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The purpose of this study was to explore what exactly bound post-Second World War American conservatives together. Since modern conservatism's recent birth in the United States in the last half century or more, many historians have claimed that both anti-communism and capitalism kept conservatives working in cooperation. My contention was that the intellectual founder of postwar conservatism, Russell Kirk, made imagination, and not anti-communism or capitalism, the thrust behind that movement in his seminal work The Conservative Mind. In The Conservative Mind, published in 1953, Russell Kirk created a conservative genealogy that began with English parliamentarian Edmund Burke. Using Burke and his dislike for the modern revolutionary spirit, Kirk uncovered a supposedly conservative seed that began in late eighteenth-century England, and traced it through various interlocutors into the United States that culminated in the writings of American expatriate poet T.S. Eliot. What Kirk really did was to create a counter-narrative to the American liberal tradition that usually began with the French Revolution and revolutionary figures such as English-American revolutionary Thomas Paine. One of my goals was to demystify the fusionist thesis, which states that conservatism is a monolithic entity of shared qualities. I demonstrated that major differences existed from conservatism's postwar origins in 1953. I do this by using the concept of textual communities. A textual community is a group of people led by a privileged interpreter—someone such as Russell Kirk—who translates a text, for example Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, for followers. What happens in a textual community is that the privileged interpreter explains to followers how to read a text and then forms boundaries around a particular rendering of a book. I argue that conservatism was full of these textual communities and privileged interpreters. Therefore, in consecutive chapters, I look at the careers of Russell Kirk, John Lukacs, Christopher Lasch, and Paul Gottfried to demonstrate how this concept fleshed out from 1953 and well into the first decade of the new millennium. / Ph. D.

Willa Cather believed literature and journalism were separate and unequal genres. During her decade in Pittsburgh (1896-1906), as she gained recognition as a literary artist, she increasingly censored her early journalism and apprentice fiction. My dissertation promotes the recovery of these writings, especially the unsigned and pseudonymous pieces contained in two affiliated journals she served as an editor: Home Monthly the National Stockman and Farmer. My first chapter describes more then forty additional items from Home Monthly and the Stockman, including poetry, short fiction, and editorials. Annotated tables of contents and contributors' lists for both journals (1896-97) and maps and period photographs are offered in appendices.<br>Employing the methodology of New Historicism, my dissertation returns little regarded works to their approximate contexts of publication. Chapter 2 reads Cather's story "The Conversion of Sun Loo" (1900) as part of the debate over proselytizing the Chinese within the Library, a Pittsburgh magazine whose brief life (Spring and Summer of 1900) coincided with the Boxer rebellion in North China. "Sum Loo," it argues, is a satire upon recent events linking China and Pittsburgh's small Chinese colony.<br>The third chapter recovers a journalistic prototype for a story Cather held among her most "literary." Although Cather preferred to say "Paul's Case" (1905) was inspired by her teaching experience, she borrowed its plot from the city papers of November 1902, which reported the theft of $1,500 from the offices of the Denny Estate by two Pittsburgh boys. This chapter examines not only Cather's adaptation of extra-literary sources, but also her ambivalence toward her first career in journalism.<br>The final chapter concerns two late novellas, "Uncle Valentine" (1922) and "Double Birthday" (1929), written more than a decade after Cather's last physical visit to the city. Both use memories of Pittsburgh and Allegheny City at the turn of the century to attack suburbanization and class stratification, twin problems that she thought were eroding the nation's social fabric in the 1920s. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / English / PhD; / Dissertation;

