A presente tese tem como objetivo analisar figurações de Deus nos romances saramaguianos Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia, Levantado do Chão, Memorial do Convento, O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo e Caim. Nos três primeiros, Deus não aparece como personagem, mas pelos comentários críticos, seja do narrador, seja das personagens, pode-se presumir a inexistência de Deus, que nada mais é que uma criação da mente humana. Nos dois últimos, Deus surge como uma personagem de ficção, com características que destoam daquelas que lhe são atribuídas pela tradição religiosa judaico-cristã, sendo dessacralizado, tendo como contrapartida a elevação do homem a único senhor de seu próprio destino. / This thesis aims to analyze God\'s figurations in the Saramago\'s novels Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, Raised from the Ground, Baltasar and Blimunda, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Cain. In the first three, God doesn\'t appear as character, but for the critical comments, belong to the narrator, belong to the characters, it can be supposed the inexistence of God, that it is nothing else that a creation of the human mind. In the last two, God appears as a fiction character, with characteristics that differ from those characteristics that Jewish-Christian religion tradition attribute to him, stopping being a sacred being, having as compensation the elevation of the man to only master of his own destiny.

O presente estudo tem como objetivo analisar a construção do nacionalismo egípcio na obra Trilogia do Cairo, de Nagib Mahfuz, romance em três volumes que recobre o período histórico de maturação do nacionalismo egípcio até o momento que antecedeu o nasserismo, respectivamente de 1917 a 1944. Desse modo, inicialmente são apresentadas as teorias sobre o nacionalismo, no intuito de situar as correntes teóricas que descrevem o desenvolvimento dos conceitos de nação, estado e estado nacional ao longo da história, a saber, a teoria clássica, a modernista, a essencialista e a etno-simbolista. Em seguida, este trabalho apresenta o contexto histórico do nacionalismo egípcio e sua confluência com o nacionalismo árabe. Apesar de a Trilogia do Cairo não abranger o período que se estende do início até a decadência do nacionalismo de expressão nasserista, o presente estudo considera importante mencioná-lo como um todo, no intuito de contextualizar aquilo que o romance já anunciava como premente na sociedade egípcia, a necessidade de autonomia política dentro de um projeto de base nacionalista. A fim de se estabelecer as relações entre autor, obra e instituição, na sequência são discutidos os diversos pareceres críticos do romance, além de sua abordagem enquanto discurso literário e prática discursiva. Desse modo, através da narrativa da inscrição da história no discurso literário, analisado no presente estudo sob o formato de cronotopos, se pretendeu efetivar uma exposição do modo como as personagens fictícias e históricas, que participaram do processo de tentativa de emancipação do Egito, construíram o nacionalismo. / This work intends to analyse the construction of egptian nationalism in Cairo Trilogy, by Nagib Mahfuz, novel composed by tree volumes that recover the period between 1917 and 1944, regarded to the real rising of nacionalism and the previous nasserism age. Initially this study introduces theories about nationalism in order to define the concepts of nation, state and national state, after that, the context of egptian and arabic nationalism is introduced. Although Cairo Trilogy recovers the period before nasserism age, this reference is important to sign the need of political autonomy within an egpitian nationalist project. The following discussion is about linguistics and literary criticism related to the novel, in whish is made the reflexion about literary discourse and discourse practices. Thus, through the narrative inscription of history in literary discourse, analysed in this study by the notion of chronotope, this work intended to make an exhibition about how ficcional and historical characters, who participated the egption freedom process, built the nationalism.

