This thesis is an exploration of the ways in which a number of important Russian writers and filmmakers of the 1910s and 1920s appropriated domestic interiors as structural, visual and literary metaphors. My focus is on the artistic articulation of the closed space of the Russian domestic interior, in particular as it surfaced in the narratives of the modernist literature and cinema of the time and became an essential metaphor of its age. In my discussion I take issue with two standard ways of understanding domestic space in existing literature. I argue that representations of home spaces in early twentiethcentury Russian culture mount a challenge to the conventional view of the home as a place of safety and stability. I also argue that, at this point, the traditional approach to the room and the domestic space as a fixed closed structure is assailed by representations that see domestic space as kinetic. The importance of the 'room in motion' means that I address cinematic as well as literary representations of domestic space, and show that even literary representation borrow cinematic techniques. My different chapters constitute case studies of various separate, but complementary, aspects of the representation of home space. The first chapter shows how domestic space in reflected in the poetical language of Anna Akhmatova. The second chapter focuses on the parallel exploration of rooms and a child's consciousness in Kotik Letaev by Andrei Belyi. The third chapter discovers the philosophy of a room built by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii in his short stories of the 1920s. The next three chapters focus on interiors of three different cinematic genres. The fourth chapter looks closely at films created by Evgenii Bauer, showing the director's innovative techniques of framing and set-design. The fifth chapter explores the film Tret'ia Meshchanskaia by Abram Room, focusing on the director's employment of the room as a structural device of the film. The last chapter analyses two lyrical comedies by Boris Barnet to show the comic effect produced by the empty room and domestic objects in his films, and also focuses on the image of staircase. In conclusion, I speculate that the representation of interior spaces in the period in question goes beyond genre, medium, and narrative structure and becomes an important and culturally dynamic motif of the time.

No description available.

George MacDonald (1824-1905) is one of the most complex and significant Scottish writers of the nineteenth century, especially as a writer of children's fiction and literary fairy tales. His works, however, have seldom been studied as Scottish literature. This dissertation is the first full-length analysis of his writings for children in their Scottish context, focusing particularly on his use of Scottish folklore in his literary fairy tales. MacDonald wrote in the Scottish Romantic tradition of Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and James Hogg; by close reading his works alongside similar texts by his compatriots, such as Andrew Lang, MacDonald's own idiosyncratic contribution to that tradition becomes more apparent. His profound knowledge of and appreciation for Christian mysticism is in evidence throughout his work; his use of folklore was directly informed by his exploration of mystical ideas. Hogg is recast as a second Dante, and ‘bogey tales' become catalysts for spiritual awakening. MacDonald's fairy tales deal sensitively and profoundly with the theme of child death, a tragedy that held personal significance for him, and can thus be read as his attempt to come to terms with the reality of bereavement by using Scottish folklore to explain it in mystical terms. Traditional figures such as Thomas Rhymer, visionary poets, and doubles appear in his fairy tales as guides and pilgrims out of the material world toward mystical union with the Divine.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This master thesis examines the heritage of the Prague journal Volja Rossii, one of the leading Russian emigration's periodical publications in 1920s, in terms of literary criticism. The research aims to describe the main tendencies in the perception of current socio-political processes of that era, as well as the Soviet literature and other cultural processes in SSSR of the interwar period, by the magazine's critics and columnists. Furthermore, this study includes biographical data, thematical and theoretical preferences in publications of the key personalities in the journal's editorial staff.

This thesis examines James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and early cinema (c. 1895-1920) through Merleau-Pontian phenomenology. Instead of arguing for lines of direct influence between specific films and particular parts of Ulysses, I show that Joyce’s text and selected early films and film genres exhibit parallel philosophies. Ulysses and early cinema share similar ideas on the embodied nature of perception, the close relationship between mind and body, the intermingling of the human and the mechanical, intersubjectivity, and the subject’s inherence in the world. All of these shared ideas are inherently phenomenological. My phenomenological position on the Joyce-and-cinema relationship is at odds with a popular strain of scholarship which cites impersonality, neutrality, and automatism as the key linking factors between early cinema and modernist literature (including Joyce). ‘Joyce-and-cinema’ studies is a relatively large, and growing, field; as is ‘modernism-and-cinema’ studies. As well as ploughing my own path through an already crowded area, I analyse the different trends present (both historically and currently) in each area of study. I also add to the scholarship on phenomenological film theory by analysing the work of phenomenologically inflected film-philosophers and suggesting some new ways in which Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology might be used in the analysis of films and literature. I provide close analyses of several episodes of Ulysses and pay particular attention to ‘Ithaca’, ‘Circe’, ‘Nausicaa’, and ‘Wandering Rocks’. Several of Charlie Chaplin’s Mutual films are analysed, as are a select number of films by George Méliès. I also look at other trick-films, Irish melodrama, panoramas, ‘phantom rides’, and local actuality films (especially Mitchell and Kenyon’s Living Dublin series). Proto-cinematic devices – the Mutoscope and stereoscope – are also included in my analyses.