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This thesis offers a narratorial and textual examination of the tragic in Hardy’s fiction and uncovers how his tragic vision of a changing world led him into proto-modernist forms of writing. By first positing Hardy within his milieu and exploring the ideas, beliefs and attitudes that gave rise to his expression of the tragic, the thesis proceeds to conducts a close textual analysis of the fiction. His early psychological use of environment and the construction of metaphoric landscapes evoke a disturbing sense of place, in which individuals are diminished and displaced by nature. In this mode, Hardy’s agnostic, secular recasting of the tragic brings to the fore the material world, objects, animals and the non-human. Hardy’s experimental use of fetichism and the primitive and his animism intensify the tragic situation in the middle fiction. Here, there is also a pronounced satiric strain in the writing, elements of the absurd and use of ‘abstract imaginings’ through which Hardy expresses what he called ‘tragical mysteries of life’. The hybrid nature of the texts, with their fluid oscillations of mode, I argue, shapes the tragic effect and reflects Hardy’s experimental and recursive procedures during this period. The final concern of the thesis is the fragmentation of experience in the later fiction, which focuses upon Hardy’s depiction of the destructive forces of the unconscious and his use of shocks and interruptions in the short stories. The vision of isolated individuals failing to find fulfilment and connection with each other comes to the fore in these works. Hardy’s later and more radical experiments in characterisation present unstable beings that are read as simulacras; amalgamations of nerves and sensations. Such a recasting of the human reflects a vital proto-modernist aspect of Hardy’s writing, which subverts realist representations of the individual and anticipates the fractured, unstable characters of the modernists.

Traditional Narratives of nineteenth-century Spain still remain unproblematized from a sociocultural perspective. The idea of a static and backward society is still prevalent. These histories still minimize the liberal rupture of the mid-1830s and the epistemological legacies of the Spanish Enlightenment. From a critical feminist perspective, this thesis shows how a number of philanthropic societies were created from 1838 also out of the revolutionary impulse given to a new active gendered liberal public sphere in Madrid. They became central spaces for the theorization and implementation of liberal social reform in post-revolutionary Madrid. This liberal social reformism was based on the scientific principles of 'social economy', which were in turn grounded on an shared underlying moral order that organized and legitimated ascending liberal gendered social imaginaries. Liberal social reformists of the late 1830s and early 1840s imported contemporary modern industrial imaginaries and social stereotypes. 'Social economy' appeared as a scientific theory invested in preventing the evils of modern industrial societies. It created the bases of a liberal utopia that revolved around family morals, poverty (the worst social evil) and women (the pivotal moralizing subject). The analysis of this social economy and its projection of a gendered socio-moral ideal based on the self-sufficient and self-governed nuclear family allow me to explore some of the deepest contradictions and paradoxes of nineteenth-century liberal thought with respect to modern social categories related to work and poverty, on the one hand, and to liberalism, women and the public sphere, on the other. After mid-1841, progressivism explicitly appropriated the new ambivalent discourse of social reform as a project of social transformation and order; a project of social reform which was meant to be led by the so called 'middle class' families and that revolved around the ideal of 'education for all classes of both sexes'. However, the movement of progressivism from official politics after 1844 coincided with the eclipse of this philanthropic associationism as a symbol of an alternative liberal, respectable and antidemocratic but more socially inclusive political discourse.

In its first phase the Andalusian regionalist movement for autonomy used the figure of Seville's female cigar-maker as an emblem of Andalusian culture in the regionalist journal Betica (1913--1917) and in the celebration of Cigarreras in the Royal Tobacco Factory of Seville (1915), the painting of a well-known Andalusian artist at the time, Gonzalo Bilbao. In so doing, the male intellectuals who led this movement, opposed Spain's centralized rule, and campaigned for regional reform in fact elevated the figure of the female cigar-maker to the status of cultural icon. They used her easily recognizable image to promote Andalusia's autonomy, to exalt the political status of the region, and to inspire social and economic reform. In producing and upholding this representation of cultural purity and integrity, however, Andalusian regionalists were forced to contend with the cigar-maker's representational baggage. A close reading of the journal Betica reveals the figure of Seville's cigar-maker to be Janus-faced: she simultaneously contains identifications of the virginal, sacred Madonna and the insolent, shameful whore. This dissertation examines the dynamics of ambivalence through which figures of women in general and of Seville's female cigar-maker in particular are used to represent the specificity and difference of a group of people and their culture. Through close readings of the Andalusian regionalist journal Betica, social-scientific and feminists narratives regarding women and exchange, and a selection of French and Spanish novels written in the nineteenth century, this dissertation follows the meanderings of the cigar-maker and her double, the prostitute, across texts and time as they come to reach the status, as one, of Andalusian cultural icon. By examining historical and literary relations between France and Spain and between Spain and Andalusia during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, this study finds that as a representation of cultural specificity and autonomy Seville's female cigar-maker is paradoxically a composite product of exchange across texts, cultures, and art forms. The dissertation further finds that this process of exchange functioned in the production of works of so-called national literature in France and Spain.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, voluntary associations were organized at an unprecedented rate throughout both rural and urban France. Particularly within growing communities, industrialization and urbanization had created social stresses and economic uncertainties against which voluntary associations could offer some protection. Workers, employees and small merchants looked to mutual aid societies and fraternal organizations for material and social support. These same processes, in conjunction with institutional reforms inaugurated by the Third Republic, also created new opportunities for association. Neighborhoods and suburbs, and the innumerable corner cafes they supported, encouraged both formal and informal sociability. Merchants, industrialists and professionals--as well as workers--formed recreational, conscript and alumni groups, and thus reinforced personal ties of family and neighborhood as well as bonds formed at the newly created public schools or during military service. This thesis analyses the growth of associational life in the mid-size textile town of Roanne (Loire) between 1860 and 1914. During these years of rapid demographic and industrial growth, the population of this cite ouvriere doubled from 17,000 to over 35,000, while the number of voluntary associations grew from around twenty to more than 240. Archival material in local, departmental and national archives, as well as contemporary newspapers and household census data are used to explore the development of this formal associative life and its relationship to class, gender and the formation of social identity and community culture. Most important, it is argued that Roanne's voluntary associations comprised by the turn of the century a civic culture that integrated and was supported by all who directly or indirectly participated in it. This civic culture instilled in its members a sense of civic pride and gave to each a social identity that cut across political and class distinctions. It thus sewed as an integrating and stabilizing force during a period marked by political, religious and class conflict. This is a case study, but its conclusions should prove applicable to other developing communities in fin-de-siecle France.

