Sir John A. Macdonald has been a political figure frequently referenced in Canadian history. Yet no study has explored the evolution of his public memory. This study provides a focused examination of the attempts by Canada’s federal political parties to shape Macdonald’s public memory. The period of study began immediately following the death of Sir John A. Macdonald on June 6, 1891 and continued until the Centennial Celebrations of Confederation in 1967. The study first aims to identify and analyze events and activities organized or supported by Canada’s federal political class which allowed them opportunities to shape Macdonald’s public memory. The study then explores through the lens of official memory their motivation to engage in his commemoration and to shape his memory in specific ways. The objective of this study is to answer two specific research questions. The first asked if Canada’ federal political leaders were interested and successful in shaping Macdonald’s public memory during the period of study to allow the emergence of a seemingly national hegemonic figure acceptable to both political parties. The second asked if the federal political parties’ attempts to depict Macdonald as a unifying national symbol were picked up in the media in Ontario and Quebec and in both official languages, thereby reinforcing his hegemonic status for the federal political class. The study argues that Macdonald became on a single occasion a seemingly national hegemonic figure acceptable to both political parties and to the media in both official language communities in Ontario and Quebec. / Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2010-12-22 15:44:13.807

No description available.

No description available.

Thesis (MEd)--PU vir CHO

Thesis (MEd)--PU vir CHO

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1969. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis is a selected edition of thirty-six unpublished letters and fragments from Thomas Henry Hall Caine to Dante Gabriel Rossetti with an introduction and explanatory notes. The letters have been chosen to illustrate Caine's typical interests and concerns as these appear in the body of eighty-six unpublished letters and fragments contained in the Angeli Papers in Special Collections at the University of British Columbia Library. Although the letters are far from being masterpieces of epistolary art, they are of historical interest as a chronicle of the friendship which was initiated by letter. The introduction provides a background for the letters, using, in so far as possible, unpublished contemporaneous material from the Angeli and Penkill Papers. Hall Caine knew Rossetti for less than three years; for two of those years the friendship was conducted almost exclusively by letter, but for the last ten months of Rossetti1s life they lived together. The friendship began when Caine published a eulogistic article on Rossetti's poetry, and sent a copy to him. Caine was then an eager, ambitious, and very naive twenty-six year old Liverpudlian; Rossetti, a known painter and poet of fifty-one, was lonely, frightened, filled with morbid phantasies and a chloral hydrate addict. He was virtually a recluse in his gloomy London house, but Caine's letters revived his interest in literary criticism and during the last years of his life Rossetti taught Caine about literature. His "pupil's" interest and energy also helped to inspire Rossetti on his own behalf, for in 1881 he published a revised edition of Poems and a new book, Ballads and Sonnets. Very shortly after Rossetti*s death, Caine published his Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1882), a biography of his friend which included some seventy-five fragments of the "nearly two hundred letters" he had received from Rossetti. In 1908 Caine included a large section on Rossetti in My Life, and in 1928 he produced a considerably altered version of his first biography. Caine became a prolific and popular novelist and playwright, was knighted for his war effort, and made a Companion of Honour "in recognition of his distinction in literature," but in spite of his successes, skepticism remains concerning his reliability as Rossetti's biographer. The doubts must have sprung from Caine's character—he had a romantic sensibility, a flair for seeing the simplest events dramatically, and a distinct taste for self-aggrandizement. However, although contemporaneous materials indicate that he inspired a certain wariness among Rossetti’s intimates, there are no concrete reasons to doubt his veracity in matters of fact. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This thesis is biographical in form, and follows a chronological development. James Croft's life illustrates many of the problems of an ambitious man of the period, and spans more than seventy years and four reigns. His early career was as a soldier, and this aspect, as well as a survey of his family background, has been dealt with in Chapter One. In 1551, Croft served in Ireland, originally as leader of an expeditionary force, but later as Lord Deputy, the first post in his career of major importance. The accession of Mary to the throne in 1553 prompted Croft to take part in the poorly-planned and ill-fated Wyatt's Rebellion, which led to Croft's imprisonment and subsequent loss of revenue. Following Elizabeth's accession in 1558, Croft was made Governor of the town of Berwick, on the Scottish border, and took a major part in the action against the French troops at Leith. His eventual disgrace led to his exile from Court until 1570, in which year he was created Comptroller of the Queen's Household, a position he held for the remainder of his life. Chapter Five deals not only with his duties as Comptroller, but contains an examination of Croft's growing importance in his home county of Herefordshire, and shows his increasing influence and range of contacts at Court. Croft's final appearance two years before his death, was as a commissioner to negotiate with the Spanish in the Low Countries in early 1588. The final chapter of this thesis attempts to examine the significance of Croft as typical of a section of Tudor society, and deals with some of the problems raised by modern historians of the period. Investigation has necessarily been limited by the shortage of records available for research. In the absence of any collection of family papers, the principal sources have been various collections of state papers and letters, contemporary annals and diaries, and such sources as the Acts of the Privy Council and parliamentary records. In spite of the difficulties involved, a surprising amount of information concerning James Croft is extant. A reasonably clear outline of his activities can be seen, and it has been possible to place him in the larger context of sixteenth century society. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

