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The few studies of Mormon home literature that have been published to date dismiss it as inferior artistry, an embarrassing if necessary step in the progression towards true Mormon literature. These studies are inadequate, however, because they divorce the texts from their context, holding them up to standards that did not exist for their original audience. Jane Tompkins' theory of texts as cultural work provides a more satisfactory way of looking at these narratives. Home literature is thoroughly enmeshed in the cultural discourse of its day. Beneath the surface, these didactic stories about young Mormons finding love with their foreordained mates performed important cultural work by helping Mormons to think about their personal and collective identities, by co-opting mainstream fictional forms and giving them safe expression, and by reconceptualizing marriage in the wake of polygamy's demise. The stories of Susa Young Gates illustrate these functions well. Gates was a prominent youth leader and prolific home author during the 1890s. Her stories extend and enact Mormon cultural discourse of the time and point up the connections between Mormon fiction and mainstream models. The last decade of the nineteenth century marked the beginning of Mormonism's transition from an isolated separatist movement to a thoroughly assimilated and modem mainstream religion. As Mormons shifted away from the defining practices of polygamy, communal economics, and ecclesiastical dominance of politics, they sought for new ways to define themselves that would retain their sense of distinctness from a world they still viewed as sinful. The result was new emphasis on formerly dormant or relatively unemphasized practices such as the Word of Wisdom and the law of tithing. This emphasis shows up in the story "Donald's Boy" which repeatedly focuses on the necessity for Mormon youth to shun the corruptions of the world. "Seven Times," which ran in the 1893-94 volume of the Young Woman's Journal, shows Gates's debt to mainstream fiction in its extensive adoption of popular conventions, reworking such devices as the heroine's development, the divine child, the lecherous villain, and the sick bed ordeal into a Mormon conversion narrative. As in popular American fiction, the role of the narrator is central to the didactic intentions of the story. The narrator becomes the dominant personality of the text as she both creates and controls the emotion necessary to the formal and ideological demands of the narrative. Gates claimed to consider popular didactic fiction inconsequential, but her own comments and her wholesale use of its conventions suggests that her relationship with these novels was much more complex than she acknowledged. "John Stevens' Courtship" is Gates's most popular and ambitious work. Its setting in the early years of Mormon settlement in Utah at the time of the first large-scale influx of "outsiders" into Mormon society constructs an idealized view of early Mormon culture that contrasts with the diminished faithfulness Gates perceived in her day. Gates's artistic ambitions show up most clearly in her intense descriptions of her characters. These character descriptions draw on popular conventions to inscribe idealized gender constructs that interacted with Mormon ideology to remain in force in Mormon society long after they had faded elsewhere. Finally, Gates's emphasis on the idea of a foreordained mate replaces polygamy as the essential doctrine of marriage, an important shift in post-Manifesto Mormondom.

Martin Luther supported the development of the early German educational system on the basis of both religious and social ideals. His impact endured in the emphasis on obedience and duty to the state evident in the north German educational system throughout the early modern period and the nineteenth century. Luther taught that the state was a gift from God and that service to the state was a personal vocation. This thesis explores the extent to which a select group of nineteenth century German philosophers and historians reflect Luther's teachings. Chapters II and III provide historiography on this topic, survey Luther's view of the state and education, and demonstrate the adherence of nineteenth century German intellectuals to these goals. Chapters IV through VII examine the works respectively of Johann Gottfried Herder, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Leopold von Ranke, and Wilhelm Dilthey, with focus on the interest each had in the reformer's work for its religious, and social content. The common themes found in these authors' works were: the analysis of the membership of the individual in the group, the stress on the uniqueness of individual persons and cultures, the belief that familial authority, as established in the Fourth Commandment, provided the basis for state authority, the view that the state was a necessary and benevolent institution, and, finally, the rejection of revolution as a means of instigating social change. This work explains the relationship between Luther's view of the state and its interpretation by later German scholars, providing specific examples of the way in which Herder, Hegel, Ranke, and Dilthey incorporated in their writings the reformer's theory of the state. It also argues for the continued importance of Luther to later German intellectuals in the area of social and political theory.

