This thesis examines the origin and consequences of the French Republican calendar in relation to eighteenth-century temporality. It assesses the extent of the calendar's use, examines the cultural and political meanings that it assumed, and argues that the temporal order of society can be equally as important as its spatial organisation. It suggests that calendars are not purely neutral measures of time, but are cultural, social and political texts that can express the central beliefs of a society. As the history of the Republican calendar shows, such beliefs could be highly contestable. Unsurprisingly, the demands of a ten-day week, new nomenclature, and the calendar's association with the Terror did not lend the new style of time reckoning much popularity, except amongst confirmed Jacobins. Yet, successive regimes, in particular the post-Fructidor Directory, did attempt to ensure conformity to the new calendar. In many parts of France the calendar became a site of cultural, political and, indeed, physical conflict as local communities and officials fought over observance of the new Republican day of rest, the décadi. The speed of political events and the dramatic changes in French society, coupled with intellectual trends from before the Revolution also led to new questions about the nature of time and history defined more broadly. Although the timing of society was becoming more controlled and more precise during this period, older and often more flexible time practices still remained. Opposition to the calendar and the new temporalities was not just a consequence of political or religious sentiment, but represented communal and individual attachment to older habits. Finally, it is argued that the Revolution, the calendar, and pre-existing cultural changes helped to create a modern understanding of time, and had important consequences for the imagining of the nation.

Burke¡¦s Reflections on the Revolution in France opposes the principles of rights of man that ferment the French Revolution. Burke values the doctrines of tradition and wants to maintain the status quo, while the radical writers petition for political and social reform. The confrontation between Burke and other radical writers embodies the conflicting viewpoints of the eighteenth century. One is the idea of natural law of which Burke is the eloquent spokesman. The other is the theory of natural rights that is established to refute conservative values of the divine natural laws, in terms of the reverence of tradition, religion, order and property. The theory of natural rights is to reply to the theory of natural hierarchy and an answer to the contractual submission to absolute authority. In this thesis, I wamt to follow the dispute between Edmund Burke and the advocates of the rights of man who see in Burke the perfect formulation of the doctrines as inequality, injustice and persecution. This thesis falls into four parts. In Chapter One of this thesis, I attempt to portray the historical and social background of the eighteenth century British society from which the dispute between the conservatives and the radicals emerged and into which they interconnected with the historical and social context. In Chapter Two, I argue against Burke¡¦s ideas of natural law in the Reflections on the Revolution in France and regard Burke¡¦s insistence of preserving the traditional doctrines as the limitation of human progress and innovation by following the disputes of the radical writers. In Chapter Three, I discuss how the authority uses political imposture to make people obedient and servile in William Godwin¡¦s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and attempt to explore how Caleb Williams has tried to unfetter the minds of people who had been deeply manipulated by despotic authority. In Chapter Four I attempt to explore Rousseau¡¦s ideas of natural state and natural man embody in Robert Bage¡¦s Hermsprong. I end my thesis with a conclusion.

Cette thèse étudie un corpus de romans anglais, encore peu étudiés en France et jamais étudiés collectivement, publiés entre 1782 et 1805 par des écrivains et des écrivaines se rattachant par leurs idées et, pour certains, leur militantisme actif, au mouvement radical qui se développe en Angleterre dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, s’amplifie et s’organise sous l’impulsion de la Révolution française, puis, sévèrement réprimé par le gouvernement de William Pitt, s’effondre à la fin de la décennie. Cette séquence historique laisse des traces profondes dans l’œuvre des romanciers radicaux, dont beaucoup, comme William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft et John Thelwall, sont philosophes ou polémistes avant d’être romanciers et prennent la plume pour défendre les droits de l’homme (et de la femme) dans le débat anglais sur la Révolution française qui oppose Edmund Burke à Thomas Paine. En croisant l’histoire des idées politiques, l’histoire sociale et culturelle du mouvement radical, l’histoire du livre et la narratologie classique, ce travail s’efforce de mettre en lumière la façon dont les romans encodent une certaine idéologie politique dans leurs formes – du discours des locuteurs au format de publication des romans, en passant par leurs narrateurs, leurs intrigues, leurs personnages, leur style et leurs silences signifiants. Un tel examen fait ressortir, plutôt qu’une idéologie radicale unifiée, une tension récurrente entre deux versions, libérale et jacobine, bourgeoise et plébéienne, du radicalisme, dont l’articulation conflictuelle revêt différentes formes d’un auteur à l’autre et d’un terme à l’autre de la période étudiée, à mesure que la réaction conservatrice enterre les espoirs radicaux de réformes. / This dissertation examines a corpus of English novels which have been little studied in France as yet and never as a whole. The novels were published between 1782 and 1805 by a group of writers who, by their ideas and in some cases active political commitment, belong to the radical movement which developed in England in the second half of the eighteenth century, gained impetus and structure in the wake of the French Revolution, and collapsed at the end of the decade when faced with repression from the government of William Pitt. Radical novelists, many of whom, like William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and John Thelwall, were philosophers and pamphleteers before they took to novel-writing, flew to the defence of the rights of man (and of the rights of woman) in the revolution controversy which pitted Thomas Paine against Edmund Burke – and their work bears the mark of the rise and demise of the radical movement. Combining intellectual history with classical narratology, book history, and the social and cultural history of radicalism, this dissertation seeks to highlight the way in which political ideology is built into the very forms of the novels – in the characters’ speech and the characters themselves, in the novels’ plot and narration type, in their style and publishing format, as well as in their meaningful silences. Such a study brings to light, rather than a coherent radical ideology, a recurring tension between two versions of radicalism, liberal and jacobin, bourgeois and plebeian, whose partly conflicting conjunction assumes different shapes from one novelist to the other and between the early 1780s and late 1790s, as radical hopes of reform sink under the conservative backlash.

