<p>This study explores the role of learning and education in American historical fiction written in the 1820s. The United States has been, and still is, commonly considered to be hostile to scholarly learning. In novels and short stories of the 1820s, however, learning and education are recurrent themes, and this dissertation shows that the attitudes to these issues are more ambivalent than hitherto acknowledged. The 1820s was a period characterized by a political struggle, expressed as a battle between intellectuals, represented by the sitting president, John Quincy Adams, a Harvard professor, and anti-intellectuals, headed by the war hero Andrew Jackson. The battle over the place of scholarly learning in the U.S. was played out not only on the political scene but also in historical fiction, where the themes of learning and education become vehicles for exploring national identity. In these texts, whose aim is often to establish an impressive national history, scholarly learning carries negative connotations as it is linked to the former colonizer Britain and also symbolizes social stratification. However, it also stands for civilization and progress, qualities felt to be necessary for the nation to come into its own. The conflicting views and anxieties surrounding the issues of learning and education tend to center on a recurrent character in these texts, the learned person. </p><p>After providing an overview of how the themes of learning and education are treated in historical narratives from the 1820s, this dissertation focuses on works of three writers: <i>Hobomok</i> (1824) and <i>The Rebels</i> (1825) by Lydia Maria Child, <i>The Prairie</i> (1827) by James Fenimore Cooper, and <i>Hope Leslie</i> (1827) by Catharine Maria Sedgwick.</p>

This thesis will investigate the fictional discourse that has developed around academia and how this discourse has manifested itself in the New Zealand literary tradition, primarily in the works of M.K. Joseph, Dan Davin and James K. Baxter. These three writers have been selected because of their status within Kai Jensen's conception of “a literary tradition of excitement about masculinity”; in other words, the masculine tradition in New Zealand literature which provides fictional representations of factual events and tensions. This literary approach is also utilised in the tradition of British university fiction, in which the behaviour of students and faculty are often deliberately exaggerated in order to provide a representation of campus life that captures the essence of the reality without being wholly factual. The fact that these three writers attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to combine the two traditions is a matter of great literary interest: Joseph's A Pound of Saffron (1962) appropriates tropes of the British university novel while extending them to include concerns specific to New Zealand; Davin's Cliffs of Fall (1945), Not Here, Not Now (1970) and Brides of Price (1972) attempt to blend traditions of university fiction with the masculine realist tradition in New Zealand literature, though, as we will see, with limited success; Baxter's station as the maternal grandson of a noted professor allows him to criticise the elitist New Zealand university system in Horse (1985) from a unique position, for he was more sympathetic towards what he considered the working class “peasant wisdom” of his father, Archie, than the “professorial knowledge” of Archie's father-in-law. These three authors have been chosen also because of the way they explore attitudes towards universities amongst mainstream New Zealand society in their writing, for while most novels in the British tradition demonstrate little tension between those within the university walls and those without, in New Zealand fiction the tension is palpable. The motivations for this tension will also be explored in due course, but before we can grapple with how the tradition of British university fiction has impacted New Zealand literature, we must first examine the tradition itself.

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The philosophical and empirical study reported here developed from the observation that information science has had no comprehensive understanding of nonuse of information. Without such an understanding, information workers may use the words "nonuse of information" while referring to very different phenomena. This lack of understanding makes the job of the information professional difficult. For example, the model presented here reduces hundreds of theories of information behavior to a conceptually manageable taxonomy of six conditions that lead to nonuse of information. The six conditions include: 1) intrinsic somatic conditions, 2) socio-environmental barriers, 3) authoritarian controls, 4) threshold knowledge shortfall, 5) attention shortfall, and 6) information filtering. This dissertation explains and provides examples of each condition. The study of a novel area that had no prior theory or model required a novel methodology. Thus, for this study, I adopted the pragmatism formulated by Charles Sanders Peirce, a method of evaluating concepts by their practical consequences. This pragmatism applied in two ways to the study of nonuse of information. First, because nonuse of information is a behavior, pragmatism helped me to limit the psychologic implications of the study to behavior, rather than to expand the discussion to psychodynamics or cognition, for example. I justified this limiting on the basis that behavior reflects the use or nonuse of information, and behavior is more observable than other aspects of psychology, such as cognition. Second, Peirce's concept of pragmatism supported another of his contributions to philosophical inquiry, retroduction, sometimes referred to as abduction. To study nonuse of information through retroduction, I created a fivestep "definition heuristic," based on the writings of Spradley and McCurdy. I then created a nine-step "retroduction heuristic" based on the system of logic identified and termed "retroductive" or "abductive" by Peirce. I used this heuristic to identify examples of nonuse of information and applied the examples to a second corpus of research reports that contained examples of compelled nonuse of information. The taxonomy of this study resulted from this second application and represents a descriptive model of compelled nonuse of information. / text