published_or_final_version / Sociology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

published_or_final_version / Sociology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1991.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2009. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1991. / Also available in print.

Thesis (doctoral?)--University of Oslo, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 189-200). Also issued online.

This thesis argues that in the wake of the Decembrist Revolt in Russia in 1825, the British Foreign Office was forced to address the tension between two conceptions of stability-one domestic and one international. It contends that the aristocratic ethos of the British diplomatic corps both magnified the fragile social condition of the Russian Empire and organized the political response which subordinated this concern to the international equilibrium of Europe. Ambassadors such as Lord Strangford and Edward Cromwell Disbrowe helped interpret the events of the Decembrist conspiracy while stationed in St. Petersburg and reported back to their Foreign Secretary, George Canning, who used the revolt as an attempt to realign British interests with Russia. In the end, elite Britons chose to protect the international balance of power in post-Napoleonic Europe instead of the traditional social hierarchies believed to be under siege in Russia. / by Kenneth Posner. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2010. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2010. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

published_or_final_version / Urban Studies / Master / Master of Social Sciences

published_or_final_version / Sociology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

If the Victorians privileged the idea of ‘the family’ and the domestic configuration, what, then, was the position of unrelated groups, quasi-families and outsiders? While mid-Victorian literature widely praised or denigrated the reputation of the family, Stevenson’s works take a different standpoint. Throughout Stevenson’s oeuvre we encounter families which are falling apart and unrelated, family-like groups which take their place: Stevenson’s writing features clubs, clans and secret societies. Recent Stevenson criticism associates the problematic family relations depicted in his texts with biographical details, such as the tempestuous relationship the writer had with his father. Yet this thesis offers a reassessment of the kinship relations in Stevenson’s works. It argues that Stevenson’s writing does not focus on domestic quarrels, but prioritises families which are not related. It asks what it means to be a member of a family which is not familial or a non-family group which is like a family. Is it possible to be both a member of a family and to be without kin? Stevenson’s works are characterised by strange and estranged family groups; it is by stepping outside of the Victorian family that characters in Stevenson’s works experience the familial. The chapters in this thesis survey a range of social groups in Stevenson’s works, all of which take on a quasi-familial form. The first chapter considers the fin-de-siècle writing world and Stevenson’s own position in London’s family-like clubland relations, which both rejected and replicated the family form. The following two chapters go on to explore the role of exile and outsiders in kinship groups. Chapter 2 looks at David Balfour’s extra-familial adventures in Kidnapped and the clan groups he encounters. The importance of the outsider to kinship is proposed in Chapter 3, which considers island communities in Stevenson’s South Pacific writings and the role of taboo as a method of social organisation. The final two chapters consider the appropriation of familial relations by the secret society. In Chapter 4 we encounter the Otherness between the brothers in The Master of Ballantrae and the similar relations of inequality in the Fenian Brotherhood in The Dynamiter; here, fraternal relations have been adopted by the political secret society. Chapter 5 explores this relationship between family and secret society in The Dynamiter further: it considers the female characters in the text and the crossovers and exchanges between domestic family life and political fraternity. These familial groups are characterised by difference, Otherness and exclusion; Stevenson’s works reconsider family relations and recognise the strangeness of social groups.