In the midst of Frances revolution, and the shockwaves it sent all over Europe and further, another revolutionary change took place. It was the threat of literature. This paper studies certain political actor’s solutions to the challenges that faced but also shaped politics and the technologies themselves, such as reading, in England during the 1790’s. For many the spreading of literature was an end in itself. It held the enlightenment promise of a world runned by reason. But it was also a means. The intellectuals typically associated with the revolution in France, and the welcoming of it in England, – say Voltaire and Thomas Paine – were all well versed in the workings of literature. Pitted against the revolutionaries we usually find political actors such as Edmund Burke. This paper argues for more nuanced and historical understanding of the conflict, one that doesn’t give literature any inherent properties, as an a priori radical tool. We need to understand these technologies as something that there could be a different kind of solution to than repression, that Burke and his fellow hostiles to the revolution rather shaped these technologies in a mould that would fit their political cast. In this way there was, besides the ideological disputes, a struggle for the nature of literature. This took shape through a renewed interest in educating the people in institutions such as Sunday schools, and by press efforts like the magazine Anti-Jacobin; or, the weekly examiner, which form the basis of the study. This paper argues that they changed the rules of literature. Therefore it is not the immediate introduction of a technology or media that necessarily is revolutionary – not Gutenberg, nor Arpanet – but when it is spread to the people and when certain protocols for the media is shaped, that is, when they are assigned a function. This paper is a study of the shaping of literatures protocols and with that the anti-Jacobins themselves.

Abstract This dissertation consists of four articles on irrationality measures. In the first paper we derive explicit irrationality measures by using the simple continued fraction expansions in a completely new way. In the second and third articles we use Padé approximations to construct irrationality measures. In the second paper we obtain an explicit irrationality measure for the values of q-exponential series, for which the earlier corresponding results are not as explicit. Furthermore, we construct a restricted irrationality measure for the values of q-exponential series, which is an improvement on the earlier results in the restricted case. In the third article we derive the best possible asymptotic restricted irrationality exponent for the values of Jacobi's triple product. In the last paper we consider Cantor series. We generalize the earlier results by deriving Sondow's irrationality measure for some Cantor series. / Tiivistelmä Tämä väitöskirja koostuu neljästä artikkelista, jotka kaikki käsittelevät irrationaalisuusmittoja. Ensimmäisessä artikkelissa irrationaalisuusmittoja johdetaan uudella tavalla irrationaalilukujen yksinkertaisista ketjumurtolukuesityksistä. Toisessa ja kolmannessa artikkelissa irrationaalisuusmitat konstruoidaan Padé-approksimaatioiden avulla. Toisessa artikkelissa saadaan eksplisiittinen irrationaalisuusmitta q-eksponenttisarjan arvoille, joiden vastaavat aikaisemmat irrationaalisuusmitat eivät ole näin eksplisiittisiä. Lisäksi samassa artikkelissa konstruoidaan q-eksponenttisarjan arvoille rajoitettu eksplisiittinen irrationaalisuusmitta, mikä parantaa aikaisempia tuloksia rajoitetussa tapauksessa. Kolmannessa artikkelissa johdetaan paras mahdollinen asymptoottinen irrationaalisuuseksponentti Jacobin kolmitulon arvoille. Viimeisessä artikkelissa käsitellään Cantorin sarjoja. Siinä yleistetään aikaisempia tuloksia johtamalla Sondowin irrationaalisuusmitta tietylle joukolle Cantorin sarjoja.

