This thesis examines the history of the performance and dissemination of chamber music in Melbourne during the period 1877 to 1901. It explores the role and development of chamber music in concerts held by Melbourne’s leading musical societies and public subscription series, and various concerts featuring local and touring performers. Discussion is placed within an international context and the thesis asks whether local musicians were influenced by contemporary developments in Europe and if so, was the primary influence English or German? / The bulk of the thesis explores the history of some of Melbourne’s musical societies and public concerts and focuses in particular on the repertoire that was performed, methods of program construction, the perceived ‘educational’ value of chamber music and performances within educational institutions. It demonstrates that performances of chamber music flourished during Melbourne’s economic boom of the 1880s, and that although performances declined during the following depression of the 1890s, standards of performance had improved, audiences were better educated and informed about chamber music, and Melbourne was relatively quick to introduce contemporary chamber repertoire. The first chamber works by local musicians and composers were also composed and performed in Melbourne during this period. / The availability of competent musicians was a significant factor and played a role in determining the type of repertoire that was performed. With large numbers of competent pianists and string players, and very few wind players, present in Melbourne during this period, for example, the repertory tended to focus on works for piano and/or strings. The contribution of local and international performers, particularly English and German-born and/or trained instrumentalists, is also considered. English and German musicians not only had an impact on the shaping of the repertory, but also influenced the way that concerts were organized. These influences, however, often overlapped and were not always clearly defined.

"Scenes of Reading: Forgotten Antebellum Readers, Self-Representation, and the Transatlantic Reprint Industry" argues that African-American and white working-class people participated in transatlantic antebellum literary culture in a far more central and sophisticated manner than has been assumed. Employing "scenes" of reading--self-representations of what, where, how, and why African Americans and the white working classes read--as primary texts, this dissertation asserts that these groups, in differing degrees and under distinct circumstances, were able to learn to read, to appropriate reading materials from mainstream literary culture, and, most importantly, to transform their acts of reading into acts of politicized self-representation. Their literary practice was possible because of the transatlantic reprint industry that flourished during the antebellum era resulting from the lack of a copyright agreement between Britain and America. This meant that in both nations, texts from across the Atlantic could be reprinted and sold more cheaply than domestic texts, making novels, poetry, and non-fiction available to wider readerships. Reprinted texts in multiple inexpensive formats were ubiquitous, allowing even marginalized readers to encounter them in the context of everyday life. More importantly, reprinted texts legally belonged to no one, meaning that they could be appropriated by anyone, including black and working-class groups whose political values threatened to undermine accepted social hierarchies. With no permission or payment required for reprinting, reprints were easily grafted into new ideological contexts, meaning that black and working-class newspapers had access to free literary content that they could employ toward counter-hegemonical self-representations. The practices and implications of reprinting enabled free blacks, slaves, and white workers to participate in mainstream literary culture subversively through "underground literacy": set of literary practices that were counter-cultural yet also dependent upon the apparatus of mainstream print culture in order to carry out subversive aims. Reading reprinted texts and assimilating them into the context of their everyday lives, African Americans and the white working classes in America and Britain formed similar strategies for practicing literacy beneath the surface of a transatlantic print culture. This dissertation examines scenes of reading that exemplify these underground reading strategies and represent the literacy of these groups. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / English / PhD; / Dissertation;