Using the theoretical idea of ‘writing between’ to describe the condition of the travelling subject, this study attempts to chart some of the literary, intellectual and cultural connections that exist(ed) between black South African intellectuals and writers, and the experiences of their African- American counterparts in their common movements towards civil liberty, enfranchisement and valorised consciousness. The years 1913-1936 saw important historical events taking place in the United States, South Africa and the world – and their effects on the peoples of the African diaspora were signficant. Such events elicited unified black diasporic responses to colonial hegemony. Using theories of transatlantic/transnational cultural negotiation as a starting point, conceptualisations that map out, and give context to, the connections between transcontinental black experiences of slavery and subjugation, this study seeks to re-envisage such black South African and African-American intellectual discourses through reading them anew. These texts have been re-covered and re-situated, are both published and unpublished, and engage the notion of travel and the instability of transatlantic voyaging in the liminal state of ‘writing between’. With my particular regional focus, I explore the cultural and intellectual politics of these diasporic interrelations in the form of case studies of texts from several genres, including fiction and autobiography. They are: the travel writings of Xhosa intellectual, DDT Jabavu, with a focus on his 1913 journey to the United States; an analysis of Ethelreda Lewis’s novel, Wild Deer (1933), which imagines the visit of an African-American musician, Paul Robeson-like figure to South Africa; and Eslanda Goode Robeson’s representation of her African Journey (1945) to the country in 1936, and the traveller’s gaze as expressed through the ethnographic imagination, or the anthropological ‘eye’ in the text. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2008.

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Prenant appui sur une historicisation critique des postulats méthodologiques et idéologiques au fondement des catégories d’humanisme civique et de républicanisme, la thèse entend renoncer à une lecture uniquement théorique de l’œuvre des humanistes florentins et restituer aux textes leur statut d’énoncés historiques. L’enjeu est de redessiner les lignes portantes d’une tradition civile et républicaine propre à la réalité florentine dont les penseurs des guerres d’Italie (Savonarole, Guichardin, Machiavel) seront les dépositaires critiques. Un travail d’interprétation de la correspondance familière de Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406) constitue le socle de la recherche et fait apparaître la dimension juridique de la pensée du chancelier, et ce à double titre : d’une part elle révèle l’omniprésence d’un lexique juridique qui fournit l’essentiel de l’arsenal interprétatif de l’analyse politique, et d’autre part, elle définit un « office d’exhortation » qui constitue la théorie politique de Salutati non pas simplement comme une rhétorique propagandiste mais aussi comme un discours réformateur. L’apport de Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444) est ainsi réévalué dans le sillage de l’humanisme politique de Salutati, et se distingue de ce dernier surtout par la valeur nouvelle accordée à l’histoire dans l’élaboration d’une langue et d’une science de la vie civile. / Starting from a critical historicization of the methodological and ideological foundations of categories such as civic humanism and republicanism, this thesis investigates the works of the Florentine humanists not only from the point of view of political theory but also in relation to their historical significance. The aim is to redefine the structural lines of a republican tradition characteristic of Florentine history, a tradition which the thinkers of the Italian Wars (Savonarola, Guicciardini, Machiavelli) inherited and criticized. An extensive reading of the private letters by Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406) constitutes the central part of this work and reveals the juridical character of the Chancellor’s thought : on the one hand, the juridical vocabulary is omnipresent in the letters and provides the core of the hermeneutic tools necessary to political analysis ; on the other hand, it helps defining an « office of exhortation » which discloses Salutati’s urge for reform rather than his role of propagandist. New light is then shed on Leonardo Bruni’s contribution to political thought as Bruni is seen following the path of Salutati’s political humanism. Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444), in comparison with his master, stresses the superiority of history, but finds himself equally involved in the formulation of a language and a science of political life.

"In writing the organized report of the findings an effort will be made, first, to present a historical sketch of the Review with background information explaining some of its whys and wherefores; secondly to introduce its editors, their work and accomplishment; and thirdly, to call the attention of the reader to the scope, magnitude, and performance of the Southern Review itself. In the course of examination of the journal some exercises in patience were performed; i. e., a listing of all contributors, the number of the contributions that each made and the volumes in which these contributions appeared; and a chart showing the contents of each volume; i. e., the number of the different types of essays included, and the number of poems, short stories, and book reviews published. These, as of possible interest to someone other than this writer, will appear in Appendix I and Table I, respectively"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "August, 1952." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Robert G. Clapp, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 47-49).

