Embedded within various works of Eighteenth-Century literature lie themes regarding how the protagonists of these stories pursue their own versions of happiness. This thesis examines how characters from a wide variety of Eighteenth-Century novels engage with their surroundings, often resisting the dominant social structures of the time, to fashion more fulfilling lives for themselves. From Robinson Crusoe to Elizabeth Bennet to Frankenstein's monster, these characters come from a wide variety of backgrounds but all reveal several unifying themes. They seek out personal connections rather that striving to fulfill antiquated social expectations and they focus on their own agency, rather than circumstances out of their control. Their respective journeys are often fraught with peril, but each one is a journey worth embarking on.

This thesis explores a contemporary literary movement that has been called ‘the new nature writing’, framing it in its wider historical and cultural context of the last forty years. Drawing on recent developments in cultural geography, it explores the way such terms as ‘landscape’ and ‘place’ have been engaged with and reinterpreted in a diverse project of literary re-mapping in the British and Irish archipelago. It argues that the rise of environmentalism since the late 1960s has changed and destabilised the way the British and Irish relate to the world around them. It is, however, concerned with challenging the term ‘nature writing’ and argues that the literature of landscape and place of the last forty years is not solely concerned with ‘nature’, a term that has come under some degree of scrutiny recently. It sets out an argument for reframing this movement as an ‘archipelagic literature’ in order to incorporate the question of community. In understanding the present uncertainties that pervade the questions around landscape and place today it also considers the effects of such political changes as the partial devolution of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on the British and Irish relationship to the land. The literature that it takes as its subject often explores the way personal and communal senses of identity have found a renewed focus in a critical localism in opposition to more footloose forms of globalisation. Through a careful negotiation of Marxist and phenomenological readings of landscape, it offers an overview of what is a considerable body of literature now and what is developing into one of the most consistent and defined literary movements of the twenty-first century.

De nombreux travaux ont montré l'importance de l'interpolation de Craig pour la structuration et la modularité des spécifications de type axiomatique. En vue d'en donner des conditions suffisantes dans un cadre théorique adapté à l'informatique, nous nous sommes intéressé à une propriété équivalente à l'interpolation de Craig dans le cadre de la théorie standard des modèles : la consistance de Robinson. L'étude de cette dernière propriété nous a amené à généraliser dans une spécialisation des institutions les notions classiques de diagrammes complets et de morphismes élémentaires. Ceci nous a alors permis de généraliser quelques résultats classiques de théorie des modèles tels que les théorèmes de Löwenheim-Skolem ou l'union de chaînes de Tarski. En fin, les constructeurs de formules étant explicites dans notre cadre théorique, nous nous sommes naturellemant intéressés à la combinaison de logiques et à la préservation de l'interpolation de Craig et de la consistance de Robinson.

Le théorème de Burke est un résultat classique en théorie des files d'attente. Il établit que le processus de départ d'une file M/M/1 est un processus de Poisson de même intensité que le processus des arrivées. Nous présentons des extensions de ce résultat à la file d'attente et au modèle de stockage. Nous abordons ensuite l'étude de ces systèmes en tandem et en régime transitoire. Nous prouvons que les équations qui régissent la dynamique des deux systèmes (file d'attente et modèle de stockage) sont les mêmes alors que les variables pertinentes sont différentes selon le modèle qui nous intéresse. En utilisant des analogies entre ces systèmes et l'algorithme de Robinson-Schensted-Knuth, nous donnons une preuve élégante de la propriété de symétrie de chacun des deux systèmes. Nous nous intéressons également aux corrélations entre les services des clients successifs au sein d'une période d'activité. Nous revenons par la suite au théorème de Burke que l'on peut voir comme étant un résultat de point fixe: le processus de Poisson est un point fixe pour la file d'attente avec des lois de service exponentielles. Nous prouvons des résultats de points fixes dans le cadre des grandes déviations où les variables d'entrée sont décrites par le biais de leurs fonctions de taux.

Der Zusammenhang zwischen Lohnhöhe einerseits und Profit bzw. Profitrate andererseits gehört traditionell zur Grundlagenforschung der ökonomischen Theorie. In der kapitaltheoretischen Kontroverse der jüngeren Vergangenheit spielen Kurven, die diesen Zusammenhang wiedergeben, eine bedeutende Rolle. Hier geht es indes weniger um deren formale Eigenschaften, sondern eher darum, ihren ökonomischen Gehalt freizulegen und auf offene Fragen hinzuweisen.

