This dissertation examines the technique of archaism as it has been practiced in the historical novel since that genre’s origins. By “archaism,” I refer to a variation of the strategy that Jerome McGann calls textual “literalism,” whereby literary texts use “thickly materialized” language and bibliographic forms to foreground their own “textuality as such” (Black Riders 74). Archaism is distinguished from Blake’s, Pound’s, or Robert Carlton Brown’s literalism by its imitation of older literary idioms, yet the specifically historical quality of its intertextuality also seems different from primarily formal imitations such as pastiche and parody. Although archaism appears to have originated as part of the special language of romance, this study focuses on the technique as a representational strategy within historical fiction. Thus I begin by interpreting Thomas Chatterton’s faux-medieval forgeries (ca. 1770) as a kind of poetic antiquarianism, after which I trace the legacy of Chattertonian archaism in nineteenth-century historical novels including Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) and Thackeray’s Henry Esmond (1852). The last two chapters address the twentieth-century return to archaism in John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), William Golding’s To the Ends of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy (1980-1989), and William T. Vollmann’s Argall (2001). Throughout, I rely extensively upon Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1937), approaching the latter novels as historical fiction rather than as specimens of such post-1960s genres as Linda Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction” or Amy J. Elias’s “metahistorical romance.” Lukács is especially useful because of his sense that historical fictions are animated by the mimetic imperative to represent historical “reality.” Furthermore, the historical novel frame of these novels often serves to historicize literary form, disciplining both the simulation and the metafictionality that exemplify postmodern cultural praxis. Ultimately, I argue that archaism within the historical novel models a historical “real” that is always constructed in a manner analogous to the construction of literary texts, positing a historicity in which imaginative literature offers a key figuration of social experience. Unlike Hutcheon, who advances similar claims for historiographic metafiction, I contend that these novels often use archaism to represent their historical referents as reality—a practice that recalls the “classical” historical fiction of the nineteenth century. By drawing equally on historical novel theory and on Hutcheon, Elias, and Fredric Jameson’s analyses of post-1960s historical fiction as a representative form of aesthetic postmodernism, I synthesize two theoretical discussions which have typically been seen as incompatible. Similarly, this study emphasizes the continuity between old and new forms of historical fiction, expanding on Elias’s salient observation that “postmodern historical fiction stands in the refracted light of nineteenth-century historical novels” (Sublime Desire 6). Concepts of theoretical and aesthetic continuity, therefore, shape both the argument and the organization of this dissertation.

The seven-and-a-half-hour series of funeral rites that occurred in Atlanta on April 9, 1968 in honor of assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. were broadcast live to 120 million U.S. television viewers and reported extensively in local and national newspapers and magazines. While King's April 4 assassination triggered deadly riots in more than 100 cities, Atlanta remained peaceful before and during the funeral. In this research thesis I explore how the funeral was leveraged by three disparate stakeholder group's King's family, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Atlanta's liberal white leadership- to stage image events. I create a historiography for each group that draws on primary sources and original interviews. Using an intertextual approach I conduct qualitative content analysis of the media coverage generated by each group's actions, identifying seven major messages that emerged.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [295]-314). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [295]-314). Also available on the Internet.

This MA thesis seeks to apply Henri Bergson’s theory of time to a reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” and David Fincher’s film adaptation of the text, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. By applying Bergson’s notions of durée and simultaneity, timeless moments will be seen to emerge in the text and the film. I place Fitzgerald’s text in context with other seminal modernist works in order to provide a study of the importance of the story within its time period. Through Deleuze’s application of Bergson to cinema, I analyze the evolution of the time-image within Fincher’s film, and place it within the context of a cinema of time. Ultimately, this thesis begins a discussion of the importance of how F. Scott Fitzgerald and Fincher’s works contribute meditations on time in their respective time periods and media.

Gravity waves have a significant dynamic effect in the mesosphere. In particular, they drive the mesospheric circulation and are the reason that the summer polar mesosphere is cooler than the winter polar mesosphere. This thesis examines whether the effects of gravity waves are largely determined by filtering effects which allow only gravity waves with certain properties to propagate into the atmosphere. The filtering of gravity waves above Scott Base, Antarctica is examined using a radiosonde derived gravity wave source function, an MF-radar derived mesospheric gravity wave climatology, and a model derived filtering function. Least squares fitting of the source function and filtering function to the observed mesospheric gravity wave climatology allows us to determine which gravity wave phase velocities and propagation direction are likely to be present in the mesosphere and the relative importance of filtering and sources in this region. It is concluded the blocking of eastward gravity waves is important in winter and westward waves in summer.