The dissertation firstly looks at how the Arabic essay and short story developed in Egypt since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then a discussion follows on the life and contribution of the Egyptian author, Mustafā Lutfī al-Manfalūtī, as representative of this literary evolution. The general influences on Egyptian literature are discussed, and the general development of Arabic prose from 1850 onwards is then detailed, including the efforts to save Arabic literature from stagnation and degeneration. Following this, the focus is on the origins of the essay and short story. This leads to dealing with the growth and advancement of the essay and short story, together with the revival of the Arabic heritage and how the Arabic novel came into being. Then Mustafā Lutfī al-Manfalūtīs biography, environmental circumstances and personalities that influenced his writings are focused on. Afterwards, the core discussion is Al-Manfalūtīs seven literary works, and his ideas and opinions as reflected in his writings. In conclusion, the relevance of his writings and an appraisal of his literary contributions are detailed. / Religious Studies & Arabic / M.A. (Arabic)

The subject matter of this thesis is manuscript and scribal culture in the age of print. Its first part explores the flourishing scholarship of post-medieval scribal culture in Europe and beyond over the past 25-30 years, as well as recent trends and turns in the historiography of printing and of literacy. These studies make a strong case for a radical revision of how these fundamental cultural phenomena should be viewed. As a part of the so-called cultural turn and postmodernist revisionism of the 1980s and 1990s, the new trend has been to reject the dichotomies of manuscript versus print and of literacy versus illiteracy in favour of more ambiguous and complex images where multiple media and modes of transmission and reception coexist and interact with each other. The second part of the thesis deals with literary culture in nineteenth-century Iceland: both the general framework of the production, dissemination and consumption of texts, and the individual case of the farmer, fisherman and scribe Sighvatur Grímsson (1840-1930) and his cultural surroundings. Focussing on Sighvatur’s life between 1840 and 1873, the thesis presents an argument about the function of the scribal medium within a poor, rural, and de-institutionalized society. Central to the theoretical framework is a microhistorical approach and the juxtaposition of both narrow and wide scope, zooming from one individual protagonist out to his local surroundings and communities and further out to Icelandic scribal and literary culture as a whole. The scope of the thesis can be described in terms of four concentric circles: the individual, his intimate community, Icelandic society, and the wider European and global context during the ‘post-Gutenbergian era’.

This dissertation examines Elizabeth Robinson Montagu's relationships with three men: her husband, Edward Montagu; George Lyttelton, first baron Lyttelton; and William Pulteney, earl of Bath to show how these relationships were structured and how Elizabeth Montagu negotiated them in order to forward her own intellectual interests. Montagu's relationship with her husband Edward and her friendships with Lord Lyttelton and Lord Bath supplied her with important outlets for intellectual and political expression. Scholarly work on Montagu's friendships with other intellectual women has demonstrated how Montagu drew on the support of female friends in her literary ambitions, but at the same time, it has obscured her equally important male relationships. Without discounting the importance of female friendship to Montagu's intellectual life, this study demonstrates that Montagu's relationships with Bath, Lyttleton, and her husband were at least as important to her as those with women, and that her male friendships and relationships offered her entry into the political sphere. Elizabeth Montagu was greatly interested in the political debates of her day and she contributed to the political process in the various ways open to her as an elite woman and female intellectual. Within the context of these male friendships, Montagu had an opportunity to discuss political philosophy as well as practical politics; as a result, she developed her own political positions. It is clear that contemporary gender conventions limited the boundaries of Montagu's intellectual and political concerns and that she felt the need to position her interests and activities in ways that did not appear transgressive in order to follow her own inclinations. Montagu represented her interest in the political realm as an extension of family duty and expression of female tenderness. In this manner, Montagu was able to forward her own opinions without appearing to cross conventional gender boundaries.