Small organic ‘collector’ ligands play an important role in the recovery of platinum group minerals (PGMs) from the industrial platinum mining process via the froth flotation process, which separates finely ground minerals on the basis of relative hydrophobicity. Design of novel ligands to improve PGM recovery is an ongoing industrial interest. This thesis involves the application of computational chemistry techniques to gain a first-principles understanding of simple mineral-collector ligand interactions, with a view to applying this understanding to the design of novel collector ligands. Experimental techniques are also used, where appropriate, to validate computational modelling in order to gauge the applicability of computational chemistry to this field. Sperrylite (PtAs2), the world’s most common PGM, was used as a model for a typical platinum group sulfide mineral. Pentlandite ((Fe,Ni)9S8) and pyrite (FeS2), two base metal sulfide minerals commonly associated with PGMs, were used as competitor surfaces to gauge collector selectivity. α-quartz (SiO2) was used as to model silicaceous waste material, and pure platinum (Pt) as an internal standard to gauge Pt-collector interactions. Chapter 1 provides an overview of PGM mining with particular focus on the froth flotation process. A brief overview of the computational methods applied in this work is provided in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 presents modelling work based on assessing the various mineral and metal surfaces upon which ligands adsorption is modelled. Stable ‘working surfaces’ are defined by calculating surface energies for various low Miller index cleavages of the bulk unit cells of these solids. Surface stability with respect to slab depth is also assessed. A number of methods, including application of the virtual crystal approximation, a pairwise cluster expansion and explicit site modelling, are used to resolve the issue of positional disorder of the metal sites in pentlandite. This leads to the observation that pentlandite slabs with a higher concentration of Ni atoms at the mineral/vacuum interface are more stable. A global minimum energy bulk unit cell of pentlandite is described. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the adsorption of collector and aqua ligands onto these surfaces, with Chapter 5 also reporting attempts at rational in-silico ligand design. A novel method for calculating the binding energy of anionic species in periodic systems via a work-function based correction is described and tested for both mono- and dianionic species. Modelling of ethyl xanthate (H5C2OCS2-) and xanthate-based analogues (H5C2XCS2-, where X=N, NH, NC2H5, S, CH, CH2) shows a trend of increased binding strength upon formation of dianionic species. Whilst this observation was supported (to a lesser degree) by geometrical parameters, the extension of the work-function based correction to deal with dianionic species tended to significantly overbind these ligands and so the work function correction was found to be inappropriate for use in models with a charge state greater than -1. Modelling of heterocyclic ligands on selected surfaces shows weaker adsorption than non-heterocyclic species due to unfavourable electronic effects of the delocalised heterocycle on the R-CS2- head group. Efforts in ligand design focussed on optimising the electronic properties of the tail group in the xanthate structure to provide maximum electron density to the CS2- system. The output from this process was p-methoxyphenyl dithiocarbamate (H2CO-C6H4-N=CS2²-), which performed well in computational models. Synthesis of this ligand, as well as protonated Nethyl dithiocarbamate (H5C2NHCS2-) failed, however, due to the intrinsic instability of monosubstituted dithiocarbamates. Attempts to validate modelling results using two experimental techniques are reported in Chapter 6. Firstly, cyclic voltammetry experiments using sperrylite, pentlandite and platinum working electrodes suspended in collector solutions of concentration 1x10-3 M are reported, which show some correlation between the order of calculated binding energies and the relative position of the oxidation potential for the formation of disulfide oxidation products, a process which is affected by surface adsorption. Correlation is best for ethyl xanthate and diisobutyl dithiophospinate, but poor for N,N-diethyl dithiocarbamate ((H5C2)2NCS2-). Secondly, microflotation experiments for the recovery of sperrylite, pentlandite and pyrite using various collector ligands were conducted. Results broadly agree with prior microflotation literature, but show no simple correlation between ligand binding energies and flotation recovery, suggesting that more complex factors than simple ligand/mineral adsorption are involved.

