This dissertation examines how postmodernist narratives of memory in Graham Swift's Waterland, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines retrieve the stories of those who have been lost or forgotten in official history and refigure the temporal and spatial imaginary in intertwining personal stories of crisis with public history through acts of remembering. Questioning the modernist ideology of progress based on the idea of linear sequence of time, the novels not only retrace the heterogeneous and discontinuous layers of stories overlooked or repressed in official accounts of modern history, but also re-examine the contradictory and contested process by which subjects are situated or positioned, and its effects on the production of knowledge. These postmodern historical novels examine history as a discourse and explore its limits. The narrators of the novels are engaged with an autobiographical act of rewriting their lives, but their efforts to reconstitute themselves in unity and continuity are undermined by the disjunctive narrative form of the novels. The layered narrative of memory through which the novels reconstruct modern history is allegorical in the double sense that it exposes the act of signification by decentering the symbol of the transcendental signifier while telling an allegorical story of personal and familial history that mirrors national history in a fragmented way. In Waterland, Tom Crick retells his personal and familial stories intertwined with local and national history as alternative history lessons and challenges the Idea of Progress by revisiting sites of traumatic memory. Midnight's Children constructs counter-stories of Post-Independence India as multiple alternatives to one official version of history and addresses the limits of history in terms of "a border zone of temporality." In The Shadow Lines, the narrator retells his family history as a story of borders through his struggle with gaps in official history and creates a national imaginary with mirror images and events. The postmodernist narrative of memory in these novels turns the time of the now into a time for the "past as to come," a time to detect the unrealized and unfulfilled possibilities of the past, through retellings of the past.

A novel set of long-term data on Swedish commercial banks in 1870–2001 is used to shed new light on some long-standing issues in money and banking. Essays 1 and 2 explore long-term changes in the leverage and profitability of the Swedish banking system, and inquire into the causes of their change. In particular, it is investigated whether inflation and high corporate taxes were the causes behind the increasing leverage of Swedish banks in the 20th century. Essays 3 to 5 describe the workings of the Swedish note-banking system in the late 19th century and compare its performance with the central-banking regime after 1904, when the Bank of Sweden gained a note monopoly. How does note monopolisation affect the elasticity of the currency, and how does it affect the size of money and credit cycles? These classical questions are tested empirically for the first time. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2005 S. 3-11: sammanfattning, s. 15-186: 5 uppsatser

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Michigan, 1938. / "Errata" : slip inserted. "Plays first performed or first published 1919-1935 which are based on some phase of German history 1803-1815" : p. 131-139. "General bibliography": p. 141-147.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Michigan, 1938. / "Errata" : slip inserted. "Plays first performed or first published 1919-1935 which are based on some phase of German history 1803-1815" : p. 131-139. "General bibliography": p. 141-147.

Thesis (M.Arch.)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes special report study entitled : Conservation of old structures. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2008. Graduate Programme in English. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-234). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR51491

While political parties in Europe are incredibly adaptable organizations, they have varied in the extent to which they are able to adapt to social and political transformations. I explain parties' adaptability in two steps. 1) Adaptability depends on factionalism in a nonlinear way. Giving too much room and no room at all to factions undermines a party's ability to adapt. 2) Factionalism depends on early organizational characteristics. The more centralized the initially introduced leadership selection process is, the more party elites will be incentivized to form factions. This argument applies to political parties that allow for internal competition and elect their leaders according to formal rules. I use statistical tools, a medium- and small-N analysis and systematic process tracing to test my framework against competing explanations. I focus on Christian democracy to use a most-similar system design. The main empirical part of the thesis relies on a structured focused comparison of the Italian DC, Austrian ÖVP and German CDU. It is guided by a nested analysis and builds on a large amount of primary data which has not been analyzed before. I test my theory on the additional cases of the Portuguese, Dutch and Luxembourgian Christian Democrats and the French MRP. My main finding is that early organizational choices matter. The initial form the leadership selection process takes has a decisive impact on the incentives of intra-party actors to form factions. The initial level of factionalism becomes deeply entrenched in the party's organization and internal code of practice. This explains why party elites are unlikely to change it when they realize that their party's level of factionalism undermines its adaptability. Moving beyond the focus of path dependence on a single level has thus important implications for the literature on party politics, factionalism, party organizations and institutional development.

The purpose of this essay is to analyze how the Swedish government agency Forum för levande historia mediates historical understanding through attempts to bridge distance in time and space. With reference to the concept of historical empathy I examine two publications by the Forum för levande historia agency to illustrate how history may be conveyed in a way which constitutes historical empathy in relation to secondary school students. The essay is guided by three question: "how can one understand the concept of historical empathy in relation to the student materials published by the Forum för levande historia angency in a broader educational context?", "how does the Forum för levande historia agency relate to the readers historical understanding?", and, "in what way is historical empathy used to bridge the temporal and geographical dimension in history education?". Furthermore, my theoretical framework states that historical empathy can only be achieved through an alignment of historical positionality; a positioning of a texts authors and recipients regarding their preconceived understanding of his-tory. Thus, history may only be conveyed when an author positions the historical content in a way that consider how the recipient’s ontological, epistemological, existential, and sociocultural disposition impact their view of history. Through my textual analysis, with basis in said theoretical framework, I conclude that Forum för levande historia convey history by three different means, each one facilitated as a different type of historical empathy. Consequently, the three types that constitutes historical empathy, narrative, subjective, and contextual empathy, are used by the authors to position the text in a way that is accessible for student. However, as the analysis demonstrate a hybridization in the use of historical empathy raises questions about whether this implementation develop or impair historical empathy. Hence, my essay suggests that the implication for teaching history, as well as history education in a broader sense, require educators to reflect and evaluate how they con-vey history.

This thesis examines the preoccupation with the relationship between history and fiction present in the work of Leonardo Sciascia and Jorge Luis Borges. By means of different narrative strategies, both authors underscore the narrative elements that underpin any reconstruction of the past, and in this way they link the process of reconstruction of past events to the process of rewriting of a literary work. They emphasise, however, that whereas the literary work can be enriched by multiple rewritings, multiple reconstructions of the same real past event risk threatening its truthfulness. This thesis investigates the different ways in which Borges’s and Sciascia’s works intersect, across three narrative forms: the detective story, the historical essay (inchiesta or ‘enquiry’ for Sciascia) and the historical fiction. The analysis of Sciascia’s texts starts from a focus on the structural similarities with the work of Borges in the detective story, paying particular attention to Il contesto (1971), Todo modo (1974), and Il cavaliere e la morte (1988). It then moves on to Sciascia’s inclusion of fragments of Borges’s texts in two of his inchieste, L’affaire Moro (1978) and Il teatro della memoria (1981). The last chapter of the thesis proposes a metafictional reading of Sciascia’s historical novel Il Consiglio d’Egitto (1963), in the light of the comparisons with Borges’s work undertaken in the previous chapters. The two key aims of this thesis are to show (1) that studying the ways in which Sciascia integrates Borges’s texts in his own writing allows a deeper understanding of Sciascia’s texts, but also underscores traits in Borges’s which might have been downplayed by previous criticism of his work, and (2) that reconsidering in the light of this understanding a number of Sciascia’s other texts where Borges’s influence is not explicit allows us to identify a preoccupation with regards to the relationship between history and fiction shared between both authors.