La première partie de cette thèse est consacrée aux problématiques liées à la modélisation markovienne de la courbe de variance forward. Elle est divisée en 3 chapitres. Dans le premier chapitre, nous présentons le cadre général de la modélisation de type HJM-Markov pour la courbe de variance forward. Nous revisitons le cadre affine-markovien modélisation et nous l'illustrons par l'exemple du modèle de Bühler. Dans le deuxième chapitre, nous proposons un nouveau modèle pour la courbe de variance forward qui combine les caractéristiques des deux versions (continue et discrète) du modèle de Bergomi 2008, sans se réduire ni à l'une ni à l'autre. Un des avantages de ce modèle est que les prix des futures et options sur VIX peuvent être exprimés comme des espérances de fonctions déterministes d'une variable aléatoire gaussienne, ce qui réduit le problème de la calibration à l'inversion de certaines fonctions monotones. Dans le troisième chapitre, on propose une méthode d'approximation pour les prix d'options européennes dans des modèles à volatilité stochastique de type multi-factoriels lognormal (comprenant le modèle présenté dans le deuxième chapitre, les modèles de Bergomi et le modèle de Scot 1987). Nous obtenons un développement d'ordre 3 de la densité du sous-jacent par rapport au paramètre de la volatilité de la volatilité. Nous présentons aussi une méthode de réduction de variance de type "variable de contrôle" pour la simulation par la méthode de Monte-Carlo qui utilise l'approximation explicite que nous obtenons de la fonction de répartition de la loi du sous-jacent. La deuxième partie de cette thèse est consacrée à l'étude des propriétés de monotonie des prix d'options européennes par rapport aux paramètres du CIR dans le modèle de Heston. Elle est divisée en deux chapitres. Dans le premier chapitre (cf. chapitre 4), nous donnons quelques résultats généraux sur le processus CIR. Nous montrons d'abord que les queues de distribution d'une combinaison du CIR et de sa moyenne arithmétique se comportent comme des exponentielles. Nous étudions ensuite les dérivées de la solution de ce processus par rapport aux paramètres de sa dynamique. Ces dérivées sont données comme solutions d'équations différentielles stochastiques, qu'on résout pour obtenir des représentations de ces dérivées en fonction des trajectoires du CIR. Le chapitre 5 est consacré à l'étude de la monotonie du prix d'un Put européen par rapport aux paramètres du CIR et à la corrélation dans le modèle de Heston. Nous montrons que, sous certaines conditions, les prix d'options européennes sont monotones par rapport aux paramètres du drift du CIR. Nous montrons ensuite que le paramètre de la volatilité de la volatilité joue le rôle de la volatilité si on prend la variance réalisée comme sous-jacent. En particulier, les prix d'options convexes sur la variance réalisée sont strictement croissants par rapport à la volatilité de la volatilité. Enfin, nous étudions la monotonie du prix du Put européen par rapport à la corrélation. Nous montrons que le prix du put du Put est croissant par rapport à la corrélation pour les petites valeurs du Spot et décroissant pour les grandes valeurs. Nous étudions ensuite les points de changement de monotonie pour les courtes et longues maturités

Gravity waves have a significant dynamic effect in the mesosphere. In particular, they drive the mesospheric circulation and are the reason that the summer polar mesosphere is cooler than the winter polar mesosphere. This thesis examines whether the effects of gravity waves are largely determined by filtering effects which allow only gravity waves with certain properties to propagate into the atmosphere. The filtering of gravity waves above Scott Base, Antarctica is examined using a radiosonde derived gravity wave source function, an MF-radar derived mesospheric gravity wave climatology, and a model derived filtering function. Least squares fitting of the source function and filtering function to the observed mesospheric gravity wave climatology allows us to determine which gravity wave phase velocities and propagation direction are likely to be present in the mesosphere and the relative importance of filtering and sources in this region. It is concluded the blocking of eastward gravity waves is important in winter and westward waves in summer.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 210-230).

Thesis (M.A.)--Cincinnati Christian University, 2007. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 103-106).