This dissertation investigates how three significant nineteenth-century American female writers strategically transform a central Gothic motif – the virtuous heroine pursued by a villain who lusts for sexual and socioeconomic power – to tell new stories about gendered bodies and the erotic relations between them. Established in the genre-defining British Gothic novels of the late eighteenth century, this popular motif endured throughout the nineteenth century in texts written and read on both sides of the Atlantic. This project examines understudied texts by E.D.E.N. Southworth, Louisa May Alcott, and Julia Ward Howe that exhibit a striking intertextual awareness of the motif, reformulating it to critique the era’s marital and inheritance practices that enable and reinforce persistent gender inequities. These texts presciently recognize the performative nature of gender, centering on protagonists that move fluidly between genders with strategic choices about dress, speech, and social roles. By examining these texts together, this project shows that they anticipate the insights of contemporary feminist and queer theory as their protagonists deliberately calculate how to blend traditionally gendered behaviors and transform sexual threats into situations in which they can either consensually participate or cleverly elude. Chapter One argues that E. D. E. N. Southworth’s popular serial novel The Hidden Hand (1859) rewrites the narrative pattern that situates Gothic heroines as vulnerable to rape by positioning its heroine as aware of her fictional status and therefore capable of using her metafictional knowledge to reconfigure sexually threatening situations. Chapter Two examines how Louisa May Alcott’s sensation tale A Long, Fatal Love Chase (1866) blends traditionally male and female Gothic narratives to cast its heroine as a female Faust figure whose desperate desire for freedom leads her to enter naively into a bigamous partnership with a Mephistophelean man whose relentless pursuit ultimately causes her death. Chapter Three contends that Julia Ward Howe’s recently recovered manuscript The Hermaphrodite (1848) situates its ambiguously sexed but male-identifying protagonist as a Gothic “heroine” who employs unconventional strategies to cope with conventional threats to his physical and financial autonomy and rejects all interpersonal bonds because of the gendered restrictions they impose upon him. / 2019-07-31T00:00:00Z

This is a thesis about English and American imaginative identification with Italy in the period 1848–1865, facilitated by and expressed through periodicals and newspapers. At the centre of the thesis sits New England magazine The Atlantic Monthly, which during the Civil War emerged as a vehicle for abolitionist literature, but which also published extensively on Italy. The Risorgimento, the movement that sought Italian unification, triumphed in 1861—the same year that the battle of Fort Sumter signalled the start of the American Civil War that would last until 1865. This thesis investigates the transatlantic relationship between the Risorgimento and the Civil War as it emerged in The Atlantic Monthly, The Springfield Daily Republican and other nineteenth–century publications, and it does so through contextualised readings of Arthur Hugh Clough, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Emily Dickinson. These three seemingly very disparate authors are connected by The Atlantic Monthly: Clough’s epistolary poem on the fall of the 1849 Roman Republic, Amours de Voyage, was first published there in 1858; Harriet Beecher Stowe serialised her historical Italian romance Agnes of Sorrento in The Atlantic Monthly between 1861 and 1862; and Dickinson was inspired to write a series of poems on Italy and volcanoes after reading both The Atlantic Monthly and local morning newspaper The Springfield Daily Republican. They are also connected by their fascination with Italy. This thesis argues that nineteenth–century periodicals need to be studied in a transatlantic context: they cannot be read, in the traditional style of Benedict Anderson, as simple affirmations of nationalism and national culture. Another way of putting it is to say that this thesis is about a series of exchanges of influence and thought that get attached to national projects but are in themselves international.

This thesis reads the twentieth-century novel in light of its engagement with multilingualism. It treats the multilingual as a recurring formal preoccupation for writers working predominantly in English, but also as an emergent historical problematic through which they confront the linguistic and political inheritances of empire. The project thus understands European modernism as emerging from empire, and reads its formal innovations as engagements with the histories and quotidian realities of language use in the empire and in the metropolis. In addition to arguing for a rooting of modernism in the language histories of empire, I also argue for the multilingual as a potential linkage between European modernist writing and the writing of decolonisation, treating the Caribbean as a particularly productive region for this kind of enquiry. Ultimately, I argue that these periodical groupings - the modernist and the postcolonial - can be understood as part of a longer chronology of the linguistic legacy of empire. The thesis thus takes its case studies from across the twentieth century, moving between Europe and the Caribbean. The first chapter considers Joseph Conrad as the paradigmatic multilingual writer of late colonialism and early modernism, and the second treats Jean Rhys as a problematic late modernist of Caribbean extraction. The second half of the thesis reads texts more explicitly preoccupied with the Caribbean: the third chapter thus considers linguistic histories of Guyana and the Americas in the works of the experimental novelist Wilson Harris, and the fourth is concerned with the inventive and polemical contemporary Dominican-American novelist, Junot Díaz.

