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Two transmissions of the Qur'an can be found in printed copies today. One stems from Kufa and the other from Medina. They are more commonly called by the names of their respective second-century transmitters, Hafs and 'Wars. This thesis examines the relationship between these two transmissions, as exemplified in the first five suras. The Hafs transmission is found in printed Qur'an copies from all but West and North-West Africa, which employ the War transmission. The Hafs transmission is therefore the transmission found in the vast majority of printed copies of the Qur'an, and printed copies of the 'Wars transmission are rare in comparison. There is no doubt that copies according to other transmissions have existed as well, but none has apparently been printed. The Basrans al—Xalil and Sibawayhi, for instance, had texts that differed in places from both the Hafs and 'Wars transmissions. And the existence of manuscripts according to the Basran reading-system of abu 'Amr by way of al—Duri has been testified in the Sudan this century. The Qur'an according to this last transmission has in fact been printed at the head and side of the pages of editions of al—Zamaxari's commentary a1—Kaf, but these are not considered by Muslims as Qur'an copies proper. They are type-set and have occasional misprints, and at times do not tally with data on the reading-system of abu 'Amr given in works on Qur'an readings. Qur'an copies according to transmissions such as these or others might therefore still exist in manuscript, but would not readily be consultable. So it would be of use to document differences between those transmissions that actually are available in print. On a general level, this provides a step towards a critical apparatus of the Qur'an, and on a more specific one, it provides the data for this thesis.

The language used in critical readings of Hamlet is rife with implicitly teleological terms: according to many critics, and the ghost of King Hamlet, the story of his father's murder and Claudius' succession requires Hamlet to do something. I ask, why should Hamlet kill his uncle, revenge his father, correct his mother, become king, marry Ophelia, and produce heirs to rule when he is gone? While Hamlet's inaction is often described as delay or paralysis, I suggest that the Danish prince resists teleology through his studied ambivalence towards dynasty: land-owning, child-bearing, wars and marriage. Building on recent theoretical and historical work by scholars like Lee Edelman, Will Fisher, Margreta de Grazia and Madhavi Menon, I suggest that Hamlet, through the interventions of its main character, thwarts the assumption that the relationship between a nobleman and his land is natural, that the desire for possession and rule is inherent. Combining de Grazia's invaluable historicism with Fisher's discussion of prostheses, Ir ead the Renaissance nobleman as a prosthetic creature, physically and politically embodied by his marriage, his children, his land. In delaying the revenge he has been called upon to carry out, in hesitating to take up the crown, Hamlet defers the prostheses of nobility, and opens up a space from which to question the dynastic project.

The language used in critical readings of Hamlet is rife with implicitly teleological terms: according to many critics, and the ghost of King Hamlet, the story of his father's murder and Claudius' succession requires Hamlet to do something. I ask, why should Hamlet kill his uncle, revenge his father, correct his mother, become king, marry Ophelia, and produce heirs to rule when he is gone? While Hamlet's inaction is often described as delay or paralysis, I suggest that the Danish prince resists teleology through his studied ambivalence towards dynasty: land-owning, child-bearing, wars and marriage. Building on recent theoretical and historical work by scholars like Lee Edelman, Will Fisher, Margreta de Grazia and Madhavi Menon, I suggest that Hamlet, through the interventions of its main character, thwarts the assumption that the relationship between a nobleman and his land is natural, that the desire for possession and rule is inherent. Combining de Grazia's invaluable historicism with Fisher's discussion of prostheses, Ir ead the Renaissance nobleman as a prosthetic creature, physically and politically embodied by his marriage, his children, his land. In delaying the revenge he has been called upon to carry out, in hesitating to take up the crown, Hamlet defers the prostheses of nobility, and opens up a space from which to question the dynastic project.

