Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

New wilderness is a term denoting a particular kind of environment which is considerably modified by human activity and then abandoned. These places are left to their own development defined mostly by natural processes. This work describes the phenomenon of new wilderness both in Czech and international context. It attempts to capture not only the general nature of new wilderness but also to point out various features which are provoked by its character. Subsequently it discusses the theory of Umwelt by Jakob von Uexküll describing the relation of individual to the world and treating the space as perceived individually. Second part of this work is dedicated to concrete example of new wilderness - Rohan island in Prague. It summarizes its history and natural conditions. The concepts of Umwelt and heterotopia are then applied to this locality. The two theories in question, conceiving space in a specific way, develop further the complexity and richness of the phenomenon of new wilderness.

This dissertation considers the early career of Boston-based, African American artist Allan Rohan Crite (1910-2007) and situates his central artistic Goal--to present uplifting images of middle class black Bostonians--within the ideological framework of the New Negro Movement of the 1920s-1940s. In each of the chapters, I consider one of the four bodies of work Crite produced simultaneously during his early career--painted portraits, neighborhood street scenes and church interiors and brush and ink illustrations of African American spirituals. I focus on these subjects in order to explore Crite’s desire to portray the middle class status of his family and community and to redefine the spirituals in terms of his own middle-class sensibility. I describe Crite’s visualization of his black middle class Episcopal and Bostonian identity in these works as performances or enactments created through a series of repeated gestures of “respectable” appearance and behavior. My analysis also considers the artist’s motivations to preserve, in the physical form of his artworks, the black middle class values and way of life in Boston that he feared was in danger of being lost and forgotten. Rooted in the Community is also a revisionist account, for it seeks to revise the notion of an African American artistic “rootedness” to mean an artist rooted in his own immediate community rather than in a search for his cultural roots in the African past or within the rural folk culture of the American south. This study challenges a bias within the discourse on racial identity in art that privileges a notion of racial authenticity, or an essentialized conception of black identity centered upon the “folk,” or working and lower class African Americans. I also challenge the negative assessment of the black middle class as a group devoid of interest in the black community and propose that early twentieth century definitions of black middle class identity embodied in the notions of the “talented tenth” and the “race” man or woman best define Crite’s sense of himself as a black artist, for he felt a responsibility towards the black community and was not alienated from it. / text

in English: The topic of this Diploma Thesis is the Sychrov Castle Library, which belonged to the Rohan noble clan. The aim of this Thesis was to evaluate the proveniencial, thematic, linguistic and quantitative representation of individual titles. The introduction presents the aim of the work and its structure. The subsequent chapters focus briefly on the history of the Sychrov Castle and the history of the Rohans, mainly the Rohan-Guémené line, since the members of the clan who settled at the Sychrov Castle came from that line. Details are given about the representatives of the nobility clan who had substantial influence on the appearance and composition of the castle library. The fourth chapter is devoted to the Sychrov Castle Library itself and familiarises readers with catalogues, book quantities, document issue dates, information about the oldest and newest titles, the language composition of the library's collection and preserved exlibris, supralibros and ownership inscriptions. The most extensive chapter, the fifth one, focuses on the content characteristics of the Sychrov Castle Library's collection. The sixth chapter compares the library's collection with the library collections of two different nobility clans, the Beaufort-Spontin and the Mensdorff-Pouilly clans. The seventh chapter...