A teoria semiótica de linha francesa, em seu início, tinha como preocupação maior as questões do inteligível, quando Greimas propôs um percurso gerativo do sentido capaz de dar conta dos diversos sistemas de significação. Entretanto, com o passar do tempo, as questões da ordem do sensível e do afeto se colocaram como um desafio para os analistas e pediram espaço na teoria trazendo textos em que a narrativa não era central. Claude Zilberberg, em especial, é um dos autores que caminha na direção de propor a primazia do sensível em relação ao inteligível com os recursos do que veio a se chamar semiótica tensiva. Acompanhando o movimento feito tanto pela teoria quanto pela literatura, nossa dissertação tem como objeto um romance experimental, Catatau, de Paulo Leminski, que se apresenta como uma obra de difícil acesso devido à sua pouca linearidade narrativa. Nosso intuito é abordar a obra pelo viés da teoria tensiva tentando apontar caminhos possíveis de leitura a partir de estratégias e procedimentos recorrentes no texto. Assim como Zilberberg encontra no modelo saussuriano da silabação um sistema rítmico passível de ser expandido a todos os domínios semióticos, podemos encontrar em um romance como o Catatau células ou elementos que se repetem em determinados intervalos criando uma lei, uma orientação, enfim, um ritmo. É curioso notar, no entanto, que no caso da obra analisada, tal ritmo se mostra mais como um desorganizador da linguagem que como um organizador. Queremos com isso dizer que é a alternância da célula rítmica que provoca no leitor o efeito ininteligibilidade. Evidentemente que há diversos outros recursos, principalmente de nível discursivo, que também reforçam esse efeito, como mostramos ao longo do trabalho. Enxergamos então o romance de Leminski menos como uma narrativa diluída que como o produto de uma vivência, sendo que tal vivência só é possível por meio de um sujeito sensível, afetado pelo que está à sua volta. É nessa linha de abordagem que encontramos os meios para explicitar a construção do sentido do texto, objetivo por excelência da teoria semiótica / In its beginnings, the French semiotic theory had as its major concern the issues of the intelligible, when Greimas proposed a generative path of meaning capable to comprise many systems of meaning. In the course of time, though, the analysts were defied by issues related to sensibility and affection, which claimed for a place in theory, through texts in which narrative was not central. Claude Zilberberg, in particular, is one of the authors who defends the primacy of the sensibility over intelligibility through the features of which came to be called tensive semiotics. Following this movement both through theory and literature, this dissertation chooses as its subject an experimental novel, Paulo Leminskis Catatau, almost considered an unintelligible work due to its non-linear narrative patterns. We aim to approach this novel through the tensive semiotics theory, proposing some ways for its reading based on the texts iterant strategies and procedures. As Zilberberg finds in Saussures syllabic model a rhythmic system which can be expanded to all semiotic domains, we can find in a novel like Catatau cells or elements which repeat in certain intervals, creating a rule, an orientation, a rhythm at least. In Catatau, this rhythm seems much more to disorganize than to organize the language. It means that its the rhythmic cell interchange that leads the reader to that effect of unintelligibility. Of course that there are more features that reinforce this effect within the novel, as we show along our work. That means that we see Leminskis novel less as a diluted narrative and more as the offspring of some experience only made possible if built upon some persons sensibility, affected by his/her surroundings. On this specific approach we find our means to make explicit the building of the text meaning, which is considered the semiotic theory main goal.