Muhammad $\sp{\rm c}$Uthman Jalal was the prolific translator of a number of French literary texts during the period usually referred to as the nahda or cultural renaissance of Egypt in the nineteenth century. This dissertation examines his complete extant corpus, which includes the translation of works by La Fontaine, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Moliere, and Racine. Previous treatment of Jalal in the literature has been generally limited to brief mention of only part of his corpus, with more detailed treatment of only very few of his works. Jalal's works have been neglected in the literature largely because they are seen as part of the prelude to later more established and sustained literary developments. The present study focuses on these translations as important instances of the appropriation of works from a dominant, hegemonic culture in a manner that implicitly asserts a loosely 'indigenous' or 'regional' cultural identity and literary tradition in complex ways, at a time when translations and adaptations were providing most of the dominant literary models and innovative forces of the Egyptian Arabic literary tradition. Each translation is analyzed in terms of the features which Jalal used to familiarize and transculturate the French texts for reception into the nineteenth-century Egyptian context. These features are shown to include (1) the sustained use of Egyptian colloquial Arabic (ECA), (2) the incorporation of markedly ECA proverbs, idiomatic and other expressions, (3) the presence of explicit Egyptian cultural references, (4) the use of Arab cultural references, (allusions to places, historical figures, proverbs) which are not exclusively, or even primarily Egyptian, (5) the incorporation of Islamic cultural references, either in the form of Quranic citations or allusions, or mention of known Islamic figures and religious customs, and (6) the utilization of literary compositional forms known within the Egyptian/Arabic literary tradition, but somewhat modified in form and function as a result of their use outside of their traditional contexts. It is demonstrated that while each translation varies in terms of the presence and the density of these features, they all share a regionalist orientation that affirms and privileges an indigenous cultural and literary identity over that of a European 'other'.

The significance of the arts is inherently problematic in modern society. The question of their purpose was posed nowhere more forcefully than in France after the Restoration, when the hold of an artificially imposed neo-classicism was broken in every art. Two solutions are generally regarded as characterizing nineteenth-century French high culture: the Romantic view, in which the arts were justified as ends in themselves affording a certain emotional expression and pleasure, and the bourgeois moralizing view, which saw in art a school for private virtue and civic pride. It is apparent, however, that this leaves the high culture of publicly accepted arts motivated by two contradictory aesthetic systems. What has not been recognized is that there was a coherent and dominant body of opinion that rejected both views and offered an alternative by which the arts could be judged. This is called here the position of cultural orthodoxy, the intellectual foundations of which this study explores. The orthodox aesthetic was defined by philosophers such as Victor Cousin and was defended by critics writing for the leading journals. It was always cast in metaphysical and ethical terms, which have not been well understood. By paying particular attention to the dramatic and musical arts of the theater--to tragedy and opera--it is possible to see the implications of philosophical categories for both artistic practice and the critical response. Hence, Romantic drama was rejected for its denial of the beauty of human dignity and transcendent justice, whereas Romantic opera was accepted because it preserved those qualities in representing the beauty of self-sacrificial love in the context of the atonement of sin. Opera thus illustrates the moral and theological dimensions of beauty in the orthodox aesthetic. Yet the arts were not therefore regarded as didactic in their aim: the purpose of art was rather to affirm, cognitively and emotionally, the transcendent value of life. This view of art was threatened by the advocates of Realism and was eventually shattered by the adoption of Kantian philosophical categories in the latter half of the century. The denial of the metaphysical foundations of the orthodox aesthetic ultimately undermined the unity of French high culture.

