Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 258-273).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 185-193).

Not available / text

Fürst Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785-1871) is a writer whose work enjoyed immense popularity in his lifetime. Today, however, he is largely forgotten or ignored. This thesis proposes the rehabilitation of Nickler in German literary history. His work, consisting mainly of travelogues, achieves a stylistic distinction comparable to that of Heinrich Heine, and depicts events, places and people with a political and social perception that shows him to have been far ahead of his time. Nickler has always been a controversial figure. Though seen by some of his contemporaries as one of Germany's most influential and eloquent liberal travelogue-writers, he was also denounced as a second-rate poet who pandered to the aristocracy. As far as it exists, modern Nickler scholarship grants his work its deserved position in the genre of travel literature, but does not fully recognize its importance as politically and socially committed writing. For most of his life Pückler was interested in social and political questions. During his travels in Great Britain (1826-1828), documented in the Briefe eines Verstorbenen, he was introduced to the English political system. Henceforth, he proclaimed the need for a German constitutional monarchy. While travelling in Ireland he witnessed the struggle of the Irish people and became a strong supporter of the Irish emancipation movement. In Germany, he came in close contact with the group of writers known as "Junges Deutschland." Their writings were outlawed by the authorities in 1835, because of their treatment of political issues ranging from freedom of the press, autonomy of the universities, and constitutional questions, to the need for greater social justice. When he raised these issues in Tutti Frutti (1834), Nickler narrowly escaped a ban on the publication of his works, for some reactionary circles considered him a liberal agitator. Indeed, both Nickler's early pieces and his later work, such as the travel narrative Süd Ostlicher Bildersaal(1840), depicting the Wittelsbacher reign in Greece and the author’s association with the autocratic King of the Greeks, Otto I, demonstrate liberal conviction and progressive political thinking. This thesis examines critically Nickler's writings about England, Ireland, Germany und Greece, traces the author’s attitudes towards historical circumstances and personages and argues for the importance of his work and for its location close to that of other "Young German" writers, such as Heine, Borne or Herwegh.

Yeats's depiction of political violence is examined through a reading of the political poetry centred on "Easter 1916," "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," and "Meditations in Time of Civil War," each of these bearing a title emphasizing the poem's historicality, each representing one of the violent epochs in modern Ireland. By studying the dramatized narrative persona utilized by Yeats--a persona constituting the ideological and societal contexts of the poem, and effecting, through the choice of perspective, the selection of historical materials--the particular contents of Yeats's history-making are brought into focus. Yeats was both a romantic poet uneasy with the political component of verse, and an Irish nationalist for whom these events were essential ingredients of his life's work. In these poems we find the collision of Yeats's own conflicting ideals about poetry, politics, and history; a collision which produces a complex portrayal of Irish political violence.

The regions of James II, III, and IV in the second half of the fifteenth century in Scotland saw a distinctive flowering of advice to princes literature. This is the first account of its kind to examine in detail the sources, arguments, and extent of political comment of each individual work. In particular it employs both literary and historical sources to reveal the largely unrecognized impact of continental, especially French, political thought, on a number of writers. The study opens with a consideration of the poem De Regimine Principum, a politically very forthright advice work, influential for a century or so after its composition. Chapter 2 deals with the writings of Sir Gilbert Hay, whose work shows clear influences from the continent, particularly in the Buik of King Alexander, which is also seen to have interesting links with De Regimine Principum. Chapter 3 discusses the romance Lancelot of the Laik, a poem less precise in its allusions, but clearly indicative of a number of recurrent preoccupations in Scottish advisory literature in the areas of justice and kingly minorities. The two following chapters examine The Talis of the Fyve Bestes, which gives a markedly nationalistic evocation of good kingship, and The Buke of the Chess, where Scottish advice to princes is seen at its least politically aware. In Chapter 6 advice appears in yet another genre, the devotional poem The Contemplacioun of Synnaris, where the wider associations of `kingship' with the nosce te ipsum tradition are apparent. Chapters 7 and 8 concern The Thre Prestis of Peblis and John Ireland's Meroure of Wyssdome, possibly produced around the same time, but presenting their advice in very different manners: the Thre Prestis adroitly worked and entertaining, the Meroure, highly theological and drawing strongly on continental writers, notably the sermons of Jean Gerson. In conclusion it is shown that through this context we can best appreciate the purpose and formidable execution of Robert Henryson's advice to princes fable lq The Lion and the Mouse.

This thesis argues that much of the gender based criticism that has led to the "rediscovery" of neglected early modern women writers has, paradoxically, also served to limit our understanding of such writers by distracting attention from other aspects of their writing, such as their political commitments. The three authors considered, Jane Barker (1652-1732), Mary Caesar (1677-1741) and Anne Finch (1661-1720), have been selected precisely because Jacobitism is central to their writing. However, it will be argued that a focus upon gender politics in the texts of these writers has led to a failure to comprehend the party political boldness of their work. The thesis examines the writing of each author in turn and explores the implications of Barker's, Caesar's and Finch's Jacobite allegiances for their respective views of human history as played out in political affairs. It also considers the ways in which each author attempts to reconcile a cause that is supposedly supported by God with apparent political failure. The quest of Barker, Caesar and Finch to investigate these issues and to comprehend how Jacobitism forms part of their own authorial identities is central to what is meant here by "literary Jacobitism" in relation to these writers. The thesis demonstrates that Jacobitism is enabling for each of these three women as it enhances their ability to conceive of themselves as authors by allowing their sense of political identity to overcome their scruples about their position as women who write. However, it also illustrates that Jacobitism functions differently in the writing of each of the selected authors. It thus argues that an undifferentiated labelling of the work of these three women as "Jacobite" is as restrictive as their previous categorisation as "women writers".

This thesis examines the development of the political outlook of the German author and revolutionary politician, Ernst Toller. It begins by looking at Toller's early years and explains how his experience as a front-line soldier during the First World war transformed his views, causing him to reject the conservative-nationalist ethos he had grown up with and to become, in his own description, a revolutionary pacifist. It then looks at his involvement in the revolutionary events which took place in Bavaria at the end of the First World War, the so-called Räterepublik, examines how they affected his understanding of social and political reality and traces their artistic reflection in the plays he wrote in the following period. A recurrent theme in Toller's political thinking throughout the years of the Weimar Republic was the idea of an Einheitsfront, a defence block of workers' organisations, which he advocated as the only means of halting the rise of National Socialism. Unfortunately, Toller's appeals to the main workers' parties to form such a block went unheard, yet they are significant all the same in that they reveal the acute political insight of a man whom many of his contemporaries dismissed as a hopeless utopian. Interestingly, and a point often missed in studies of his politics, Toller abandoned the Einheitsfront after he went into exile in 1933 and came to favour instead the creation of a Volksfront a broad, cross-party anti-fascist coalition which the Soviet Union vigorously promoted all through the 1930s until the signing of the Stalin-Hitler Pact in 1940. Toller's support for this idea, in part a corollary of his support for the Soviet Union itself, had a profound impact on his political outlook in exile, and caused him to close his eyes to the repression suffered by the opponents of the Stalin regime both inside and outside Russia, and, most significantly, led him to ignore the nascent socialist revolution which flourished in Spain after the defeat of Franco's coup d'etat in 1936. This study examines in some detail, therefore, Toller's involvement in the Volksfront, redefines his attitude towards Communist Russia and shows how his efforts to suppress his revolutionary beliefs and to become instead a mere anti-fascist affected his creative spirit during his years of exile.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 1999. / Adviser: Carol Houlihan Flynn. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 268-281). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1992. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [284]-294).