The purpose of this essay is to examine the extent to which the cholera epidemics that prevailed in Sweden during the nineteenth century affected Döderhult parish during the period 1834-1866. The study aims first to examine the total number of cholera deaths in Döderhult parish. Additionally, it examines the individuals who died of cholera concerning gender, age and occupation. The essay also aims to examine whether Döderhult parish was more affected by the cholera epidemic than other nearby parishes were and if so, why? In accordance to this, the death rate of Döderhult parish is thus studied in comparison with Mönsterås parish and documented cholera deaths in Fliseryd parish during the period.  The results show that of the 68 people who died in Döderhult parish between 1834 and 1866, 35 were men and 33 were women. The examination of the deceaseds’ age showed that the most vulnerable groups in the parish were the children and the elderly. The results regarding the deceased’s occupation showed that most men, women and children belonged to the working class. Last but not least, the comparative examination between Döderhult parish and the nearby parishes showed that Döderhult parish was worse affected by the cholera epidemic due to factors such as potential trade agreements, overcrowding, lack of public health measures, the industries’ impact on population and the spread of infection through relocation from the town of Döderhultsvik to the parish.

This study proposes the existence of lieux de mémoire in the photographs of Eugene Atget (1857-1927). My framework is based on historian Pierre Nora's definition: a lieu de mémoire is an object or idea which has become a symbolic stand-in for a community's memorial heritage. I suggest that Atget's photographs of the streets of old Paris, in concert with an empty-street aesthetic function as lieux de mémoire for their primary audience, antiquarians and professional archivists who specialized in old Paris. According to Nora's structure, identification of a lieu de mémoire requires first the establishment of a historical tradition. In the first chapter, I characterize a particular mode of photography, what I term a preservation aesthetic. I examine photographs by Louis J.M. Daguerre, Édouard Baldus, Henri Le Secq, and Charles Marville, all produced between 1839 and 1868. I propose interpretations of and reasons for photographs showing vacant Parisian streets, even after technological advancement allowed for representation by other means. My second chapter is concerned with a disruption of the established tradition, Nora's second requirement for lieu de mémoire. The focus of this chapter is twofold: since I propose that it is the preservation aesthetic partnered with the subject matter of old Paris that forms a lieu de mémoire, considering alterations in both perception of the old city and in photographic practice are necessary. First, I discuss the nostalgic views of old Paris that manifested while Baron Haussmann was remaking Paris between 1853 and 1870. The latter half of the chapter is devoted to the events of 1870-71, the Prussian siege of Paris and the Paris Commune. I argue that barricade photographs from the Commune represent a significant change in photographic practice defined by working-class individuals who made up the Commune. Finally, I examine Atget's practice and work in context of both a medieval historicist revival in the early Third Republic of France and of a popular belief that architecture could be a literal and metaphoric container for nationalist memories. I conclude with a reconsideration of Atget's preservationist and modernist audiences to support my thesis that his photographs are lieux de mémoire.

This thesis discusses pragmatist philosophy in the nineteenth century and its effect on American literature of the time.

This dissertation locates the emergence of a modern conception of information in the work of Victorian novelists and novel critics. In a period where the novel is most often understood as a genre interested in depicting total worlds, Victorian novelists lingered on aesthetic and social methods for organizing the informational minutiae that made up such worlds. Novelists developed baroque plots around marriage registers and memos. Even more notably, they conducted research: consulting and creating notebook lists, tabular arrays, archival records, and pre-printed survey forms as strategies for linking the work and the world. In this dissertation, I draw on both literary critical analysis and original archival research to show how the research of Victorian novelists wrestled with the social and aesthetic conventions of abstract data. At its core, my project shows how nineteenth-century definitions of authorship and narrative form emerge from some of the most routinized practices of storage, search and retrieval.