This study revises a dominant narrative of the eighteenth-century, in which a secular modernity emerges in opposition to religious belief. It argues that a major challenge for writers such as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, and for English subjects generally, was to grasp the object world--including the modern technological object--in terms of its spiritual potential. I identify disputes around the liturgy and common prayer as a source of a folk psychology concerning mental habits conditioned by everyday interactions with devotional and cultural objects. Swift and Defoe therefore confront even paradigmatically modern forms (from trade items to scientific techniques) as a spiritual ecology, a network of new possibilities for practical piety and familiar forms of mental-spiritual illness. Texts like A Tale of a tub (1704) and Robinson Crusoe (1719) renew Reformation ideals for the laity by evaluating technologies for governing a nation of souls. Swift and Defoe's Protestantism thus appears as an active guide to understanding emotions and new experience rather than a static body of doctrine. Current historiography neglects the early modern sense that sectarian objects and rituals not only discipline religious subjects, but also provoke ambivalence and anxiety: Swift's Tale diagnoses Catholic knavery and Puritan hypocrisy as neurotic attempts to extract pleasure from immiserating styles of material praxis. Crusoe, addressed to more radical believers in spaces of trade, sees competent spiritual, scientific and commercial practice on the same plane, as techniques for overcoming fetishistic desires. Swift's orthodoxy of enforced moderation and Defoe's oddly worldly piety represent likeminded formulae for psychic reform, and not--as often alleged--conflicts between sincere belief and political or commercial interests. Gulliver's travels (1726) and A Journal of the plague year (1722) also link mind and governance through different visions of Protestant polity. Swift sees alienation from the national church--figured by a Crusoe or Gulliver--as refusal of common sense and problem solving. Defoe points to religious schism, exemplified by dissenters' exclusion from state church statistics, as a moral and medical failure: the city risks creating selfish citizens who also may overlook data needed to combat the plague. / text

No description available.

In this thesis, Newman-Penrose techniques are used to obtain some new exact solutions to Einstein's field equations of general relativity and to assist in the physical interpretation of some exact radiative space-times. Attention is restricted to algebraically special space-times with a twist-free, repeated principal null congruence. In particular, the Robinson-Trautman type N solutions, which describe expanding gravitational waves, are investigated for all possible values of the cosmological constant A and the Gaussian curvature parameter E. The wave surfaces are always (hemi-)spherical, with successive surfaces displaced along time-like, space-like or null lines, depending on E. Explicit sandwich waves of this class are studied in Minkowski, de Sitter or anti-de Sitter backgrounds and a particular family of such solutions, which can be used to represent snapping or decaying cosmic strings, is considered in detail. The singularity and global structure of the solutions is also presented. In the remaining part of the thesis, the complete family of space-times with a non-expanding, shear-free, twist-free, geodesic principal null congruence (Kundt waves), that are of algebraic type III and for which the cosmological constant (Ac) is non-zero, is presented. The possible presence of an aligned pure radiation field is also assumed. These space-times generalise the known vacuum solutions of type N with arbitrary Ac and type III with Ac = O. It is shown that there are two, one and three distinct classes of solutions when Ac is respectively zero, positive and negative and, in these cases, the wave surfaces are plane, spherical or hyperboloidal in Minkowski, de Sitter or anti-de Sitter backgrounds respectively. The singularities which occur in these space-times are interpreted in terms of envelopes of these wave surfaces. Again, by considering functions of the retarded time which "cross-over" between canonical types, sandwich waves are also studied. The limiting cases of these, giving rise to shock or impulsive waves, are also considered.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 265-284).

Mary Robinson’s perceived entrapment within masculine discourse has led to a somewhat distorted portrayal of this author as ‘victim’: critical focus on how she and eighteenth-century society may have constructed her authorial identity, reflecting her primarily as a historical and cultural product, has contributed indirectly to diminish due recognition of the level of autonomy she attained within her own writing. However, recent political interpretations of Robinson’s work have largely challenged these views, acknowledging her considerable influence within the public realm of the ‘masculine’ Romantic. In this dissertation, I aim to build upon, and argue beyond, those readings which have explored Robinson’s political uses of victimisation, as well as those which have studied her promotion of female authorship. I will argue that, by exploring Robinson’s own portrayal of the female philosopher and author, as well as her manipulation of victimisation within sensibility literature, we may be able to better interrogate modern feminist thinking around the concept of the eighteenth-century female philosopher, and thus begin to situate the value of Robinson’s work within a firmer literary compass. I will focus upon the following novels: Walsingham (2003 b), The False Friend (1799), and The Natural Daughter (2003 a). While I will root my arguments in the abovementioned approach, I will avoid contributing further discussion to Robinson’s use of radical politics and defence or fostering of female authorship. First because these are relatively well explored issues around her writing, and secondly because it is wise to be cautious when affirming Robinson’s radical politics, as ultimately this impulse ties into a modern yearning to portray her as a radical feminist. Robinson certainly adopted a radical political stance in some of her novels; yet, I will argue, we cannot value her writing primarily in terms of its political bent, however tempting this approach may be. / English Studies / M.A. (English Studies)