The language used in critical readings of Hamlet is rife with implicitly teleological terms: according to many critics, and the ghost of King Hamlet, the story of his father's murder and Claudius' succession requires Hamlet to do something. I ask, why should Hamlet kill his uncle, revenge his father, correct his mother, become king, marry Ophelia, and produce heirs to rule when he is gone? While Hamlet's inaction is often described as delay or paralysis, I suggest that the Danish prince resists teleology through his studied ambivalence towards dynasty: land-owning, child-bearing, wars and marriage. Building on recent theoretical and historical work by scholars like Lee Edelman, Will Fisher, Margreta de Grazia and Madhavi Menon, I suggest that Hamlet, through the interventions of its main character, thwarts the assumption that the relationship between a nobleman and his land is natural, that the desire for possession and rule is inherent. Combining de Grazia's invaluable historicism with Fisher's discussion of prostheses, Ir ead the Renaissance nobleman as a prosthetic creature, physically and politically embodied by his marriage, his children, his land. In delaying the revenge he has been called upon to carry out, in hesitating to take up the crown, Hamlet defers the prostheses of nobility, and opens up a space from which to question the dynastic project. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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This study examines singular readings in the Gospel of Matthew across five of the earliest extant Greek copies of Matthew: Codex Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Ephraemi, Bezae, and Washingtonianus. In each of the selected MSS, it is determined where a spelling, word, clause, phrase, sentence, or group of sentences is different from other MSS. These “singular readings” are collected in order to shine light on what such idiosyncrasies can tell us about the MS or tendencies of the scribe who copied the MS. One of the more interesting finds is that some of our MSS add text more than they omit it, which is contrary to other studies. Apart from itacistic changes, alternate spellings are not always the most frequent type of singular reading in our MSS. The MSS have similar types of singular readings, but they often go about creating them in different ways. Conclusions are that our MSS either prefer Attic Greek to Koine (Washingtonianus) or vice versa (Sinaiticus), but two MSS (Vaticanus and Bezae) fluctuate between both grammatical standards. Our MSS typically have a high percentage of error due to parablepsis, but one MS seems to skip letters within words more often than entire words (Ephraemi). Ephraemi does not transpose words, but when the other MSS create transpositions, they all record instances where the genitive pronoun is placed prior to the word it modifies and verbs are moved forward in sentences. In addition, transpositions in Sinaiticus could have resulted from corrected leaps. Context often plays a part in the creation of singular readings, but context affects each MS differently. Nearby text seems to prompt changes in all of our MSS, but remote text such as a gospel parallel, does not often influence our scribes: Ephraemi contains the only harmonization seems to be intentional. In Sinaiticus and Washingtonianus, several readings exhibit possible interpretations of the text (but typically these do not appear to be theological changes) and they both contain readings that conflate textual variants. All of the singular readings record either a textual addition, omission, or substitution, but the MSS do not end up with the same amount of text: both Codex Vaticanus and Ephraemi add more words than they omit, whereas Codex Sinaiticus, Bezae, and Washingtonianus end up with more omissions. This final element adds a counterweight to other studies that contend MSS omit text more than they add. The examination yields few singular readings of dramatic theological import. Rather, the singular readings expose grammatical currents of the 4th-5/6th centuries, currents that are more prevalent than scribal attempts to re-present the text of Matthew.

This thesis explores ways in which the mid-nineteenth-century current of positivist thought impacted upon the work of the French artist Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). Guided by certain methodological imperatives set out in the theories of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra – in particular LaCapra’s identification of the need for historical practice to avoid reductive interpretation of data and to recognise the formulation of concepts through intersecting domains of knowledge and the specificity of their articulation in different primary sources – this thesis focuses upon interpretations of Courbet’s work formulated between 1848 and 1878, examines ideas developed within the intersecting domains of positivism and medical science, and highlights the deployment of these ideas for political leverage across the entire political spectrum. The thesis discovers ways in which positivist interpreters of Courbet’s work, including the artist himself, sought to criticise and resolve the social and political problems of the time by drawing upon theories designed to achieve social harmony through scientific understanding of human nature and its evolution. The thesis demonstrates that numerous social commentators referred to the images of people and social conditions in Courbet’s paintings to express positivist views about social decay, the enduring human potential to reform such decay, and an inevitable achievement of social harmony. I show that positivists interpreted the artist’s work with recourse to disciplines such as biology, physiology and physiognomy, as well as concepts such as ‘the physical and the moral,’ according to which the various physical, mental, emotional and moral dimensions of the human constitution were closely interconnected, evident in physical appearance, and crucially influenced by the changing environmental conditions impacting upon them, including society. I also show that, according to such prescriptions, the physical appearance of ordinary contemporary people represented in Courbet’s paintings indicated their physical and moral state and by extension the social conditions forming this state. Such physiognomical principles were often associated with caricature and portraiture to advance the critical and affective nature of Courbet’s paintings, which were seen as aesthetic stimulants in an evolutionary process of social reform. As the project shows, positivists thought that Courbet’s paintings expressed certain ideal notions of equality and materiality that served the political, ideological and often anti-religious interests of the writers concerned; in these views, all humans fostered the same inherent physiological desire for altruistic existence and shared equal status with animals and organisms as physiological beings conceived and sustained within biological nature.