Thesis advisor: Maia McAleavey / My dissertation explores how nineteenth-century novelists imagined rational thinking as a cognitive resource distributed through physical, social, national, and even imperial channels. Scholars studying nineteenth-century discourses of mind frequently position rational thinking as the normalized given against those unconscious and irrational modes of thought most indicative of the period's scientific discoveries. My project argues, in contrast, that writers were just as invested in exploring rational thinking as multivalent procedure, a versatile category of mental activity that could be layered into novelistic representations of thinking by "thinking with games": that is, incorporating forms of thinking as discussed by popular print media. By reading novels alongside historical gaming practices and gaming literatures and incorporating the insights of twenty-first century cognitive theory, I demonstrate that novelists Maria Edgeworth, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Rudyard Kipling experimented with models of gaming to make rational thinking less abstract and reveal its action across bodies, objects, and communities. If Victorian mind-sciences uncovered "thinking fast," games prioritized "thinking slow," a distinction described by psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his recent book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2013). Scenes of games often slow thinking down, allowing the author to expose the complex processes of rational, cognitive performance. Furthermore, such scenes register the expanded perspective of recent cognitive literary studies such as those by Alan Palmer and Lisa Zunshine, which understand thinking, at least in part, as externalized and social. In effect, by reading scenes of thinking along the lines proposed by strategic gaming, I demonstrate how novels imagined social possibilities for internal processing that extend beyond the bounds of any individual's consciousness. Of course, games easily serve as literary tropes or metaphors; but analyzing scenes of gaming alongside games literature underscores how authors incorporated frameworks of teachable, social thinking from gaming into their representations of rational consciousness. For strategy games literature, better play required learning how to read the minds of other players, how to turn their thinking inside out. The nineteenth-century novel's relationship to games is best understood, I suggest, within the landscape of popular games literature published at its side - sometimes literally. An article on "Whistology" appears just after an installment of The Woman in White in Dickens's All the Year Round; the Cornhill Magazine published a paean to "Chess" amid the serialization of George Eliot's Romola. As a genre, strategy manuals developed new techniques for exercising the cognitive abilities of their readers and, often along parallel lines, so do the novels I discuss. Prompting the reader to think like a game player often involved recreating the kinds of dynamic, active thinking taught by games literature through the novel's form. My dissertation explores how authors used such forms to train their readers in habits of memory, deduction, and foresight encouraged by strategy gaming. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Besieged by a Nation of Playwrights Jan Lier Critic and Dramaturge of the National Theatre in Prague The cultural endeavours of the second half of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th century - from which we have inherited more than is immediately apparent - have for the most part already been described. Nevertheless, most of what we know about them comes to us only through selected figures from the realm of politics, literature, or theatre. At the same time, there existed many other individuals who had a significant influence on their time. They may not have been "pillars" of their era - many of which are retroactively constructed by subsequent eras and have often been uncritically conserved to this day. We have thus chosen to take a new look at this era in question through the figure of Jan Lier. Although Lier had been quite popular during his life and held several important positions in society, he was ignored by later historians. This dissertation presents the full range of Lier's activities, which we divide into three parts. The first section (Ecce Homo Jan Lier) describes the author's life from his youth to his literary debut and popular novels, which brought him fame as an author of railway novels and stylistically refined (perhaps excessively so) salon prose that irritated contemporary...

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This dissertation deploys queer theory and temporality to investigate the ways in which American authors were writing about identity at the turn of the twentieth century. I provide a more expansive use of queer theory, and argue that queerness moves beyond sexual and gender identity to have intersectional implications. This is articulated in the phrase "queer textual libido" which connects queer theory with affect and temporal theories. Queerness reveals itself on both narrative and rhetorical levels, and can be used productively to show the complex navigation between individual and national identity formation.

