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L. T. Meade's Avaricious Anomaly: Madame Sara, British Imperialism, and Greedy Wolves in The Sorceress of the Strand. Laurie Langlois Denning, Department of English, BYU Master of Arts. Critics interested in the prolific late Victorian author L.T. Meade have primarily focused on her work as an author of girls' stories and novels for young people, which enjoyed fantastic commercial success in her lifetime but fell into obscurity after her death. Recent scholarship on her detective fiction shows Meade's significant contributions to the genre as well as her engagement with social and political discourse. Scholars have noted ways that Meade's popular series, The Sorceress of the Strand, contributes to the New Woman debate and expresses anxiety over the British imperial project. This project examines Meade's villain in the series as a social anomaly that functions to interrogate the greed at the heart of imperialism. Examining the series' conclusion and the unusual nature of its ending sheds new light on Meade's contribution to debate over empire at the fin de siécle. Meade's fascinating villain, Madame Sara, is doggedly pursued by two detective figures--one is considered the top forensic specialist in the British police force and the other is the head of a business fraud agency--but the detectives are never able to bring Madam Sara to justice. Instead, it is a wolf that finally defeats the brilliant criminal mastermind. Why a wolf? Madam Sara's unusual demise serves as a deus ex machina that invites the reader to consider the Dante symbolism embedded in the text. Other critics see Meade's ending as reinforcing the empire; however, given the Dante imagery that has Madam Sara symbolizing a greedy imperial force, Meade's series indicts imperial greed and warns British citizens about failure to apprehend the evil in empire.

La tesi prende in esame la figura di Giovanni Iacopo Dionisi (1734-1808), canonico della cattedrale di Verona e bibliotecario della Capitolare, noto come uno "degli uomini più benemeriti di questi studi danteschi, [...] nello scorcio del secolo passato, l’instauratore d’una critica nuova su le opere del poeta” (G. Carducci). Vengono per la prima volta analizzate a fondo, alla luce della critica dantesca successiva, gli otto "Aneddoti" e la "Preparazione istorica e critica alla nuova edizione di Dante Allighieri", opere ricche di spunti esegetici e notazioni testuali relativi alle opere dantesche. La tesi tratta anche dell'edizione bodoniana della "Commedia", pubblicata da Dionisi nel 1795, e delle polemiche di Dionisi con Baldassarre Lombardi, che nel 1791 aveva pubblicato un'edizione commentata del poema dantesco. Le risultanze dell’indagine dimostrano che il canonico veronese ha sciolto molti nodi testuali intricati, tanto che sono molte le lezioni proposte per la prima volta da Dionisi che si ritrovano anche nell’edizione Petrocchi della “Commedia” e Brambilla Ageno del “Convivio”, come risulta da una sinossi pubblicata in appendice. Nella stessa appendice vengono inoltre pubblicate sette lettere inedite di Dionisi a Bartolomeo Perazzini, parroco di Soave, anch’egli cultore di Dante, e stralci tratti da altre ventuno lettere fra i due, al fine di dimostrare quanto stretta fosse la collaborazione fra i due studiosi. / The thesis is about Giovanni Iacopo Dionisi (1734-1808), canon of Verona’s cathedral and librarian of the Biblioteca Capitolare, known as one “of the most well-deserving man of the Dante studies, […] at the end of the previous century, the beginner of a new criticism on the poet’s works” (G. Carducci). Dionisi’s books, i.e. the eight “Aneddoti”, the "Preparazione istorica e critica alla nuova edizione di Dante Allighieri" (full of exegetic and textual hints about Dante’s works), and his edition of Dante’s “Commedia” (published by Bodoni in 1795), are for the first time analysed with the point of view of modern Dante criticism. The controversy between Dionisi and Baldassarre Lombardi, editor of the “Commedia” in 1791, is taken in account as well. My thesis proves that Dionisi solved many difficult textual points in Dante’s works, so that many are the readings proposed by Dionisi you can find also in Petrocchi’s edition of the “Commedia” and in Brambilla Ageno’s edition of the “Convivio”, as is shown in a table in the thesis’ appendix, where the reader also finds seven unpublished Dionisi letters to Bartolomeo Perazzini, parish priest of Soave and fond of Dante, and twenty-one extracts from other letters between the two, that show how tight was the collaboration between the two scholars.