants was inferior / acase@tulane.edu