This dissertation proposes and tests a theory that investigates the political process of modern property formation in land in postcolonial societies of the New World. Specifically, it examines how land tenure systems of private property -- that is, a statutory tenure in which individual property rights are specified, allocated, arbitrated by the state -- are designed and executed in contexts of limited state capacity and land abundance. It draws on extensive, under-tapped archival evidence from Imperial Brazil (1822-1889), the largest postcolonial state of the southern hemisphere. The data, collected over a year of rigorous and systematic archival research, include original ledgers of rural estates surveyed and recorded at the parish (i.e., sub-municipal) level; church inventories of slaves; economic and health-related data of slaves populations; agricultural and land prices; roll call votes and transcripts from parliamentary sessions; and biographical information on Brazil's most prominent elites. My dissertation argues that exogenous, disruptive events that abolish labor-repressive relations of production, such as slavery or the slave trade, open up an opportunity for central governments to bargain for the creation of systems of freehold tenure with local traditional elites. Many countries of the New World were unable to pursue liberal reforms that commodified land and dismantled land-related colonial privileges because of the lack of professional surveyors and cadastral technologies to survey, title, and register parcels accurately. Moreover, high land-to-man ratios turned land into a factor of production with little commercial value and did not offer clear incentives to local elites to demand secure and complete property rights. My dissertation argues that, when local elites' depend on forced or servile labor for production, abolition can make them prone to support a statutory yet highly stringent system of freehold tenure that legally blocks access to land to wage laborers. A system of freehold tenure in times of abolition can attain two goals. First, to close off alternatives to wage labor in the agricultural sector by assembling ownership statutes that exacerbate conditions of tenure insecurity. Second, as local elites controlling servile labor have higher stakes in the survival of labor dependence in agriculture, it can enhance quasi-voluntary compliance with new property rules that intend to avert squatting and keep rural labor inexpensive and abundant. By willingly demarcating boundaries, titling, and paying taxes, local elites cooperate with the new land statutes. In turn, central state officials can secure the logistical resources they need (i.e., fiscal revenue, documentary evidence of ownership, spatial coordinates of rural estates) to distinguish occupied from unoccupied tracts, police the hinterlands, carry out evictions, and formulate policies (e.g., employer subsidies) that would bias labor markets in favor of elite interests. I test these propositions by examining how a powerful class of plantation owners in Imperial Brazil supported the creation of, and quasi-voluntarily complied with, the Land Law of 1850 (the country's first modern property law in land) in response to the exogenous abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1831. I show that parliamentarians who were also planters favorably voted for the bill that introduced the Land Law in the Chamber of Deputies. Moreover, I show that, once the new law had been approved, local parishes that had a greater proportion of slaves were more likely to experience higher rates of regularization. Untaxed and unbounded plantations that long benefited from Portuguese medieval traditions ended up being regularized as self-demarcated, taxable private freeholds. My analysis of Imperial Brazil yields three main insights about how property formation in the New World was carried out. First, and in contrast to the European experience, the advent of private property in land in polities of Australasia or Latin America was not a top-down phenomenon but the result of an arduous political negotiation and patterns of societal co-production between rulers and traditional landlords from the colonial era. Second, land abundance, not scarcity, threatened landlords' material wealth: by promising independent, small-scale cultivation to free rural workers, it threatened landlords with labor shortages. Finally, and even though individual and absolute proprietorship was made the hegemonic form of tenure, national policymakers enacted provisions that neglected property rights to marginalized populations such as freed slaves, immigrants, convicts, or peons. Therefore, the recognition of individual property rights in these societies was highly selective and did not follow the liberal, egalitarian principle of equality before the law.

Drawing on archival materials, family stories, and student artwork, “Schooling the Master: Caste Supremacy and American Education in British Ceylon, 1795–1855” examines how nineteenth-century American missionary education in South Asia facilitated dominant-caste supremacy while distributing negotiated sensibilities of colonial modernity. The work’s first section explores the arrangement of an educational nexus of mutual benefit between the Jaffna Peninsula’s dominant Veḷḷāḷar caste, the British Ceylonese government, and American Protestant missionaries. I track this nexus from its origins in the veranda school of Tamil Śaiva poet Kūḻaṅkai Tampirāṉ (1699–1795) to its apogee in the American Ceylon Mission boarding schools of the late 1840s. The dissertation’s second part examines two pedagogies of colonial modernity: the embroidery of needlework samplers that taught an American form of gendered domesticity, and map drawing that imparted a geographically specific and American-style national identity. By describing three moments in its development and two pedagogical facets of its career, the dissertation argues that an educational nexus crafted for some Veḷḷāḷars a distinct Jaffna Tamil identity that is geographically bound, gendered, and pervaded by a sense of superiority. This dissertation makes two significant contributions to South Asian studies, first by demonstrating an unexamined arrangement of power in the context of colonialism—the educational nexus—and second, by exploring the way colonial teaching methods in the first half of the nineteenth century transformed South Asian ways of being.