This thesis considers the representation of manly identity in the works of George MacDonald, and the way in which that identity is formed in relation to shifting power networks and contemporary social discourses. I argue that the environment of technological and societal change experienced in the mid-Victorian era (in the wake of industrialisation, urbanisation, changes in suffrage and war) led to a cultural need to re-align social, political, physical and economic power within a framework of male moral strength. Taking his lead from Thomas Carlyle and German transcendentalism, MacDonald promoted a paternalist ‗ideal‘ of manliness that articulated a synthesis of moral and physical power, yet which also served to promote a paradigm of domestic authority within diverse areas of male interaction. The dual purposes of this ideal were the defence of national identity (the purview of what I term the ‗Soldier body‘), and the enforcement of a paternalist authority hierarchy that is swiftly subsumed within a hierarchy of social status. As a result, we see the growth of close inter-relationships between the representation of manly identity and the language of class, heavily influenced by Christian socialist narratives of individual development through social education and quiescence. Moreover, we begin to witness disturbing scenes of violence and control, as aspects of MacDonald‘s culture defy confinement within his model of patriarchal domestic authority.

L’objet de cette thèse concerne les propriétés du groupe symétrique à travers deux problèmes. Le premier consiste à étudier l’action du groupe symétrique sur la fraction (...). En appliquant certaines opérations sur les graphes et les cartes, nous donnons des algorithmes et des formules combinatoires pour déterminer complètement la fraction réduite suivante : (...). L’auteur C. Greene a introduit cette fraction rationnelle pour généraliser des identités liées a la règle de Murnaghan-Nakayama. Nous utilisons (...) pour établir un nouvel algorithme de décomposition en éléments simples à l’aide des graphes. Dans la seconde partie, nous cherchons a développer les puissances paires du Vandermonde au moyen de fonctions symétriques. En particulier, nous proposons une écriture hyperdéterminantale des coefficients du développement des puissances paires du Vandermonde dans la base des fonctions de Schur. Nous obtenons plusieurs identités reliant les puissances paires du Vandermonde et les polynômes de Jack. Puis nous introduisons une q-déformation des puissances paires du Vandermonde que nous exprimons grâce aux polynômes de Macdonald / The main purpose of this document is the symmetric group. In particular, we study the two following problems. First, the symmetric group acts naturally on the rational function (…), by permuting the variables. With the help of some operations on the graphs, we give algorithms and combinatorial formulas allowing us to compute the reduced fraction (…). The author C. Greene has introduced these rational functions in the aim to generalize some identities related to the Murnaghan-Nakayama rules. We use these properties to give an original algorithm to perform partial decompositions of fractions with the help of graphs. In the second problem, we study the expansion of the even powers of the Vandermonde in several basis of symmetric functions. In this part, we give identities between symmetric functions and hyperdeterminants and we use them to obtain an hyperdeterminental expression of the coefficients in Schur’s basis. We investigate also the relation between the even powers of the Vandermonde and Jack’s functions. Finally, we introduce a q-deformation of the even powers of the Vandermonde and we relate it to some specialisations of Macdonald’s polynomials

Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka de föremål som säljs i museibutikerna i anknytning till två temporära konstutställningar och vilken roll dessa spelar för upplevelsen av utställningarna. De studerade utställningarna är Gilbert & George The Great Exhibition på Moderna Museet i Stockholm och Dansk guldålder på Nationalmuseum i Stockholm. Undersökningen utgår från ett forskningsläge där museibutikens pedagogiska eller på andra sätt inkluderande potential framhålls. Materialet består av utställningarna och deras texter, butikerna och deras displayer och föremålen som presenteras i dem. Utifrån ett besökarperspektiv jämförs föremålen i förhållande till Sharon Macdonalds kategorier mimetiska och förflyttade reproduktioner, insignier och associationer. Butiksdisplayernas samlade uttryck analyseras med hjälp av Roland Barthes semiotiska begrepp syntagm och syntax. Resultaten diskuteras sedan i förhållande till Carol Duncans definitioner av det estetiska respektive det bildande konstmuseet. Undersökningen visar att de studerade museibutikernas displayer anknyter till utställningarna genom att erbjuda en fördjupning genom associationer och temabaserade föremål men även en repetition av verken. Displayerna uttrycker också teman som på olika sätt avviker från eller vinklar utställningarnas verk och texter. Studien visar även hur museibutikerna riktar sig till den publik museet har och presenterar föremålen utifrån den målgruppen genom att relatera till samtida fenomen och trender. Museibutikernas displayer diskuteras som förlängningar av museernas presentation av konsten i utställningarna i förhållande till definitionerna av ett estetiskt och ett bildande konstmuseum.

The thesis focuses on the comparative analysis of Tolkien's novel The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (1937) and two works which significantly influenced him: George MacDonald's Princess and the Goblin (1872) and Edith Nesbit's Enchanted Castle (1907). The first part of the thesis chronologically describes the development of English children's fantasy literature. The above-mentioned authors are characterized from the perspective of their life and work. The second and the main part focuses on the comparison of the discussed works, especially on the comparison of fantastic elements such as fairy-tale characters, a journey to the unknown, a fight against evil, magical objects and magic space (the castle, the forest, the abandoned landscape). This interpretation is based on Tolkien's concept of fairy tales and fantasy and Propp's analysis of fairy tales.