The past two decades of political and social disintegration in Bosnia and Herzegovina have given birth to literary counterreactions against hegemonic ways of imagining social life in the country. This thesis deals with a particular practice in BosnianHerzegovinian war and post-war literature, which uses infantile perspectives to critically address issues related to the socialist history of Bosnia as part of Yugoslavia, the war in the 1990s, and the socalled transitional post-war period. Drawing on an old Western literary tradition of using the child character to estrange conventional experiences of the world, the texts (by authors such as Miljenko Jergović, Nenad Veličković, Alma Lazarevska, Aleksandar Hemon, and Saša Stanišić) use the skewing and dislocating outlook associated with the infantile subject to expose and undermine perceivably problematic mechanisms in socialist, ethnonationalist, and Western liberal hegemonic discourses. In contrast to previous research on the topic, which has primarily focussed upon the narratological conditions for the infantile perspective, the focus here is on the subversive infantilisation of hegemonic discourse—that is, the very discursive act of representing and contesting dominant concepts, narratives, and representations. The texts are seen as transitional areas through which input from the social world passes and, in this process, is restructured and ultimately transformed into a configuration slightly or radically different from the original input. Theoretically inspired by discourse theory and ideas from New Historicism, the study isolates and investigates a set of techniques through which this reconfiguration occurs. Apart from discussing the use of the basic infantile perspective as such a technique, the study also considers how the notion of the infantile influences techniques of dichotomisation (the production of positional counterpoints), appropriation (the critical subsuming of dominant discourse), and blending (the mixing of dominant and childish imagery). The thesis also addresses the possible political implications of the strategy of subversive infantilisation. Here the approach is influenced by the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière, which enables an understanding of the aesthetic reconfiguration of how Bosnian social life is imagined as a way of constituting a new form of subjectivity that evades the excluding and oppressive framework of hegemonic discourse.

The thesis deals with the life and work of an eminent architect of the late 19th and early 20th century, a native of Horní Branná near Jilemnice, Jan Vejrych. Forty years of his extensive and diverse project and construction activity has left its mark both in Prague and in many places in Bohemia and, by implementation of a project of the National House in Maribor, Slovenia, it has also acquired an international dimension. The aim of the text is to offer a comprehensive view of Vejrych's life and professional activities and thus fill one of the gaps in the knowledge of architecture of the late 19th and early 20th century in the Czech lands. The thesis primarily focuses on the analysis of Vejrych's architectural work. When mapping his projects the aim was to place them consistently in the broader art-historical and socio- political context. The works are not only analyzed within each creative period, the evolution of selected building types is traced over time as well. Attention is paid to interior designs, which were an integral part of major projects, as well as to sketches and studies created for architect's own use where his general observations and comments on various aspects of architectural work can be found. Opinions on Vejrych's projects and professional activities and their transformation...

La première moitié du XIXe siècle germanique voit le sacré se déplacer de façon massive et multiple vers la sphère profane. Le vocabulaire, les schémas et les idéaux religieux se refondent dans le prisme historique pour pénétrer philosophie, littérature, arts visuels et musique. Dans un climat esthétique, politique et social tendu vers la Bildung, l’édification morale mais aussi religieuse de la société, la représentation communautaire devient l’objet privilégié de l’art. En témoignent le ressourcement architectural gothique, les tableaux d’activisme nazaréen, ainsi que des modalités de représentation grandioses dans l’opéra et l’oratorio. L’insertion plus insolite du religieux dans la symphonie trouve ici un champ de contextualisation qui permet d’élucider les mutations contradictoires du genre en plein essor. Engagée depuis le classicisme dans une vocation spirituelle récusant l’intelligible, la symphonie ne s’en trouve pas moins investie de représentations religieuses se focalisant sur l’image communautaire. Dans l’attraction de l’œuvre beethovénien, Mendelssohn et Schumann, parallèlement à Spohr, font dans leurs symphonies une place décisive aux topoï connotant ou dénotant le religieux, à commencer par les cantiques et les styles anciens. Leurs corpus symphoniques respectifs apparaissent singulièrement homogènes, non moins qu’en correspondance. Par l’amplification des représentations spirituelles via la technique cyclique, ils s’appréhendent dès lors dans une vocation religieuse d’accomplissement, en probable résonance avec les conceptions historicistes d’immanence ou de transcendance. / The first half of the Germanic Nineteenth Century saw the shift of the religious expression in a massive and multiple way towards the profane sphere. Vocabulary, patterns and religious ideals are recast in the historical prism to enter philosophy, literature, visual arts and music. In a tense aesthetic, political and social climate to « Bildung », the moral and religious edification of society, the community representation becomes the privileged aim of art. Evidence of this is found in the Gothic architectural renewal, the activism of Nazarene paintings and grandiose representation arrangements in historical-religious opera and oratorio. The more unusual religious penetration into the symphony finds a significant field of contextualization that allows to elucidate the contradictory mutations of the booming genre. Committed since classicism to a spiritual vocation rejecting the intelligible, it is nonetheless true that the symphony is invested with religious representations focusing on community image. In the attraction of the work of Beethoven, symphonies by Mendelssohn and Schumann, along with those of Spohr, give emphasis to topoï connoting or indicating the religious, starting with hymns and old styles. Their respective symphonic corpus appear remarkably homogeneous, no less than in retrospect correspondence. By amplifying the spiritual representations via the cyclic technique, they are subsequently grasped in a religious vocation of accomplishment, likely in resonance with the historicist conceptions of immanence and transcendence.

