Stories engage a form of virtual play. Though they incorporate language and abstractions, stories engage many of the same biological systems and produce many of the same anatomical responses as simpler games. Like peek-a-boo or tickle play, stories stage dangerous or unpleasant scenarios in a controlled setting. In this way, they help develop cognitive strategies to tolerate, manage, and even enjoy uncertainty. One means is by inspiring confidence in difficult situations by tactical self-distraction. Another is to reframe negative or uncertain situations as learning opportunities, that is, to ascribe meaning to them. While both strategies are useful, each has limitations. In William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, a king succumbs to the desire to make meaning where there is none, and nearly ruins himself in a self-composed tragedy. His friend restores his confidence and enables a happy ending—but only by deceiving him. This deception is benign, but the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa is nearly ruined by her abductor’s confidence game. Her “happy ending” is made possible only by reframing her rape and death as redemptive transfiguration—which, as many of her readers suggest, is a dubious affair. The hero of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man spends the first half of the novel eliciting his companions’ confidence in order to swindle them, and the second half trying to inspire himself with the same confidence. The novel ends with an ominous impasse: one must trust, but one ought not to. For Samuel Beckett, this impasse is productive. In his middle novels, thought itself emerges from the interplay of spontaneous bouts of irrational confidence and distortive, after-the-fact impositions of spurious meaning. Stories create (illusory) identities, elicit (dubious) hopes, and reinforce (false) assumptions in order to help us cope with the agonies of anticipation and loss, and to transform misfortune, accident, and misery into reward, retribution, and meaning—that is, in a comedy of trauma.

After the civil conflicts of the seventeenth century, England during the Restoration period began to emerge as a modern nation. As Charles II understood, and as James II was to learn at the cost of his throne, absolute monarchy was no longer acceptable to the kingdom. Although Englishmen might henceforth tolerate the trappings of absolutism, the substance was irrevocably gone. This was as true of absolutism in religion as it was in government. It was only a question of time before the demands of Englishmen for freedom in belief and for participation in government would find expression in parliamentary democracy and in religious toleration. At the same time that England was developing new patterns of government and social behaviour, great events were happening in the cultural life of the nation. Literature and drama broadened their horizons by absorbing continental ideas and by renewing the inspiration bequeathed by native sources. Though the new literature and drama did not soon attain the excellence of their earlier counterparts, they were striking out in new directions. Scientific attitudes, too, were being revolutionized. In 1662, the formal organization of the Royal Society under royal patronage provided a meeting ground for those of inquiring mind. Soon the achievements of such men as Robert Boyle in chemistry and Isaac Newton in mathematics and physics established the framework of modern science. If art produced no comparable luminaries, architecture had in Christopher Wren only the most outstanding of a number of notable architects. Music, though less spectacular in its development than some of the other arts, soon produced Henry Purcell, whose compositions have rarely been equalled by those of any other English composer. The seventeenth century did not suffer from that proliferation of knowledge which in our own day has forced men to specialize in a narrow field of inquiry in order to be able to speak authoritatively about anything. A cultivated Englishman of the Restoration could still aspire to a reasonable understanding of all learning. Men like Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and John Dryden, Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, even men like the King himself in his dilettante way, were what the century called virtuosi—in the sense that they had a special interest in and aspired to a knowledge of art and science. Their intellects moved, more or less profoundly,over the entire range of human achievement and endeavour. This thesis is concerned with Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. Its particular purpose is to examine their diaries and other relevant sources to discover how each responded to the cultural and social environment of Restoration England, and to establish to what extent they were representative virtuosi of their period. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Samuel Johnson and Leigh Hunt, as generally representative spokesmen of the Eighteenth Century and the Romantic Age, provide some interesting comments on the theatre of their times. Their individual idiosyncrasies colour their views to some extent. Such inconsistencies, as they pertain to the theatre, are the subject of Chapter I of this essay. Physical conditions in the theatre of Johnson's and Hunt's times, which could not but influence the reception of acted drama, are noted in Chapter II. Johnson, whose views towards the drama are generally those of the literary critic, evaluated the plays of Shakespeare and others mainly in terms of their literary worth. But he was not unaware of the peculiar demands of the theatrical métier, and his well-known prejudice against the players did not prevent him from making a just appraisal of the theatrical fare of his time, according to Johnsonian canons of taste. Hunt shared in the generally idolatrous regard of the Romantics towards Shakespeare. He wrote when the offerings of current playwrights reflected, to him, the age's dearth of dramatic character. He thought some of the earlier offerings, notably those of the Restoration playwrights, were unsuitable to the present mores of taste. But in his voluminous theatre criticism he is principally concerned with the stage presentation of plays, rather than their value as closet drama. As playwrights, Johnson and Hunt made manifest some of their critical principles; and a study of Irene and A Legend of Florence provides a concluding commentary on the worth of their criticism, translated into practice. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Samuel Johnson's literary reputation in his own day was built largely upon his work as a moralist; consequently, the moral stance which forms the basis of this reputation merits more attention than it has hitherto received. It is my purpose in this thesis to establish that Johnson's moral writings, so highly rated by his contemporaries, reveal a distinctive quality of mind and a characteristic moral approach which links the author to the writings and to the moral thought of Francis Bacon. In establishing this connection, the first stage in this thesis is the isolation of common factors in the backgrounds of both men which could lead to a molding of moral attitudes into similar patterns. This is followed by an investigation of the effects of environmental influences and personal tastes which could draw Johnson to the moralist in Francis Bacon. More concrete evidence is sought in Johnson's Dictionary, a work which serves not only as a gauge of Johnson's moral thought but also as a measure of how closely his thought is aligned with that of Francis Bacon. The essays of the two moralists are examined to disclose the drive which directs their moral philosophy into a common path, a path which, leading away from all considerations of the theoretical to the practical service of their fellow man, derives from the same fixed principle of Christian charity. In following this principle of service, both men recognized the value of the essay and the biographical form as instruments of moral instruction; both utilized them as such in a pioneering fashion. Francis Bacon believed that the task of bringing the mind to virtue required, as a prerequisite, a study of the mind and its disorders. Johnson undertakes such a study along the lines envisaged by Bacon, and, in Rasselas, he is shown to be following the methods and directions of the earlier philosopher. Also investigated is the evident parallelism in their mutual concern to protect the mind from the errors of fallacious reasoning. Francis Bacon, in The Coulers of Good and Evill, had made an important contribution to the ethics of evaluation in devising a method of exposing and destroying the fallacies of sophistical reasoning; Samuel Johnson, in his review of Soame Jenyns’ study of evil, illustrates a practical application of this previously neglected method in the logical demolishment of one of the dominant myths of eighteenth-century society. The conclusion drawn from this presentation is that, even where direct influences cannot be ascribed, the evidence indicates powerful affinities in thought and in qualities of mind which draw Samuel Johnson to a similar approach to moral philosophy as that of Francis Bacon and result in similar conclusions about morals. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