A presente dissertação tem como objetivo analisar o processo de elaboração da personagem Jesus de O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo, de José Saramago, a partir da consideração do cânone literário que tem como propósito reler a história estabelecida pelos evangelhos escritos nos primórdios do Cristianismo. Isto é feito primeiro pela seleção de alguns exemplos do referido cânone e depois pela análise da personagem saramaguiana procurando mostrar como ela se relaciona com essas outras versões de Cristo / This dissertation has as objective analyzes the process of the elaboration character Jesus of José Saramago\'s O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo, starting from the consideration of the literary canon that has as purpose to read again the established history for the Gospel written in the origins of the Christianity. That is done first by the selection of some examples of the referred canon and later for the analysis of the Saramago\'s character trying to show like it relations with those other versions of Christ.

RA is a chronic and disabling disease with no known cure. The disease has a strong genetic component and modern genetic studies have successfully identified over 100 loci associated with the onset of RA. Despite the number of associations identified, the full genetic component of RA is not known, and for the majority of the loci the causal variant remains unknown. The overall aim of this study was to utilise well-powered genetic data, in order to identify novel loci, refine genetic associations, and generate robust evidence for the causal SNP and causal gene at a selected RA locus. An initial analysis was undertaken utilising 3870 RA cases and 8430 controls from the UK-ImmunoChip, a study designed for comprehensive fine-mapping of confirmed RA susceptibility loci. Analysis of the UK-ImmunoChip data identified a novel finding with the TYK2 locus, and proved informative to refining association signals, illustrating the utility of fine-mapping and implicated SNPs with putative regulatory function. The UK-ImmunoChip was subsequently expanded to incorporate samples from five additional cohorts in a study led by Dr. Stephen Eyre. In additional to novel loci discovery, this study provided evidence for SNPs putatively associated with RA (P smaller or equal to5E-05 < 5E-08). In a combined meta-analysis of 17,581 cases and 20,160 controls, convincing evidence was obtained for two novel RA loci, BACH2 and RAD51B.The newly identified genes implicate two novel pathways in RA (B-cell differentiation and DNA repair) and add to the growing number of loci associated with multiple AIDs. These findings are important to aid comprehensive pathway analysis and add to the knowledge of RA risk genes. The third most associated RA locus in both serological subtypes of disease, with an uncharacterised protein, ANKRD55, was subsequently selected for in-depth characterisation. Utilising genetic and haplotypic analysis the association at this locus was refined to a single signal, with four SNPs in strong LD (r2 > 0.8). Through bioinformatic analysis, two SNPs rs6859219 and rs10065637 showed evidence for functional activity, with evidence of being located in an enhancer element, supported by histone marks, DNAse hypersensitivity, evidence of transcription factor binding and eQTL. The use of RNA and ChIP experiments have established a testable hypothesis that the presence of the putative causal variants rs6859219 and rs10065637, act to weaken the strength of the enhancer element in which they are located, (evidenced by diminished H3k4me1 modification), which in turn down-regulates the transcriptional output of the target gene ANKRD55 (evidenced by eQTL in both whole blood and CD4+ T cells).In summary this study has led to the identification of three novel loci, highlighted the importance of fine-mapping and developed a successful systemic strategy for the characterisation of the 5q11 risk locus associated with RA.

Cette étude se propose de cerner le statut particulier du roman de Rousseau dans l'ensemble de son œuvre, et pas seulement du point de vue du genre littéraire. Rousseau envisage deux sortes de croyances : d'une part celle qui relève spécifiquement de la religion ; d'autre part celles qui ressortissent aux valeurs purement mondaines (avoir, pouvoir et gloire). Dans son œuvre philosophique, validant la première, Rousseau condamne radicalement les secondes. La présente étude vise à montrer que le roman, en accord avec l'œuvre philosophique sur la religion, se trouve dans une position infiniment plus ambiguë quant aux valeurs mondaines (en particulier le pouvoir et la gloire). / Rousseau aims at defining the particular status of Rousseau's novel in his whole work, as regards his literary genre but also others perspectives. Rousseau considers two sorts of beliefs : one pertaining to religion specifically and the other having to do with purely mundane values (possession, power and glory). In his philosophical work, he approves the former and absolutely condemns the latter. This study aims to show that the novel, which matches the philosophical works regarding religion, has a much more amiguous position as far as mundane values are concerned (particularly power and glory).