This study discusses the developing role of nutrition as a biopolitical object during the First World War. As research into food led to the discovery of vitamins in 1912, the world would shortly  erupt into global warfare thereafter in 1914. Modern, global warfare tested the limits of food production. American and British authorities worked towards new methods for combating malnutrition and ensuring quality food could be allotted to civilians and soldiers alike. Research into vitamins and nutrition in general continued during the war, and this new food model quickly became vital for American and British civilians and soldiers alike- who came to increasingly rely upon vegetables and substitutes for wheat, in the form of alternative grains, and meat in the form of beans. Milk continued to be held in highest regard by doctors and governments -owing to its high nutritional content, including the two vitamins discovered in 1912. At the same time, soldiers had their rations bolstered by fresher produce on the Western Front, while in the Middle East, germinated peas proved to be effective at warding off scurvy and beriberi- even where supply lines were at their longest. These efforts, pushed by doctors and governments working in collaboration, resulted in a profound shift in the way governments treated the realm of food, in all its aspects, but also in matters of the health of their populations. This in turn altered how conscious the average person was of what they ate-owing to the greater understanding of quality food and healthy eating during, and directly after the First World War.

Using archival and historical sources, this dissertation explores the development of a broad, inter-impairment disability movement and the functional model of disability within the post-World War II medical rehabilitation movement and the development of the welfare state in the United States. This dissertation highlights how disabled people, federal administrators, non-governmental organizations, and rehabilitation physicians and researchers bolstered support for medical rehabilitation while the nascent specialty struggled for professional recognition. By examining the ideological interconnectedness of eugenics and rehabilitation, this study documents the limitations of the rehabilitation approach to disability while demonstrating how rehabilitation replaced eugenics as the primary site of disability research and statistics. Highlighting the work of Maya Rivière, a disabled feminist, Sociomedical Scientist, and rehabilitation expert, this study reveals how disabled people actively shaped rehabilitation and independent living ideology from the 1940s to the 1960s. The second half of this study analyzes the Rehabilitation Codes project that developed the functional model of disability and became the basis of the World Health Organization’s experimental statistical classification, the International Classification of Impairment, Disability, and Handicap, published in 1980. By defining terms such as “impairment,” “disability,” and “handicap,” the functional model advanced by the Rehabilitation Codes attempted to combat the stigma of disability and bolster rehabilitation and employment opportunities available to disabled people by accounting for prejudice against disabled people and their physical and mental capabilities. This dissertation argues that the functional model facilitated a more humane disability evaluation process, expanded the field of disability research, and provided the theoretical foundation for a broad, inter-disability rights movement, but it also institutionalized long-standing intra-disability hierarchies. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates that the functional model of disability, like the concept of disability itself, is context-specific and has evolved across time and space and in response to historical circumstances and socio-cultural norms.

This thesis examines the meanings and uses of the impression in the essays and late novels of Henry James. While James found fault with impressionism in French painting and literature, he repeatedly called the novel an ‘impression of life’, and used the term to figure important moments of perception and action for his protagonists. This thesis offers the first full-length study of the impression on its own terms, rather than through the lens of a wider artistic or philosophical movement, the most obvious example being impressionism. It locates James’s impression within an intertextual history comprising British empiricist philosophy (Locke and Hume), empiricist psychology (William James), British aestheticism (Pater and Wilde), and, looking forwards, twentieth-century theories of the performative (Austin, Derrida, de Man, Butler). It offers a series of close readings of James’s non-fictional and fictional treatments of the impression in his early criticism and travel writing (1872-88), his prefaces to the New York edition (1907-09), and the three novels of his major phase, The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). This exploration does not produce any unified definition of the impression in the work of James. It finds, rather, that the impression crystallizes one of James’s main themes, the struggle between art and life, a consequence of the competing empiricist and aesthetic tendencies that the thesis distinguishes within accounts of the impression available to James. The thesis goes on to show that impressions in James may be made as well as received, and so introduces a further distinction, between ‘performative’ and ‘cognitive’ impressions. It argues that what James does with these competing impressions – empiricist and aesthetic, cognitive and performative – is to make them the narrative focus of his late novels and their drama of consciousness.