<p>From 1852 to 1910 Congress labored to find the right instruments to eliminate polygamy among the Mormons and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints struggled to retain its claim as the most American of institutions. What these struggles reveal about the shifting role of religion in the developing definition of American citizenship is at the heart of this dissertation. By looking at developing ideas about citizenship in this particular frame, the social and political history of exclusion and inclusion comes into focus and exposes the role religion played in determining who could lay claim to citizenship and who could not, who tried and failed, who succeeded, and why. In the end, the coercive measures of the state and their own desire to join the body politic drove the Saints to unquestionably abandon the practice of polygamy, a central tenet of their faith, so that they could be accepted as American citizens. </p><p>The battle over polygamy and the rights of polygamists was not limited to the floor of the U.S. Congress or the Supreme Court, although those sources are carefully examined here. Debates over polygamy and Mormons' right to be Americans also took place in sermons, novels, newspapers, and popular periodicals. Official actions of the state and popular discourses simultaneously defined citizenship and influenced how Mormons understood their own citizenship. This dissertation is a history of the discourse generated by Mormons and their antagonists, laws passed by Congress, and court cases fought to defend or deny the civil, political and social rights of Latter-day Saints.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis argues that what it terms fever narratives figure prominently in Charles Dickens’s fiction. Fever was regarded not as a symptom but as a generic disease that had sub-species, such as cholera, smallpox, typhus and typhoid, and that presented itself through devastating epidemics that frightened the public and drove the government to enact public health legislation. The core elements of the fever narrative – such as fever’s cause, pathology, treatment and prevention – were still not clearly understood. This inevitably heightened public anxiety and frustration, particularly given lengthy delays in the bureaucratic processes of Parliament and local governments in dealing with fever’s perennial threat. The politically favoured sanitarian narrative influenced Dickens significantly. Sanitarians believed that water and sewer projects in urban localities and improved sanitary practices would prevent most diseases. However, Dickens was influenced also by an alternative approach that this thesis calls the “medical narrative,” comprising a more holistic vision of public health, reliant on improved treatments, greater medical professionalism, and specialized hospitals, in addition to sanitary reform. Dickens’s 1840s novels reflected both approaches, but he emphasized the medical narrative in portrayals of the fevers of individual characters. In the 1850s, the predominant focus of fever narratives in Dickens’s journals and novels became fever of the social body – fever that figuratively infected English institutions or the country as a whole. Dickens’s fever narratives became progressively darker during these two decades and, with each novel onward from Dombey and Son (1846-48), his representations of fever apocalypses infecting both the rich and the poor became more strident, even to the extent of suggesting that the whole institutional and economic infrastructure of the country would suffer an irrevocable blow. The thesis argues that Dickens presented these minatory scenes of vengeance in response to what he perceived as the blindness of the middle class to the condition of the sick and poor of England. This reached a climax with “Revolutionary fever” in A Tale of Two Cities (1859). The thesis presents a final argument that Dickens’s stories of the early 1860s and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) provided both a continuation of and a denouement for the two previous decades’ fever narratives, by offering a view of the dust of corpse upon corpse of those who were mowed down by fever, and of a river polluted by this dust. However, he foresees also the possibility of the fundamental regeneration of a more humane physical, social and institutional environment in England.

The aim of this essay is to examine Janes personal progress through the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. It addresses the issue of personal development in relation to social position in England during the nineteenth – century. The essay follows Janes personal journey and quest for independence, equality, self worth and love from a Marxist perspective. In the essay close reading is also applied as a complementary theory.

<p>Although Charles Baudelaire's poetry was censored in part for his graphic representations of death, for Baudelaire himself, death was the ultimate censorship. He grappled with its limitations of the possibility of articulation in Les Fleurs du mal, Le Spleen de Paris, "Le Poème du hachisch," and other works. The first chapter of this dissertation, "Dead Silent," explores Baudelaire's use of apophasis as a rhetorical tactic to thwart the censoring force of death as what prevents the speaking subject from responding. Chapter two, "Voices Beyond the Grave," then investigates the opposite poetics of articulation and inarticulation, in the form of post-mortem voice from within the cemetery, and particularly as didactic speech that contradicts the living. "Baudelaire's Widows" argues that the widow is for Baudelaire a figure of modernity par excellence, auguring the anticipation of mourning and the problem of remembering the dead as a lifelong cognitive dilemma. Chapter four, "Lethal Illusions," combines analysis of suicide in "La Corde" and "Le Poème du hachisch" with interrogation of mimesis. If the intoxicant serves as suicide and mirror, the production of illusion is the possibility and the fatal pathology of art. Yet art simultaneously channels a truth understood as the revelation of illusions--not least the illusion of a life without death.</p> / Dissertation

My thesis explores how discourse and material practices have created agoraphobia, the fear of public places. This psychological disorder predominates among women. Throughout much of Western history, women have been encouraged to stay home for their safety and for the safety of society. I argue that agoraphobic women have internalized this discourse, expressing fears of being in public or being alone without a companion to support and protect them; losing control over their minds or their bodies; and endangering or humiliating themselves. Therapeutic discourse also has created agoraphobia by naming it, categorizing the emotions and behaviors associated with it, and describing the characteristics of agoraphobics. The material practice of therapy reinforces this discourse. Meanwhile, practices such as rape and harassment reinforce the dominant discourse on women’s safety. I survey psychological literature, beginning with the naming of agoraphobia in 1871, to explain why the disorder is now diagnosed primarily in women. I examine nineteenth-century discourse that told women they belonged at home while men controlled the public domain. In 1871, the Paris Commune revolt epitomized the fear of women publicly out of control. I return to Paris a century later for a reading of the novel Certificate of Absence, in which Sylvia Molloy explores identity through the eyes of a woman who might be labeled agoraphobic. I ask whether homebound women are resisting or retreating from a hostile world. Instead of seeing agoraphobia only as a personal problem, people should question why so many women fear themselves and the world outside their home. My methodology includes an analysis of nineteenth-century texts as well as current media, prose, and poetry. I also support my arguments with material from professional journals and nonfiction books in different disciplines. Common to feminist research, an interdisciplinary approach was needed to situate a psychological disorder within a social context.