Abstract Localization and tracking of multiple targets is becoming an essential feature of modern communication services and systems. Although necessary in many contexts, such as surveillance and monitoring applications, low-complexity and reliable solutions capable of coping with different degrees of information are not yet available. This thesis deals with different problems that are encountered in localization and tracking applications and aims to establish a broad understanding of multitarget systems ranging from complete active to incomplete passive solutions in dynamic scenarios. Thereby we start by investigating a fully algebraic framework which is proved to be advantageous in dynamic contexts characterized by no a-priori knowledge. Subsequently we extend the approach to improve its robustness versus corrupted observations. Finally we focus on a Bayesian formulation of the passive multitarget tracking (MTT) problem. The Thesis is based on three parts. The first part focuses on a low complexity mathematical representation of the active problem (i.e manifold-based solution). In particular, the spectrum of the matrices used to represent target locations within an algebraic, multidimensional scaling (MDS) based, solution is characterized statistically. In so doing we propose a novel Jacobi-based eigenspace tracking algorithms for Gramian matrices which is shown to be particularly convenient in a multidimensional scaling formulation of the multitarget tracking problem. The second part deals with incomplete-active multitarget scenarios as well as eventual disturbances on the ranging measurements such as bias due to non-line-of-sight conditions. In particular the aforementioned algebraic solution is extended to cope with heterogeneous information and to incorporate eventual knowledge on the confidence of the measurement information. To do so we solve the classical multidimensional scaling (C-MDS) over a novel kernel matrix and show how the intrinsic nature of this formulation allows to deal with heterogeneous information, specifically angle and distance measurements. Finally, the third part focuses on the random finite sets formulation of Bayesian multisensor MTT problem for passive scenarios. In this area a new gating strategy is proposed to lower the computational complexity of the algorithms without compromising their performance. / Tiivistelmä Useiden kohteiden yhtäaikaisesta paikannuksesta ja seurannasta on tulossa olennainen osa nykyaikaisia viestinnän palveluita ja järjestelmiä. Huolimatta siitä, että yhtäaikainen paikannus on erittäin tarpeellinen osa monissa yhteyksissä, kuten valvonnan ja kontrolloinnin sovelluksissa, siihen ei ole olemassa kompleksisuudeltaan alhaista ratkaisua, joka ottaisi huomioon kaiken saatavilla olevan informaation. Väitöskirja käsittelee useiden kohteiden paikannukseen ja seurantaan liittyviä ongelmia, ja se keskittyy antamaan laajan ymmärryksen aktiivisista täydellisistä menetelmistä passiivisiin epätäydellisiin menetelmiin dynaamisissa ympäristöissä. Saavuttaakseen tavoitteen väitöskirjassa esitetään algebrallinen kehys, jonka todistetaan olevan edistyksellinen dynaamisissa ympäristöissä, joissa ei ole ennakkoinformaatiota saatavilla. Seuraavaksi väitöskirja laajentaa esitettyä lähestymistapaa parantamalla sen vakautta vääriä havaintoja vastaan. Lopuksi esitetään bayesialainen formulointi passiiviselle usean kohteen seuranta -ongelmalle (MTT). Väitöskirja on jaettu kolmeen on osaan. Ensimmäinen osa käsittelee aktiivisen ongelman kuvaamista matemaattisesti säilyttäen alhaisen kompleksisuuden. Erityisesti tässä osassa karakterisoidaan tilastollisesti matriisien spektrin käyttäminen kohteiden paikan esittämiseen moniulotteiseen skaalaukseen (MDS) pohjautuvassa menetelmässä. Saavuttaakseen tämän väitöskirja esittää Jacobin ominaisavaruuksiin perustuvan seuranta-algoritmin Gramian matriiseille, joiden osoitetaan olevan erityisen soveltuvia usean kohteen seuraamisongelman kuvaamiseen MDS-menetelmän avulla. Toinen osa käsittelee epätäydellistä aktiivista usean kohteen skenaariota, kuten myös mittausten lopullisia häiriötä, esim. ei-näköyhteyskanavasta johtuvaa harhaa. Edellä mainittu algebrallinen ratkaisu on laajennettu ottamaan huomioon heterogeeninen informaatio sekä tieto mittausdatan luotettavuudesta. Lisäksi tässä osassa esitetään ratkaisu klassiseen moniulotteiseen skaalausongelmaan (C-MDS) esittelemällä uudenlainen ydinmatriisi ja osoitetaan, kuinka tämä mahdollistaa heterogeenisen informaation, tässä tapauksessa kulma-ja etäisyysmittauksien, huomioon ottamisen. Viimeisessä osassa käsitellään äärellisten satunnaisten joukkojen soveltuvuutta bayesialaisen MTT-ongelman ratkaisuun passiivisissa skenaarioissa. Väitöskirja esittää uuden porttistrategian algoritmien kompleksisuuksien pienentämiseksi säilyttäen kuitenkin samalla niiden suorituskyvyn.

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One of the most defining moments in the histories of British satire and the public sphere took place in the late 1790s in an abandoned house in Piccadilly. Here George Canning and several fellow conservatives began writing and circulating their weekly newspaper the Anti-Jacobin. Although the periodical has been critically neglected, it is a valuable model for exploring how literary (partisan) politicians attempted to form a rational and critical public sphere through their satiric poetry. Founded by George Canning and edited by William Gifford, the Anti-Jacobin seems to reflect a reactionary conservative's ideology and has been summarily dismissed because of this one-sided nature. In this essay, I suggest a more nuanced reading of both Canning's biography and his Anti-Jacobin poetry that will give a fuller and more accurate version of Canning, one that illustrates a moderate reformer who is concerned with centralizing the extremism of the 1790s.