This thesis submits Luigi Giussani’s theological writings to philosophical analysis. Giussani (born in Desio, 1922; died in Milan, 2005) was a prominent Italian author, public intellectual, university lecturer, and founder of the international Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation (CL). My enquiry is motivated by the experience of readers who find Giussani’s texts marked by vagueness and seeming inconsistencies despite his attempt to respond decisively and sensitively to real human problems. It also presents ideas from those works available only in Italian to an English-language readership for the first time. Rather than criticize the author’s style of exposition, or restate his arguments in a manner more suited to my audience, I treat the texts’ burdens as symptomatic of the author’s deeper, unarticulated concerns. I reconstruct Giussani’s implicit concerns using history, intellectual biography, sources, and the logic of enquiry itself. I then re-read his texts in the light of the explicit rendering of those concerns and, where the texts’ burdens still persist, I suggest repairs corresponding to those concerns and to the errant behaviours his writings were generated to correct. Three themes are examined: judgement, freedom, and beauty. These were prominent in Giussani’s dialogue with students from the 1950s onward and integral to his idea of the religious education of youth. My analysis is conceived as a contribution to philosophical theology, rather than to the philosophy of education. The areas flagged for repair, however, may nonetheless serve educators. I conclude that Giussani’s account is indeed shaped by his implicit concerns; that their nature provokes the essentialist arguments he mounts; and that his attempt to expound intrinsic, universal, and timeless claims runs against the pragmatic thrust of his writing. My repairs call for a better account of 1) practical deliberation, 2) discursive reason, 3) obedience in relation to autonomy, and 4) habits related to the formation of virtues. I argue that the practical grounds of his project are best anchored in robust solutions to the problems of ordinary life formulated from the deepest sources of repair from Giussani’s tradition (sacred scripture and sacred tradition, including the liturgy) rather than what he calls the “needs and exigencies of the heart,” which address a different problem (namely Enlightenment rationality or Neo-Thomism).

This thesis explores the concepts of “voice” and “influence” through the case studies of two famous English-speaking Canadian women writers, Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields. The “voice” is multiple, ambiguous and influenced, but it is also apparently unique. How, therefore, is it constructed and where does it come from? I examine, work with and adapt Harold Bloom’s paradigmatic study of influence to a feminist context, exploring the idea that a literary voice can be developed and influenced by Atwood and Shields. I discuss how these writers searched for an appropriate literary role model, exemplified by nineteenth-century English-Canadian writer Susanna Moodie, at the moment when Canadian nationalism and feminism coincided. Atwood and Shields are now canonical writers themselves and important in both the nationalist and women’s tradition, but have they gone on to influence new Canadian women writers? I test the pleasures and the anxieties of Shields’ influence with regard to her creative writing students and her own daughter, Anne Giardini, who has published her first novel. I compare Shields with Atwood, who has achieved a high level of fame, and examine what kind of influence each exerts. I discuss whether literary influence is politically different for women than men and whether there is any jealousy or power struggles between the sexes. Rivalry and competition between writers are not purely caused by the aesthetic issues that Bloom discusses, therefore I contextualise his concept of influence using literary celebrity studies to consider the economic basis of cultural production. This is in order to show that tensions are determined by market conditions, just as much as the new poet’s desire to overthrow a literary precursor. Finally, I examine fan letters to Atwood and Shields as another important source of literary influence. I discuss how fans are constructed through a commercial relationship and how they can also provide an amateur literary voice. Atwood and Shields have helped to create a network of writers across the globe. I explore whether both authors can be role models who will inspire the next literary generation.