In this essay I plan to show how Wharton, through Lily, criticised society, and more specifically its expectations of women. My thesis is that Wharton and her character Lily exposed the upper class society of New York, and its ruthlessness, by voicing a woman’s point of view. Therefore, the main purpose here is to reveal the complexity of the lives women led in order to fulfil society’s expectations and I thereby plan to explore what it was like living in a world governed by strict rules of conduct.

In his defense of negative freedom, Isaiah Berlin&rsquo / s main target is the political voluntarism of enlightenment rationalism which has paved way to totalitarian and authoritarian political regimes of the 20th century which brought the sacrifice of individual freedom. For Berlin, in contrast to Platonic realism of enlightenment rationalism in which there is a substantial belief in reason&rsquo / s capacity for giving us the knowledge of the supreme good, the nominalist foundations of negative freedom can provide us a secure grounding in the justification of the rights over the goods. By declaring the inviolable rights and relying on the principle of neutrality, negative freedom eliminates the risk of political voluntarism stemming from enlightenment rationalism or scientism. Since the 1980s, in Turkey, political and social oppositions to Rousseauian enlightenment of the Turkish state have deployed the epistemic and political tools of negative freedom. This appeal has aimed to open a legitimate space for the language of freedom as non-intervention under which each individual chooses his personal values without the fear of state intervention. In contrast to the interventionist claims of state, negative freedom, it has been believed that, has provided a secure grounding for the rights of individuals. Besides, the meta-ethical thesis of the incommensurability of human goods has also been employed for delegitimizing the substantial belief in the monism of the republican regime which relied on the assumption presenting the republican way of life as the supreme good. This missionary zeal for the re-construction of the republic on the premises of negative freedom has not, however, gone unchallenged. Against such identification of democracy with free-market and value pluralism, the republican front defends the restoration of the foundational ideals of the republic by returning to the substantial understanding of national sovereignty under the formulation of &lsquo / militant democracy&rsquo / . In this study, even though I agree with the nominalist epistemology of negative freedom which manifests a skeptic and agnostic attitude toward the power of reason and the insistence of negative freedom on the necessity of the priority of right, I have demonstrated the reasons behind the failure of negative freedom in justifying the priority of the right over the goods. Actually, my analysis has already displayed that concerning the radical consequences of the thesis of incommensurability, it is doubtful whether negative freedom can provide political conditions even for the cause of peace without the presence of absolute sovereign as suggested in Hobbes&rsquo / s political theory. At this point, I have argued that we should take into consideration the achievements of the ideal of autonomy in grounding the priority of the right over the good. Contrary to Berlin&rsquo / s distorted representation of autonomy, I believe that the critical rationalism of autonomy and its understanding of law will protect us not only from the metaphysics of enlightenment rationalism and scientism, but also from the metaphysics of historicism envisaged by Berlin&rsquo / s version of negative freedom.