This study examines the spread of in-life biographies (biographies written and published while their subjects were still alive) in Italy during the later years of the Risorgimento and the early years of Unification. These biographies, whose subjects ranged from the already famous to those being promoted as new political leaders, took a well-established literary form and applied it to the exigencies of the day. That this was a relatively new method of political engagement is seen through the numerous interventions by authors and editors justifying their choice of living subjects and excusing the fact that these were not traditional subjects with explanations of impartiality and necessity. As the Italian nation continued forward, such writings begin to be extended to less blatantly political subjects, such as the economic and social self-improvers touted by Michele Lessona (who followed the more famous Samuel Smiles of England) and the fictional Sicilian fishermen of Giovanni Verga's I Malavoglia. This continued push to describe in biographical terms the lives of living Italians reveals a widely neglected aspect of the biographical genre, namely that writing the life of a still-living figure is fundamentally different than writing the life of a deceased individual whose life course cannot be in any way changed by the publishing of a biography. The work that both begins and ends this study, a very early biography of Benito Mussolini, serves to illustrate the possibilities contained in this subgenre as well as the reasons for which it should continue to be studied as a form distinct from that of traditional biography. / Romance Languages and Literatures

This dissertation examines the link between food and writing about food in French modernist texts in nineteenth and twentieth-century French novels, tracing the central role of food in realist fiction as an encoder of bourgeois discourse to its persisting, yet altered, role in modernist texts. While the propagation of gastronomy and culinary discourse through realist texts presupposes and relies on the seamless conversion of diners into readers and the meal into text, this dissertation has at its root the exploration of the narrative potential inherent in the creation of space in conspicuous "second-order" consumption, leaving the diner and the reader, and the meal and the text, side-by-side, in play. I reflect on how the deliberate alignment and co-staging of the meal and the word (or the diner and the reader), rather than their conflation and collapse, throws into relief not only the act of incorporating the meal, but also the extradiegetic moment of incorporating the text, or a (self-)consciousness of the meal as text. I explore how this shift in the staging of food and eating is not only a hallmark of the play that characterizes modernist novels, which inscribe self-conscious moments of their own creation and consumption within the narrative itself, but also a key element in understanding the shifts from realism to modernism, as the meal remains central to both while at the same time crystallizing key differences in how narratives are crafted in each. / Romance Languages and Literatures

The current historiography on Mexican immigration from 1850 through 1920, has neglected to seriously study the forgotten migration of American citizens, not big capitalists as those have been well documented, seeking their American Dream in Mexico. Thus, my work seeks to understand how a very unstable international border dominated by constant Indian raids and filibuster attempts, led to transnational migration. A direct consequence of transnationalism is that it created a xenophobia mentality among the masses, and in some instances, a fetishism for anything foreign, especially among elites and the new breed of young politicians under President Diaz. I focus my analysis on the wave of American citizens, mostly former Civil War veterans, who in the 1860s decided to go to Mexico because President Benito Juarez offered them generous incentives such as tax exemptions and large land grants for colonization purposes, if they decided to join his military efforts to rid his country of the French invaders. Beyond just those white American immigrants, the dissertation also looks at the experience that black colonists encountered in a country that proudly boasted that it welcomed anyone, regardless of their skin color, so long as they adhered to the law. So I argue, that after analyzing the experience of several ethnic groups, such as the Italian immigrants in Cordoba, Veracruz, or the colonies of those immigrants seeking religious freedom such as the Mormons and Mennonites in northern Mexico, that indeed, Mexico was the Land of God and Liberty. This was the popular term used by runaway slaves from Texas in the 1850s and by many African Americans from Alabama who sold everything they had in 1895 to pay for their transportation cost to Mexico in search of a better life not found in the United States.