Pendant la Guerre froide de 1945 à 1968, le Danemark, un petit État nordique à tradition neutraliste, adopta une politique de non-alignement en réponse à la bipolarisation, avant que l’aggravation du conflit Est-Ouest ne le contraigne à y renoncer.Si la Guerre froide fit du Danemark un pion du jeu des deux Grands, la position que prit le Danemark dépassa le cadre d’une soumission traditionnelle aux grandes puissances. Il voulut se situer entre l’Est et l’Ouest en menant une politique à deux volets envers chaque bloc : intégration et isolement envers les Occidentaux et intimidation et apaisement envers l’URSS. Le Danemark se rallia au camp occidental dont il partageait la cause sans ne jamais rompre son « bon voisinage » avec l’URSS. L’objectif était double : prévenir le Danemark contre une agression extérieure tout en évitant de provoquer l’URSS. Le Danemark échappa à l’emprise soviétique, malgré la proximité géographique de l’URSS ; elle réalisa ses objectifs sans courir de risque de guerre. / During the Cold War from 1945 to 1968, the small state of Denmark, firmly consolidated within a strong tradition of neutrality, adopted non-alignment as the answer to bipolarisation, until the aggravation of the East-West conflict obliged it to take a stand.Denmark became a brick of the two Great Powers, but the position that Denmark took goes beyond the limits of the traditional submission to the requirements of big states. Denmark insisted on placing itself between the East and the West by adopting a double-headed line of policy regarding each bloc: integration and isolation towards the West and intimidation and appeasement towards the East. Denmark aligned with the West without ever jeopardizing its good neighbourly relations with the USSR. The objective was twofold: to prevent Denmark from being exposed to an external aggression by not provoking the Soviets. The Soviet Union did not attempt to attack Denmark despite the geographical proximity of the two nations; it reached its objectives without risking a war.

This thesis investigates the literary fantastic in Italy from the late nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century. The purpose is to analyse the way in which the fantastic functions in a story—its ʻmechanicsʼ—and to see how the fantastic evolved structurally over the first century of its existence in Italy. This investigation is carried out by the development of a new theoretical methodology together with the close reading of a selection of texts from four key Italian authors of fantastic literature. The thesis is divided into six chapters. The first chapter is a historical overview of the emergence of the fantastic in Italy in the late nineteenth century up to the second half of the twentieth century; it examines the obstacles the fantastic has faced and some of the thematic and structural characteristics of texts which emerge. The second chapter is a literature review of the theoretical models used to analyse and understand the fantastic, followed by an outline of a new model, entitled Different Mimetics, which looks at the internal logic of the fantastic. In the following four chapters Different Mimetics is applied to the study of a selection of fantastic texts by four authors. Chapter three focuses on Ugo Tarchetti, and shows that his stories are defined by coexistence and coincidence in both historical and thematic terms. Chapter four demonstrates how Giovanni Papini reverses the mechanics one might expect, and how his stories are structured as internal narratives. Chapter five looks at how Dino Buzzatiʼs stories are characterised by instability and stretched narrative paradigms; and finally, chapter six looks at how Italo Calvinoʼs narratives focus on world creation and paradox and how they question the stability of narrative paradigms.

The aim of this project is to account for the widespread reception of the epics of Homer and Virgil by American poets of the twentieth century. Since 1914, an unprecedented number of new poems interpreting the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid have appeared in the United States. The vast majority of these modern versions are short, combining epic and lyric impulses in a dialectical form of genre that is shaped, I propose, by two cultural movements of the twentieth century: Modernism, and American humanism. Modernist poetics created a focus on the fragmentary and imagistic aspects of Homer and Virgil; and humanist philosophy sparked a unique trend of undergraduate literature survey courses in American colleges and universities, in which for the first time, in the mid-twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of students were exposed to the epics in translation, and with minimal historical contextualisation, prompting a clear opportunity for personal appropriation on a broad scale. These main matrices for the reception of epic in the United States in the twentieth century are set out in the introduction and first chapter of this thesis. In the five remaining chapters, I have identified secondary threads of historical influence, scrutinised alongside poems that developed in that context, including the rise of Freudian and related psychologies; the experience of modern warfare; American national politics; first- and second-wave feminism; and anxiety surrounding poetic belatedness. Although modern American versions of epic have been recognised in recent scholarship on the reception of Classics in twentieth-century poetry in English, no comprehensive account of the extent of the phenomenon has yet been attempted. The foundation of my arguments is a catalogue of almost 400 poems referring to Homer and Virgil, written by over 175 different American poets from 1914 to the present. Using a comparative methodology (after T. Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns, 1993), and models of reception from German and English reception theory (including C. Martindale, Redeeming the Text, 1993), the thesis contributes to the areas of classical reception studies and American literary history, and provides a starting point for considering future steps in the evolution of the epic genre.