It has been ten years since the 26-year-old fruit seller set himself on fire to protest corruption in Tunisia. The street vendor created a wave of protests in the Arab world, a campaign for civil resistance, better known as the "Arab Spring". The protests led to the removal of long-standing authoritarian regimes in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya. The civil resistance was a result of an economic crisis, high unemployment and corruption. The citizens of the arab world were demanding freedom of expression and greater civil rights. Tunisia became a successful example, where the country today is a complete democracy. In Egypt, the revolution also led to democratization, but for a short period of time. Egypt became more authoritarian after a coup led by the military. The other states failed and the consequences have been devastating with results of civil wars in Libya and Yemen. The main purpose of this essay was to sort out and understand why Tunisia succeeded to become a democracy after the arab spring 2010, while Egypt failed. A qualitative analysis with a comparative democratization study, composed of a most different system-design. The theoretical framework is based on Samuel Huntington (1991) “third wave democratization” and the author’s criteria on democracy, which includes regime legitimacy, economical modernization, and religious change.

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The play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett has for a long time been considered one of his best works. Grasping the significance of key factors such as modernity, modernism and historical background is of great importance to situate and contextualise the play. As Beckett´s play belongs to the “Theatre of the Absurd”, the complicated aspects of where the play belongs has given opportunities for questioning. The intricate layers of the play have opened several doors for interpretation which has allowed diverse conclusions from various researchers. For that reason, further investigation on that matter may perhaps add another viewpoint which can be considered important to fully understand the potential of this piece. This essay examines Samuel Beckett´s famous play Waiting for Godot through the complex lens of Soren Aabaye Kierkegaard´s and Jean-Paul Sartre´s perspectives within the existentialist philosophy. Certain features of each perspectives within the philosophy such as the for-itself,in-itself and the three stages consciousness facilitate the linkage needed between the play and the theory. By using these two perspectives, this essay analyses how the elements of nothingness, purpose and meaning are apparent throughout the play. The analysis of the essay was done to: firstly, attempt to discover new possible meanings and secondly, to deepen and widen my understanding of the Beckett´s play. This essay argues that these elements provide evidence that the play contains components of both Sartre´s and Kierkegaard´s perspective of existentialism.

This thesis presents an analysis of the ghosts in Samuel Richardson’s 1747-48 novel Clarissa, and synthesizes traditional literary criticism on that novel with British folklore and ghost traditions. It examines the novel historically and demonstrates that Richardson’s novelistic approach changed between 1740 when he wrote Pamela and 1747 when he began writing Clarissa in that he relies on the ghost image to discuss the complexities of individual identity. In Clarissa, Richardson outdoes his previous attempt at depicting reality in Pamela because his use of the ghost motif allows the audience to see beyond the physical reality of the plot into the spiritual depths of the human heart. Clarissa involves the journey of a young woman attempting to establish a sense of identity and selfhood, and the ghosts of the novel supply a lens for interpreting her course toward a sense of self that transcends the material world, its wants, its objectives, its myriad institutions, and the identity she has constructed by association with those entities.

This paper evaluates the critical response to Samuel Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." In the Introduction I outline my critical approach, which attempts to see the relationships between parts of the poem, sources outside the poem and poet himself. In analyzing Coleridge's esthetics, I have come to the conclusion that the poem was the first of a new type of Romantic poem. The central structural principle of this type of poem is the use of illusion and the fragmented form, or the illusion of the fragmented form. Poems that fall within this esthetic frequently use the "vision within a dream" motif as a metaphor for this illusion.

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