Early nineteenth-century Eurocentric perceptions of natural history led to the flora and fauna of Australia being thought of as deficient and inferior compared with those of other lands. By the 1820s, Australia had become known as ???the land of contrarieties???. This, and Eurocentric attitudes to nature in general, influenced the expectations and perceptions of immigrants throughout the century. Yet at the same time there was developing an aesthetic appreciation of the natural history of Australia. This thesis examines the tension between these two perceptions in the popular natural history writing of the nineteenth century, mainly through the writing of five authors ??? George Bennett (1804-1893), Louisa Anne Meredith (1812-1895), Samuel Hannaford (1937-1874), Horace Wheelwright (1815-1865) and Donald Macdonald (1859?-1932). George Bennett was a scientist, who saw Australian plants and animals more as scientific specimens than objects of beauty. Louisa Meredith perceived them in the familiar language of English romantic poetry. Samuel Hannaford used another language, that of popular British natural history writers of the mid-nineteenth century. To Horace Wheelwright, Australian animals were equally valuable to the sportsman???s gun as to the naturalist???s pen. Donald Macdonald was the only one of these major writers to have been born in Australia. Although proud of his British heritage, he rejoiced in the beauty of his native land. His writing demonstrates his joy, and his novel attitude to Australian natural history continued and developed in the present century.

We establish a strong connection between buildings and Hecke algebras through the study of two algebras of averaging operators on buildings. To each locally finite regular building we associate a natural algebra B of chamber set averaging operators, and when the building is affine we also define an algebra A of vertex set averaging operators. In the affine case, it is shown how the building gives rise to a combinatorial and geometric description of the Macdonald spherical functions, and of the centers of affine Hecke algebras. The algebra homomorphisms from A into the complex numbers are studied, and some associated spherical harmonic analysis is conducted. This generalises known results concerning spherical functions on groups of p-adic type. As an application of this spherical harmonic analysis we prove a local limit theorem for radial random walks on affine buildings.

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1995. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-93).

Le quotient d'un espace vectoriel de dimension finie par l'action d'un sous-groupe fini d'automorphismes est une variété en général singulière. Sous bonnes hypothèses, la correspondance de McKay relie la géométrie de bonnes résolutions des singularités aux représentations du groupe. Pour le schéma de Hilbert de points sur le plan affine, nous étudions comment les différentes correspondances (McKay, McKay duale et McKay multiplicative) sont reliées les unes aux autres. A cette fin, nous calculons des formules combinatoires pour les fibrés vectoriels usuels sur le schéma de Hilbert de points sur le plan affine. Parallèlement à ces questions, nous étudions le comportement multiplicatif du théorème de Bridgeland, King \& Reid construisant la correspondance de McKay pour le schéma de Hilbert de points sur le plan affine. Dans une dernière partie, nous calculons les classes de Chern du fibré tangent au schéma de Hilbert de points sur le plan affine.

Thèse de doctorat : Etudes anglaises et nord-américaines : Rennes 2 : 2007. / Bibliogr. p. 467-478. Index des noms propres.

This dissertation examines George MacDonald's preoccupation with his literary predecessor Percy Shelley. While eminently Victorian in many ways, MacDonald was equally a late Romantic, who was inspired by the Romantic poets and positioned himself as the heir to their radical tradition. While he channeled their visionary ardor, he also made it his duty to correct what he saw as their flaws. I read MacDonald through the figure of Shelley, with whom MacDonald seems to have personally identified, but to whose atheism MacDonald, a devout believer, objected. MacDonald's fascination with Shelley works its way into his fiction, which mythologizes literary history, offering fables about the transmission of the literary spirit down through the generations. Throughout his work, MacDonald resurrects Shelley in various guises, idealizing and reshaping Shelley into an image that is startlingly like MacDonald himself. This project contributes to MacDonald scholarship by offering a new approach to his work. It positions MacDonald, who is often portrayed as an ahistorical myth-maker, in an explicitly historical light, revealing him as a Victorian mythographer who was deeply invested in questions of literary criticism and historical succession. / Chapter 1 introduces MacDonald's concern with literary genealogy, and discusses how his work as a literary critic and historian idealizes Shefey. Chapter 2 examines how MacDonald's Phantastes portrays literary history as romantic quest, featuring Shelley as a heroic but fallen knight, and opening questions about literary fatherhood. Chapter 3 interprets the gothic tale "The Cruel Painter" as a myth about the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, in which MacDonald rewrites the story of Shelley's involvement with Mary Godwin and her father William Godwin. Chapter 4 considers Sir Gibbie and Donal Grant, works in which MacDonald explicitly critiques Shelley, and implicitly positions himself as the savior of the English literary tradition. Chapter 5 investigates MacDonald's later works, The Flight of the Shadow and Lilith, in which Shelley---and evil itself---become more complex entities. Throughout the dissertation, particular attention is given to the issue of repeating history vs. redeeming history, a tension that is reflected in MacDonald's use of vampire imagery to portray the unredeemed past.