This essay explores the choices and fates of three women in Thomas Hardy’s A Group of Noble Dames. The lives of Betty Dornell, Emmeline Oldbourne and Barbara Grebe are all influenced by chance, choice and the interference of their parents and lovers. Despite the similar circumstances of their lives as young, upper-class women, it is shown that their fates vary widely as a result of both choice and chance. Ultimately, however, this essay claims that Hardy allows chance to have the final say in each dame’s destiny.

This dissertation politically analyses the principles of literary evaluation (here called "axiology") argued and applied by the English critics Christopher Caudwell, Raymond Williams, and Terry Eagleton. The paradoxical fact that all three claim to be working within a Marxist framework while producing mutually divergent rationales for literary evaluation prompts a detailed examination of Marx and Engels. Moreover, since Caudwell and Eagleton acknowledge Leninism to be Marxism, and, further, since Eagleton and I both in our own ways argue that Trotskyism--as opposed to Stalinism--is the continuator of Leninism, the evaluative methods of Lenin and Trotsky also become relevant. Examined in light of that revolutionary tradition, however, and in view of the (English) critics' high political self-consciousness, the latter's principles of "literary" evaluation reveal definitive political differences between each other and with Marxism itself, centrally over the question of organised action. Thus, each of the chapters on the English critics begins with an examination of the chosen critic's purely political profile and its relationship to his general theory of literature. Next, I show how the contradictions of his "axiology" express those of his politics. Finally, with Hardy as a focus, I show the influence of each critic's political logic on his particular "literary" assessment of individual authors and texts. The heterogeneity of these critics' evaluations of Hardy, the close correspondence of each critic's general evaluative principles to his political beliefs, and the non-Marxist nature of those beliefs themselves all concretely suggest that none of the three English critics is strictly a Marxist. I do not know whether a genuinely Marxist axiology is inevitable; however, I do admit such a phenomenon as a logical possibility. In any case, I argue, this possibility will never be realised unless aspiring Marxist axiologists seek to match their usually extensive knowledge of literature with an active interest in making international proletarian revolution happen. And, since it can only happen if it is organised, the "Marxist" axiologist without such an orientation will be merely an axiologist without Marxism. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This study has two purposes. First is to dispel myths that there are no residence halls at community colleges. Second is to discuss the ways in which these residence halls are administered, the amenities offered to students, the benefits of residence halls, and their future in community colleges. The study is based upon the Katsinas, Lacey and Hardy 2004 classifications and divides community colleges into 7 categories: Urban multi campus, Urban single campus, Suburban multi campus, Suburban single campus, and Rural small, medium and large. Included in the study are tables of data received from an original survey sent to 232 community college CEOs who reported to the US Department of Education that they had residence halls at their campus. The results indicate that a significant number of community colleges with residence halls exist, particularly at rural community colleges, that they bring significant financial gain to the colleges, and they append numerous benefits to students and to student life at these colleges. Residence halls are housed in divisions of student services and directed by experienced student affairs professionals. The study concludes with recommendations for policy as well as practice, the most important of which calls for more accurate data collection regarding on-campus residence housing by the US Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics.

Title: Integral and Supremal Operators on Weighted Function Spaces Author: Martin Křepela Department: Department of Mathematical Analysis Supervisor: prof. RNDr. Luboš Pick, CSc., DSc., Department of Mathematical Analysis Abstract: The common topic of this thesis is boundedness of integral and supre- mal operators between function spaces with weights. The results of this work have the form of characterizations of validity of weighted operator inequalities for appropriate cones of functions. The outcome can be divided into three cate- gories according to the particular type of studied operators and function spaces. The first part involves a convolution operator acting on general weighted Lorentz spaces of types Λ, Γ and S defined in terms of the nonincreasing rear- rangement, Hardy-Littlewood maximal function and the difference of these two, respectively. It is characterized when a convolution-type operator with a fixed kernel is bounded between the aforementioned function spaces. Furthermore, weighted Young-type convolution inequalities are obtained and a certain optima- lity property of involved rearrangement-invariant domain spaces is proved. The additional provided information includes a comparison of the results to the pre- viously known ones and an overview of basic properties of some new function spaces...

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L’unitarienne Elizabeth Gaskell rejetait les doctrines anglicanes qui aliéneraient Thomas Hardy de sa religion. Elle était aussi championne de plusieurs penseurs qui exerceraient une forte influence sur les convictions d'Hardy. La continuité de la religion de Gaskell avec la vision du monde d'Hardy est évidente dans leurs écritures personnelles et aussi dans leurs romans. L'authenticité de voix que tant Gaskell que Hardy donnent aux caractères marginalisés, et spécialement aux femmes, provient aussi de leurs valeurs chrétiennes communes. Les convictions religieuses des deux auteurs et l'influence de la religion sur leurs travaux ont été abondamment étudiées, mais une comparaison entre elles doit encore être entreprise. Après avoir examiné les liens entre la foi de Gaskell et les convictions d'Hardy, je compare les attitudes des deux auteurs envers la classe dans North and South et The Woodlanders et leurs sympathies envers la femme tombée dans Ruth et Tess of the d’Urbervilles. / As a progressive Unitarian, Elizabeth Gaskell rejected the Anglican doctrines that would later alienate Thomas Hardy from his religion. She also championed many of the thinkers who would exert a strong influence on Hardy’s beliefs. The connection between Gaskell’s religion and Hardy’s worldview is evident in their personal writings and in their novels. The authenticity of voice that both Gaskell and Hardy give to marginalized characters, specifically to women, also springs from their common Christian-based values. Both authors’ religious convictions and the influence of religion on their works have been extensively studied, but a comparison between them has yet to be undertaken. After examining the links between Gaskell’s Unitarianism and Hardy’s beliefs, I compare the two authors’ attitudes towards class in North and South and The Woodlanders and their sympathies with the fallen woman as expressed in Ruth and Tess of the d’Urbervilles to demonstrate their intellectual and artistic affinities.

