The present work examines the literary criticism expressed by Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi in several of her unpublished letters. / The first part outlines the cultural and historical tradition of Venice during the Eighteenth Century. Particular attention is subsequently given to the intellectual role of women, their contribution to the literary salons of the time, and the neoclassical tradition. This first part is essential in that it supplies a valuable context to Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi's writings. / In the second part, I examine Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi's literary criticism of major European authors and works. Through these criticisms she exposes her misvision of the literary world to which she aspired, and reveals that although she was influenced by the subtle preromantic tendencies, she remained faithful to the neoclassical school.

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

One medium has dominated accounts of American art in the years following the Second World War. The period witnessed, in the words of one critic, a 'Triumph of American Painting', with advances in the easel picture far surpassing those in other media. Whilst more recent accounts have nuanced this view, drawing attention to developments in music and sculpture, literary contributions to the new American modernism have gone almost without assessment. Were there advances in literature comparable to those of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, David Smith and John Cage? Drawing extensively on his unpublished writings, After the New Failure of Nerve reveals the poet Charles Olson to have been the keenest literary advocate of the new American avant-garde and one of the most astute observers of its conditions and possibilities. Paying special attention to unpublished notes, lectures, and correspondence, the thesis utilises Olson's early writings in order to examine the momentum given early postwar modernism by a potent contemporary reaction against abstract rationality, a reaction identified at the time as a 'New Failure of Nerve'. Born of recent disillusionment with 'scientific' Marxism and New Deal progressivism, the thesis demonstrates the several ways in which this 'New Failure of Nerve' fuelled vanguard American art from the middle of the Second World War to the end of the decade. It argues that the new critique of abstract rationality - which was also reflected in the contemporary American work of the Frankfurt School - defined the way American artists understood the function of postwar modernism, the posture of the postwar modernist artist, and the status of the postwar modernist artwork. This pivotal moment in the history of modernism was shaped, I contend, by a philosophical critique explored most ambitiously by an American poet.

This thesis offers a new policy history of the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal agency responsible for providing grants to artists and arts organisations in the United States. It focuses in particular on the development of conservative perspectives on federal arts funding from the 1950s to the 1980s, and hence, illuminates the broader evolution of conservative political power, especially its limits. The most familiar narrative holds that the Endowment found itself caught up in the Culture Wars of the late 1980s when Christian right groups objected to certain federal grants, particularly to Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and Robert Mapplethorpe's Self-Portrait with Whip. This thesis, however, uncovers the older origins of conservative opposition to state support for the arts, analyses conservative conceptions of art, and illuminates the limited federal role the right sought to secure in the arts in the post-war period. Numerous studies have analysed the meanings and origins of the Culture Wars, but until now, scholars had not examined conservative approaches to federal arts politics in a historical sense. Historians have generally been too interested in explaining change to the detriment of examining continuity, but this approach under-emphasises the long-term tensions that underlie seemingly sudden political eruptions. This work also offers a deep account of the conservative movement and the arts world, an area that has so far been almost completely ignored by scholars, even though a focus on marginalised players is essential to understanding the limits of conservatism. In a general sense then, this thesis evaluates the range and diversity of the conservative movement and illuminates the overall odyssey of the right in modern America. In so doing, it provides a new insight into the ways we periodise political history and also invites a broader view of how we understand politics itself.

Religion and history became closely related in new ways in the Victorian imagination. This thesis asks why this was so, by focusing on arguments within British Protestant culture over progress and development in the history of Christianity. In an intellectual movement approximately beginning with the 1845 publication of John Henry Newman's 'Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine', and powerfully spreading and developing until the earlier years of the twentieth century, British intellectuals came to treat the history of religion - both as a past and present process, and as a didactic genre - as a vital element of broader attempts to stabilise or reconstruct religious belief and social order. Religious revivalists, determined to use church history as a raw material for the inculcation of exclusive confessional identities and dogmatic theology, were highly successful in pressing it on the attention of early Victorian audiences. But they proved unable to control its meaning. Historians rose to prominence who instead interpreted the history of Christianity as a guide to how religious culture, which many treated as indistinguishable from society as a whole, might eventually supersede denominational and dogmatic divisions. Humanity's spiritual development in time, which numerous British critics assessed with the aid of German Idealist thought, also became an attractive apologetic resource as the epistemological basis of Christian belief came under unprecedented public challenge. A major part of that danger was perceived to come from rival, avowedly secularising interpretations of human social progress. Such accounts - the ancestors of twentieth-century secularisation theory - were vigorously opposed by historians who understood modernity as involving not the decline, but the purification of Christianity. By exploring the ways in which Victorian critics - clerical and lay, religious and secular - approached religious history as a resource for solving the problems of their own age, this thesis offers a new way of understanding the importance of history, claims to knowledge, and the nature and ends of 'liberalism' in the long nineteenth century.

To call something 'inverted' or 'topsy-turvy' in the sixteenth century is, above all, to label it as abnormal, unnatural and going against the natural order of things. The topos of the world upside-down brings to mind a world returned to its initial state of primeval chaos, in which everything is inside-out, topsy-turvy and out of bounds: fish live in trees, children rule over their parents, wives command their husband and rivers flow back to their source. This thesis undertakes a detailed account of the development of the topos of the world upside-down in sixteenth-century French literature and visual culture. By examining different uses of this topos - comic, moralising and polemical - it relates the transformations of the topos to religious, social and political conflicts of the period. To explain the shift of this topos from comic and moralising device to satirical and polemical tool, this thesis argues that troubled times produce troubled texts. In order to demonstrate this hypothesis, two kinds of evidence will be examined: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 present diachronic evidence of the 'polemicisation' of the topos of the world upside-down in literary genres of the period (adages, paradoxes and emblems) and within François Rabelais's body of work; Chapter 3 and 4 provide synchronic evidence of the polemical use of the topos of the world upside-down during the French religious wars in Huguenot and Catholic polemic and in depictions of socio-political turmoil. Charting the variety of uses of the topos of the world upside-down throughout the sixteenth century, this thesis connects the world upside-down and its historical context; and contributes to the scholarship on religious polemic.