The purpose of this thesis has been to define Max Beerbohm's critical literary principles, to evaluate his contribution to aesthetic criticism and thereby to determine his place in the critical tradition. The methods of investigation have been: to study the formative influences on the development of his critical principles and to evaluate the results of their application in Max's essays and dramatic criticisms. From this study it is evident that as a man and as an artist Max was "formed" during the Eighteen-nineties. By nature he was an intellectual dandy who always preferred strong, narrow creative personalities like himself. He was detached, fastidious, witty, and humane, and he was noted for his wisdom and sound common sense, even as a very young man. Under the influence of the Aesthetic Movement at Oxford, Max turned to Walter Pater for ideas on impressionistic criticism, but he preferred Oscar Wilde for style. He felt that personality was the paramount thing in art and that an exact, witty and beautiful style was its finest expression. His early style was mannered, satirical and superficial. However, Max never belonged to the "precious school" of writers, because he was not satisfied with less than a perfect synthesis of matter and manner to produce a unified effect of sheer delight. To this end he employed literary principles he had derived from neoclassical "rules" and aesthetic concepts. When Max became drama critic for the Saturday Review, he used his literary standards to form the basis of his dramatic criticisms. Although these standards related almost exclusively to matters of form and style, Max saw their wider application, because they satisfied his requirements for what a work of art should be. Accordingly, they have been examined under four main headings: the illusion of life, an exact and beautiful style, form and the unified effect, ethics and aesthetics. As a drama critic, Max welcomed the rise of modern realism because it had restored to the theatre the illusion of actual life. However, he did not favour realism for realism's sake or for the sake of social reforms. He believed that art must appeal to the emotions, not to the intellect, and that the impact of the play may arouse either joy or sorrow, but it must be aesthetically satisfying. Max always tried to be fair and flexible in his criticisms but his extreme fastidiousness and his innate sense of detachment imposed serious limitations. For instance, he was too reactionary to appreciate radical experiments in form. Nor could he admire plays in which the ideas were more important than the emotional conflicts of flesh and blood characters. Inevitably, he failed to appreciate Shaw because Max was a nineteenth-century man attempting to apply aesthetic ideals and neoclassical principles to the experimental plays of a progressive, analytical dramatic genius of the twentieth century. Max's value as a critic comes from his important insights in matters of form and style. In his essay on Whistler he revealed the artist in a new light as the author of an exquisite literary style. His essay on Lytton Strachey is also valuable for the careful discrimination Max made between the satirist and the mocker which vindicated Strachey from the charge of malice. However, the fact that his interests were narrow and essentially pertained to small, minor works of art, limits his significance as a critic. Max was an "exquisite" critic of the dying impressionistic tradition, whose critical talents were best suited to minor artists with whom he had some affinity in temperament and style. Consequently, his place is out of the mainstream of the critical tradition. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This study is an interpretation of the social and political thought and methodology of Karl Popper, one of the most heralded yet controversial philosophers of our time. The goal has been to provide a more coherent, accurate, and systematic account of Popper's thought and of its relevance to students of politics and society than currently exists by, first, emphasizing certain historical and contextual factors in connection with the structure and development of his ideas which rule out certain contemporary misunderstandings of his thought, and secondly, by allowing Popper's own formulations to take precedence over those of his commentators, regardless of their sympathies and estimate of Popper's massive intellectual legacy. It is my principal argument that the unity of Popper's philosophy lies in its moral dimension, his life long determination to conserve the intellectual foundations of hope and progress that human autonomy requires--the distinctively Kantian belief that mind can and should be decisive in practical affairs no less than in the struggle with nature, the twin pillars of the Enlightenment and modern liberalism alike. Given the nature of our times--a century of "total" wars, endless crises, and one intellectual revolution after another--such an endeavour is no small achievement. I have tried to capture the propositional cutting-edge of my interpretation of Popper's thought in the keywords of the subtitle of this study: that, without the belief in the possibility of objective truth--knowledge that is independent of whether we wish to acknowledge its existence or not, there is little hope in the future prospects of the "open societies" of the Western world, and that one of the gravest errors of the liberalism of the past was its underestimation of the need to institutionalise its best interests against the threat of many forms of illiberal power known in our time, particularly of the "unintended" variety. I accordingly argue that Popper's vision is best characterised as a combat-toughened conception of reality, and of the corresponding rationality necessary to survive, let alone to live well, as the Western tradition of political theory has held to be desirable. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate