Paganini's 24th caprice still remains to this day one of the most celebrated themes in classical music history. Many composers have used this theme to create variations and each composer attempted to produce stylistically unique variations on this piece. Hamelin's Variations on a Theme of Paganini stands out because his piece incorporates musical borrowing and many different composers' styles. His variations integrate music from different centuries, using pastiche and musical borrowing from figures such as Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms, Chopin, and Rachmaninoff. More provocatively, Hamelin's variations reach outside of Classical music, even adopting elements from salsa and friska. The spectrum of composers and styles included in this set are so radical and shocking that it creates a parody of not only Paganini's theme, but also the tradition of theme and variation pieces it has inspired. Due to its multiple variations juxtaposing extremely different styles, Hamelin's Variations on a Theme of Paganini presents the listener with a musical puzzle that is designed to invoke surprise. The juxtapositions of extremely different styles in these variations create disjointed variations with polystylism. The polystylism in this work diversifies his variations, while unifying these seemingly unbalanced movements through broad musical references. As such, both performers and listeners stand to benefit from a detailed, critical examination of the piece. I consider not just the musical sources themselves, but also the ways in which they interact, paying close attention to Hamelin's use of parody and humor.

The purpose of this paper is to show the similarities between two authors, who both have been very successful in Italy and abroad. They are the 14th century writer Giovanni Boccaccio and the contemporary author Andrea Camilleri. I compare five short stories by Camilleri published in his books Gran circo Taddei and La regina di Pomerania and five short stories from Decameron. My aim is to show that they, although more than 600 years apart, have a common angle of approach when it comes to describing how women, seemingly subordinate and compliant, not rarely manage to achieve their aim even if it is trivial, low and not at all focused on changing the world. I also want to elucidate the fact that both writers not rarely let their female characters act as accomplices, that there is a female solidarity between them and that they seem to hav an energy and vigour that men seem to lack. The man on the other hand is often described as weak, as a false authority, who changes into a tool, a diversion in the hands of the woman. Besides this I make an analysis of the "false" short story by Boccaccio, Antonello da Palermo, written by Camilleri to see if it can fall into the genre of rewriting of classical works, which is typical of postmodernism, simply if it fulfills the criteria of such a rewriting.

Le présent mémoire porte sur la critique littéraire telle que pensée et pratiquée par Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve ainsi que son disciple infidèle Marcel Proust, et ce dans une perspective poético-historique. Il tente de montrer que la critique proustienne n’est pas radicalement opposée à la critique beuvienne, qu’elle ne se positionne pas absolument « contre » elle comme l’ont compris plusieurs lecteurs de Contre Sainte-Beuve, mais qu’elle la prolonge en la corrigeant. Plus précisément, et pour mettre en évidence cette filiation, ce mémoire compare la forme de prédilection de la critique beuvienne, le portrait littéraire, à son pendant proustien, le pastiche.

This thesis discusses contemporary Scottish crime fiction in light of its transatlantic contexts. It argues that, despite participating in a globalized popular genre, examples of Scottish crime fiction nevertheless meaningfully intervene in notions of Scottishness. The first chapter examines Scottish appropriations of the hard-boiled mode in the work of William McIlvanney, Ian Rankin, and Irvine Welsh, using their representation of traditional masculinity as an index for wider concerns about community, class, and violence. The second chapter examines examples of Scottish crime fiction that exploit the baroque aesthetics of gothic and noir fiction as a means of dealing with the same socio-political contexts. It argues that the work of Iain Banks and Louise Welsh draws upon a tradition of distinctively Scottish gothic in order to articulate concerns about the re-incursion of barbarism within contemporary civilized societies. The third chapter examines the parodic, carnivalesque aspects of contemporary Scottish crime fiction in the work of Christopher Brookmyre and Allan Guthrie. It argues that the structure of parody replicates the structure of genre, meaning that the parodic examples dramatize the textual processes at work in more central examples of Scottish crime fiction. The fourth chapter focuses on examples of Scottish crime fiction that participate in the culturally English golden-age and soft-boiled traditions. Unpacking the darker, more ambivalent aspects of these apparently cosy and genteel traditions, this final chapter argues that the novels of M. C. Beaton and Kate Atkinson obliquely refract the particularly Scottish concerns about modernity that the more central examples more openly express.

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Pin-up images have played an important role in American culture, in both their illustrated and photographic configurations. The pin-up is viewed as a significant representational cultural artifact of idealistic and aspirational femininity and of consumerism and material wealth, especially reflective of the mid-twentieth century period in America spanning the 1930s to the 1960s. These images not only reflect great shifts in social mores and women’s social status, but also affected changes in both areas in turn. Furthermore, pin-up images internationally circulated in magazines, advertising and promotional material, contributed to the manner in which America was idealized in Europe and beyond. Crucially, they influenced how an eroticized and glamorous, yet unrealistic, example of femininity came to be generalized as a desirous model of femininity. In recent years there has been vital, though limited, scholarly research into the cultural and social impact of pin-up imagery, to which this thesis adds to. This thesis takes a genealogical approach, charting the development of popular female-centric “pin-up” imagery in America since the 1860s and up to the 1960s, and its resurgence since the 1980s onwards. In doing so this thesis aims to provide a social, political and cultural context to the emergence of a specific archetypal sexualized femininity, with the aim of challenging the tendency to dismiss sexualized imagery as “anti-feminist” or as trivial. Toward that end, I examine the complexity of intentions behind the production of “pin-up” images. In taking this revisionist approach I am better able to conclusively analyze the reasons for the resurgence and reappropriation of pin-up imagery in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century popular culture, and consider what the gendered cultural implications may be.