This thesis heeds W. Andrew Achenbaum’s call for historians of ageing to analyse the inner lives of their subjects. Building on and problematizing existing studies of health and welfare policies for the old, it explores the ways that mid-century public and private life shaped how individuals felt about old age. Both public discussions and private narratives of ageing are used to consider how older people understood and expressed their emotional experiences during a challenging period of the life cycle. I argue that old age in general, and its emotional dimensions in particular, are missing from British historiography. Yet both were vital to social life in the mid-century, when the ageing population was an important political issue and a large number of experts hoped to manage the emotional and psychological aspects of this ‘problem’. This thesis begins by setting out this national context for old age, showing that heightened interest in ageing and emotion were significant influences over the expansion of the welfare state. However, contrary to the expectations of mid-century researchers and policy-makers, my subsequent chapters show that older people frequently maintained their social roles and relationships through informal means. This thesis explores how ageing men and women engaged with work, retirement, ill health, marriage, bereavement, fashion, beauty culture, and autobiography as opportunities to find meaning in late life. Together, these varied perspectives on old age make a series of interventions in its history. I argue that historians could do much more to detail the significance of the life cycle for their subjects, whether they write political, social, or cultural history. As this thesis shows, such studies should approach ageing as a lifelong and personal process, which has been shaped by reminiscence and story-telling. I suggest that historians of emotion are best-equipped to write scholarship that is sensitive to the passing of time and personal biography in this way.

Pour Albert Camus, la littérature était à la fois une activité essentielle à son bonheur et un objet de réflexion. Afin de saisir quelle conception de la littérature et quelle vision du rôle de l’écrivain se dégagent de son oeuvre, ce mémoire aborde dans un même mouvement ses deux principaux essais, Le Mythe de Sisyphe et L’Homme révolté, et une pièce de théâtre, Caligula. Notre premier chapitre consiste dans la recherche de ce qui, pour Camus, fait de la création artistique une activité privilégiée dans l’horizon de la pensée de l’absurde et de la révolte. Dans le deuxième chapitre, les différents commentaires émis par la critique à propos de Caligula seront examinés. La pièce, malgré l’opinion dominante, ne raconte pas l’histoire d’un empereur absurde qui se révolte contre son destin. L’importance du thème de la création littéraire dans cette pièce a également été grandement sous-estimée. Enfin, le troisième chapitre de ce mémoire présente notre propre analyse de la pièce. La confrontation de la fiction avec la théorie révèle une grande concordance entre les deux aspects de l’oeuvre de Camus. L’accord n’est cependant pas parfait, et l’étude des points de friction découverts permet d’apporter des éclaircissements sur un des points les plus obscurs des essais de Camus : l’éthique du créateur placé dans une situation où il doit choisir entre tuer et mourir. / For Albert Camus, literature was both an activity crucial to his happiness and a study object. In order to understand what conception of literature can be found in Camus’ writings and the responsibilities of the writer that this definition implies, this memoir studies his two main essays, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, and one play, Caligula. Our first chapter consist in a research of what makes artistic creation an exceptional activity in the light of Camus’ thoughts on absurd on revolt. In our second chapter, the critics’ various commentaries about Caligula are examined. In spite of what is still the opinion of a majority of critics, the play is not the tale of an absurd emperor who would revolt against his destiny. Also, the theme of literary creation has not been sufficiently studied in that play, in which it plays a determinant role. Finally, the third chapter of this memoir presents our own analysis of the play. The confrontation of fiction and theory reveals a great similarity between the two aspects of Camus’ writings. However, the match is never perfect, and the study of the friction points allows us to shed light on one of the most obscure part of Camus’ essays: the ethic of the creator placed in a situation where he must kill or be killed.