The miracle-workers and magicians we meet in the Greco-Roman world and on the pages of Greco-Roman narratives are among the most difficult characters for modem scholars to understand. While Greco-Roman writers presume their readers will share their socio-cultural script and understand how one distinguishes between a legitimate miracle-worker and an illegitimate magician, this script is lost on modem scholars. Hindered first by absolute definitions for miracle and magic from social anthropology and then by relative definitions from the sociology of knowledge, this thesis calls for a re-engagement of the "historic imagination" with respect to these sorts of characters. In particular, this thesis suggests that a detailed investigation into the operation of characters labelled as performers of miracles or magic can reveal the criteria which distinguished the two in the minds of Greco-Roman Mediterraneans as well as revealing the practical outworking of the criteria themselves. Two narratives are chosen for this task-the canonical Acts of the Apostles, representing a Jewish- Christian angle, and Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana, representing a pagan angle. Methodologically the study proceeds by converting these narratives into "narrative worlds" and then subjecting the narrative worlds to a social investigation using models suggested by the work of Mary Douglas and Peter Brown. Under the rubric of "gaining power, " "intersecting power, " and "defending power" the two narrative worlds projected by these texts are compared and contrasted with respect to the criteria being used to distinguish miracle-worker from magician. The conclusion reached is that in both texts legitimacy for a mediator of divine power is found especially in demonstrating power without appearing desirous of personal gains. A miracle-worker is successful in this regard; a magician is one who fails in this regard.

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The purpose of the thesis is to examine a selection of papyri from the large corpus of Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes. The study of the texts has been divided into three major chapters where each one of the selected papyri is first reproduced and then discussed. The transcription follows the original publication whereas any possible textual improvement is included in the commentary. The commentary also contains a general description of the papyrus (date, layout and content) as well reference to special characteristics. The structure of the commentary is not identical for marginalia and hypomnemata: the former are examined in relation to their position round the main text and are treated both as individual notes and as a group conveying the annotator's aims. The latter are examined lemma by lemma with more emphasis upon their origins and later appearances in scholia and lexica. After the study of the papyri follows an essay which summarizes the results and tries to incorporate them into the wider context of the history of the text of each author and the scholarly attention that this received by the Alexandrian scholars or later grammarians. The main effort is to place each papyrus into one of the various stages that scholarly exegesis passed especially in late antiquity. Special treatment has been given to P.Wurzburg 1, the importance of which made it necessary that it occupies a chapter by itself. The last chapter of the thesis deals with the issue of glosses, namely their origin and use in the margins of papyri. The focus is again on the history of early collections of tragic and comic vocabulary and their appearance in the margins or hypomnemata. The parallel circulation of hypomnemata and glossaries often compiled by the same people and some special features of the glosses in our material led to the conclusion that most glosses at least in the earlier periods were copied from hypomnemata. The thesis ends with a presentation of all conclusions from the previous chapters in relation to the history of scholarship and book production in late antiquity

The Picture book - text and image in interaction. A study of Tove Jansson's picturebook: The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little MyThis study examines Tove Jansson's picture book The Book About Moomin, Mymbleand Little My, to show relationships between text and image in the narration of thestory. This is done through an analysis based on Ulla Rhedins dissertation The picturebook - towards a theory where the conclusion is that the picture book as book mediumcan be divided in three different picture concepts. The various concepts are; the epicpicture book, the expanding text as well as the genuine picture book. This study hasperformed a text and image analysis showing that the image colors, the differentspreads, landscape scenes and characters' placement, et cetera play a role in placingthe picture book in its concept.Tove Jansson used more than text and image to work out the story of theMoomintroll, Mymble and Little My, there are holes in the picture book that have animportant role, which the analysis will show. According to the analysis performed inthis study The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My is a good example of the genuine picture book.

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The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the relationship between Elizabeth Gaskell and Romanticism, as shown in her shorter works. This investigation will be conducted in three principal ways: a consideration of Romanticism as a cultural phenomenon; a discussion of the cultural environment in which Gaskell was nurtured; and a critical appraisal of a selection of her shorter works. The first chapter is a consideration and discussion of Romanticism as a cultural shift which manifested itself through the closing decades of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth century. Aspects of this cultural shift considered include literature, music and the visual arts. The second chapter focuses on biographical considerations with particular reference to Elizabeth Gaskell's family circumstances and the kind of education to which she had access. The remaining chapters offer a detailed discussion of a representative selection of her shorter works. These texts have been chosen to reveal her early collaboration with her husband William Gaskell; her knowledge of Romantic poets; and ways in which she developed as a writer. This development shows an engagement with an increasingly wide range of Romantic poets and a willingness on her part to engage with the darker side of Romanticism, especially through the use of Gothic techniques. The focus is on Gaskell's shorter works because these texts have received far less critical attention than her full-length novels and because of her contribution to the rise of the modem short story, as a genre distinct from the novel.

One of the key features driving the growth and success of the Social Web is large-scale participation through user-contributed content – often through short text in social media. Unlike traditional long-form documents – e.g., Web pages, blog posts – these short text resources are typically quite brief (on the order of 100s of characters), often of a personal nature (reflecting opinions and reactions of users), and being generated at an explosive rate. Coupled with this explosion of short text in social media is the need for new methods to organize, monitor, and distill relevant information from these large-scale social systems, even in the face of the inherent “messiness” of short text, considering the wide variability in quality, style, and substance of short text generated by a legion of Social Web participants. Hence, this dissertation seeks to develop new algorithms and methods to ensure the continued growth of the Social Web by enhancing how users engage with short text in social media. Concretely, this dissertation takes a three-fold approach: First, this dissertation develops a learning-based algorithm to automatically rank short text comments associated with a Social Web object (e.g., Web document, image, video) based on the expressed preferences of the community itself, so that low-quality short text may be filtered and user attention may be focused on highly-ranked short text. Second, this dissertation organizes short text through labeling, via a graph- based framework for automatically assigning relevant labels to short text. In this way meaningful semantic descriptors may be assigned to short text for improved classification, browsing, and visualization. Third, this dissertation presents a cluster-based summarization approach for extracting high-quality viewpoints expressed in a collection of short text, while maintaining diverse viewpoints. By summarizing short text, user attention may quickly assess the aggregate viewpoints expressed in a collection of short text, without the need to scan each of possibly thousands of short text items.

This project involves the retelling of a historic New Zealand story using a system of multiple narrations. The research is presented in three parts:1. The practical component, Last Man Hanging: a book of pictures.2. A contextualising exegesis.3. 31 months (a documentation of my visual journey). The major component of this research is the creative text, Last Man Hanging. This is a book of pictures and type that retells the story of the trial and death of Walter James Bolton; the last man hanged in New Zealand. Its narrative discourse involves the orchestration of relationships through a compendium of characters, architecture, artifacts, environments and typography. The book integrates narrative voices that may be grouped into two often-conflicting positions; the story as it appeared in newspapers at the time, and the writer's personal consideration of an alternative series of events and emphases. Though an argument of tellings the book suggests a different verdict to that established by the courts in 1956.Finally, the exegesis contextualises both works. It considers specific theoretical issues pertaining to Last Man Hanging's narrative voice and imagery.