La thèse est consacrée à une étude d'interpolation complexe "semi-libre" dans le sens suivant: étant donné un ensemble "sigma" dans le disque unité D et une fonction f holomorphe dans D appartenant à une certaine classe X, on cherche g dans une autre classe Y (plus petite que X) qui minimise la norme de g dans Y parmi toutes les fonctions g satisfaisant g=f sur l'ensemble "sigma". Plus précisément, nous nous intéressons aux estimations de la constante d'interpolation suivante: c(sigma, X, Y ) = sup{ inf{||g||_Y: g=f sur sigma}: ||f||_X<=1} Dans la thèse, nous étudions le cas où Y = H^infini et où l'espace des contraintes X est choisi parmi les espaces suivants: les espaces de Hardy, les espaces de Bergman pondérés à poids radial ou encore les espaces de fonctions holomorphes ayant leurs coefficients de Taylor dans lp(w) (w étant un poids). La thèse contient également certaines applications aux nombres conditionnés des matrices de Toeplitz. / The thesis is devoted to a "semi-free" interpolation problem in the following way. Let sigma be a finite set of the unit disc D and f an holomorphic function in D which belongs to a certain class X, we search for g in another class Y (smaller than X) which minimize the norm of g in Y among all the functions g such that g=f on the set "sigma". More precisely, we are interested in the following interpolation constant : c(sigma, X, Y ) = sup{ inf{||g||_Y: g=f sur sigma}: ||f||_X<=1}. We study in the thesis the case where Y=H^\infinity and the space of constrains X is chosen among the following spaces: Hardy spaces, weighted Bergman spaces (with radial waights), and holomorphic functions which Taylor coefficients are in lp(w) (w being a weight). The thesis also contains an application to the condition numbers of Toeplitz matrices.

This dissertation makes two arguments: First, it elaborates a depressive genealogy of the Victorian novel that asserts a category of realism rooted in affect rather than period or place. Second, it argues for a critical strategy called "depressive reading" that has unique purchase on this literary history. Drawing on Melanie Klein's "depressive position," the project asserts an alternative to novel theories that are rooted in sympathy and desire. By being attentive to mood and critical disposition, depressive reading homes in on the barely-contained negativities of realism. Through readings of novels by William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Charlotte Brontë, it explores feelings of ambivalence, soreness, and dislike as aesthetic responses and interpretations, as well as prompts to varieties of non-instrumentalist ethics. In the final chapter, the psychological and literary strategy of play emerges as a creative and scholarly possibility.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, gaslight supplanted the candles and oil lamps that had brightened Europe and America for centuries, and, by 1900, electricity would attain decisive dominance over both. In their narrative figurations of lighting, however, novels of the same period often arrest this march of progress, lingering in an Arcadian past organized around the rhythms of the solar day and the agricultural year. Mining works by Frances Burney, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust, and others, my dissertation argues that novelists employ obsolete lighting technologies not merely to provide historical texture, but to express narrative impulses that run counter to the realist mode, to dramatize transgressive forms of ambition within the rural communities they depict, and sometimes even to voice ambivalence about the commercial constraints of the serial form. Characters in these novels who avail themselves of artificial illumination alter the rhythm of the workday in order to satisfy desires inconsistent with the interests and pursuits sanctioned by their neighbors: by the light of lamps and candles, they pursue cross-class romance, literary aspirations, or professional goals that fall outside the parameters dictated by social class and the historical moment. For Proust’s narrator, this entails a series of adjustments to his evening schedule over the course of the Recherche, first to accommodate an aristocratic social calendar, and, later, to facilitate the nocturnal composition of his own novel. In Eliot’s case, the inclination to stay awake after nightfall—whether the illicit romantic fantasies of a Hetty Sorrel or the workmanlike resolve of an Adam Bede—constitutes a meaningful challenge to the author’s narrative realism. By examining the formal innovations these technologies provoke in nineteenth-century fiction, my research unearths a pervasive counter-realist tendency in novels often famed for their fidelity to the protocols of realist representation.

Classical operators of harmonic analysis in Orlicz spaces V'ıt Musil We deal with classical operators of harmonic analysis in Orlicz spaces such as the Hardy-Littlewood maximal operator, the Hardy-type integral operators, the maximal operator of fractional order, the Riesz potential, the Laplace transform, and also with Sobolev-type embeddings on open subsets of Rn or with respect to Frostman measures and, in particular, trace embeddings on the boundary. For each operator (in case of embeddings we consider the identity operator) we investigate the question of its boundedness from an Orlicz space into another. Particular attention is paid to the sharpness of the results. We further study the question of the existence of optimal Orlicz domain and target spaces and their description. The work consists of author's published and unpublished results compiled together with material appearing in the literature.