The aim of this study is to offer a critical analysis of representations of gender violence and resistance to such violence in selected novels by Zimbabwean women writers. A great deal of scholarship on Zimbabwean women writers focuses on well-known authors such as Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga. Even here, the critical emphasis tends to be on the representation of women’s suffering under patriarchy and their status as victims. Although the exposure of gendered suffering is important, these studies often fail to take into consideration the female characters’ agency and survival strategies, including how they go about rebuilding lives and identities in the aftermath of violence. This thesis argues that the fictional texts of other, lesser known Zimbabwean authors are similarly worthy of critical scrutiny, yielding as they can important insights into female characters’ resistance to gender violence. The current study analyses Zimbabwean women writers’ literary contributions to discourses on gender-based violence and explores how female characters have embraced the concept of agency to recreate their identities and to introduce a new gender ethos into the contexts of lives that are often shaped by severe restrictions and oppression. Violence is a phenomenon that is always shaped by specific cultural, ideological and socio-economic forces. As the study shows, characters’ identities are constituted by the complex intersections of a number of markers of difference, including their gender, race and class. This study thus regards identity as intersectional and takes all these factors into consideration in its analysis of the representations of violence and resistance in the selected texts. The study also aims to determine whether these literary representations offer any solutions to the difficulties of characters affected by or living with violence. The works critiqued are Lillian Masitera’s The Trail (2000), Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope (2006), Virginia Phiri’s Highway Queen (2010) and Violet Masilo’s The African Tea Cosy (2010). / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

This thesis is not a life history of Archie Mafeje. Instead, it is an attempt to grapple with his ideas. This thesis is said to be a ‘biography’ insofar as it is dedicated to a study of one individual and his contribution to knowledge. In trying to understand Mafeje’s ideas and the intellectual and political environment that shaped them, the thesis relies on Lewis R. Gordon’s concept of ‘epistemic possibility’. The thesis comprises four main parts. Part I locates Mafeje and his work within the broader African intellectual and political environment. Part II evaluates his critique of the social sciences. Part III focuses on his work on land and agrarian issues in sub-Saharan Africa. Part IV deals with his work on revolutionary theory and politics. Broadly speaking, this thesis is the first comprehensive engagement with the entire body of Mafeje’s scholarship. Specifically, the unique perspective of this thesis, and therefore its primary contribution to the existing body of knowledge, is that it seeks to overturn the idea that Mafeje was a critic of the discipline of anthropology only. The view that Mafeje was a mere critic of anthropology is in this thesis referred to as the standard view or the conventional view. The thesis argues that Mafeje is best understood as criticising all of the bourgeois social sciences for being Eurocentric and imperialist. This is offered as the alternative view. The thesis argues that the standard view makes a reformist of Mafeje, while the alternative view seeks to present him as the revolutionary scholar that he was. This interpretation lays the foundation for a profounder analysis of Mafeje’s work. In arguing that all the social sciences are Eurocentric and imperialist, he sought to liquidate them and therefore called for ‘non-disciplinarity’. It should be noted that in this regard, the primary focus of this thesis consists in following the unit of his thought and not whether he succeeded or failed in this difficult task. / Sociology / D. Litt. et Phil. (Sociology)

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 and Arabic / M.A. (Arabic)

This study is, by its intention at any rate, an attempt at assembling the scattered fragments of Can Themba’s life to make a composite being out of the various existing phenomena that shaped the contours of his life in both literary and literal senses. Given the disjunctive manner in which Can Themba and his work have been represented thus far, a combination of Historical and Biographical research methods will underpin the approach of this study. The resultant approach is the Historical-Biographical method of research. According to Guerin et al (2005, 22) the Historical-Biographical approach “sees the work chiefly, if not exclusively, as the reflection of author’s life and times or the life and times of the characters in the work.” This research is premised on the conviction that an individual is a constellation of multiple factors that play a pivotal role in the construction of their persona. These factors will be traced from his family background, early schooling, tertiary education, socio-economic conditions as well as his contribution to various newspapers and journals. While so much has been written about Themba and his work, there is no comprehensive biography of Can Themba as a person. Most importantly, the factors that contributed to his making as well as his breaking, or destruction, have not been interrogated in a form of comprehensive academic research. Rightly or wrongly, Themba’s meteoric rise into the South African literary canon is often traced from the moment he won the inaugural Drum Magazine short story competition. Themba became one of the most popular journalists and rose within the ranks of Drum to become the Assistant Editor. However, my research demonstrates that winning the Drum short story competition was the culmination of a literary talent that was developed and had been simmering for a number of years. Themba studied at the University of Fort Hare between 1945 and 1951 alongside the likes of Dennis Brutus, Ntsu Mokhehle, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, and many other prominent individuals. He was a regular contributor to The Fortharian, a university publication that published opinion pieces, poems and short stories. This is a vital component of Themba’s intellectual growth and it remains the least explored aspect of his life. As a result, what has been discursively documented by various scholars, writers and journalists, thus far, is a very parochial representation of Can Themba’s oeuvre. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English Literature)