This study examines the central role of associations in the consolidation and exercise of power by liberal ruling elites in Italy, from 1848 to the turn of the century. It argues that the period of Italian unification coincided with a profound change in the nature of associational life. Restricted in the first half of the century to the domain of elite sociability, by 1848 Italian associations had begun to embrace a more varied and ambitious set of goals, from the improvement of agriculture and the education of artisans to the promotion of savings banks, museums and public works. At the same time, they reflected the political and ideological ascension of liberalism in Italy. Late unification and the appearance of social, economic and civic backwardness gave Italian liberals a unique view of the association. Although in theory they embraced the principles of voluntarism and social self-organization, in practice they treated the association as a means by which to effect a dramatic transformation of society. In Italy, liberal elites believed, a civil society could not be taken for granted; rather, it had to be encouraged, awakened, educated, organized, even created anew. As a result, more than a natural or spontaneous expression of liberal society, the association in Italy represented a distinctly institutional model of liberal government. The focus of this study is on Padua and Vicenza, two provincial centers in the Veneto. Using a range of published and unpublished associational records, newspapers, and private correspondence, it shows how deeply involved the leading liberal elites in the region were in the promotion and administration of associations, in particular with those associations which aimed to attract--and redeem--the popular classes. As the center of the strongest Catholic movement in Italy, the Veneto also provides an excellent example of the social and political challenges which liberals faced in the late nineteenth century. Rather than pointing to a crisis or decline of liberalism, however, this study of associational life suggests how and why liberals continued to dominate Italian society and politics until the outbreak of the First World War.

Prior to this dissertation most research on the Gothic Revival in America has been restricted to architectural genealogy and stylistic development. An interpretative analysis of the American perception of the style has been lacking in recent scholarship. This dissertation fills this gap in the literature on the Gothic Revival by concentrating on the American response toward the Gothic style. The Gothic Revival in America has often been treated as an architectural curiosity, as a bizarre episode in the course of American building. The Gothic revival house has also been unnecessarily burdened with negative associations--death, terror, eccentricity, expense--which we have been assured contributed to the unpopularity of the Gothic style. Yet during the period of Romanticism Gothic architecture was associated with life, nature, nationalism, and morality. Furthermore, the Gothic Revival received considerable attention as a style perfectly suited to the character of the American people. To romantic Americans who lived between 1830 and 1860 the Gothic style embodied the essence of life, animation, and energy. It was the style which seemed most intimately related to man, as varied and as intricate as the human mind and as warm as the human heart. Matching in form and spirit the forested American wilderness, it was the style which seemed most in sympathy with nature. Associated with God, it was the style which seemed most expressive of spirituality. It was the style that best represented the American ideals of hearth and home, where the ancestral home and the moral home became one. It was the style that best reflected antiquity and continuity in an ever-changing industrial society, yet also reflected the dynamism of the American locomotive age. The Gothic revival house was indeed an expressive agent in the American definition of self. This dissertation is distinguished by its cultural interpretation of the Gothic Revival in America where the spirit of Gothic was perceived to be as significant as the form it took.

Born into a patrician Basel family, Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887) was raised in an atmosphere of Christian piety and conservative politics. His religious view of reality was traceable to his upbringing in Basel and to the neo-Humanist movement which conditioned his education. In the mid-1830's, Bachofen left home to study in Germany. There he was deeply influenced by the historian of Roman law Karl Friedrich von Savigny. During the 1840's, Bachofen moved away from Savigny intellectually. He became absorbed with the methodological value of ancient myth, tradition, and grave symbolism for understanding the ancient mind. The elaboration of his methodology was predicated upon the belief that modern historical criticism was destroying historical knowledge by imposing its analytical categories upon the mysteries of experience. Bachofen's research into antiquity was therefore linked to his critique of modernity. Throughout his writings, he was impressed by the religious nature of the ancient mind. The religio-cultural transformations of antiquity, the periods of health and illness, served as cultural mirrors for his own age which he believed was in need of rejuvenation. The dialectical relationship between decadence and renewal forms the clue to understanding Bachofen's thought. Bachofen rebelled against a Mommsenist logic of facts. He perceived positivist methodology as the sorry fruit of materialism in thought and democratic ideas in politics. He exhorted his age to accept the holistic and religious nature of consciousness and its engendering experiences. These ideas persisted to the end of his life. They conditioned his ethnological studies of the 1870's and 1880's which continued from his seminal Das Mutterrecht (1861). In these investigations, he approached primative cultures according to his faith in the unity of the species. Bachofen's ideas became part of the cultural ambience of the fin de siecle. They influenced ethnologists, social theorists and the poets of the Kosmische Runde, who discovered the religious power of his language. From this period on, the interpretation of his work is filled with ideological half-truths until a critical preparation of a Gesammelte Werke by the Meuli group in the 1940's began to set the record straight.

All interpretations of nineteenth-century American legal history include a central assumption: that the basic theory of American property law, derived from the English common law, gave the title owner of land total control over the uses of land. This study challenges that assumption. Fence laws required owners of land to fence or suffer livestock to trespass onto the fields. Every colony adopted some form of fence law and forced landowners to fence in order to acquire dominion over the land. In the Southern colonies and states these fence laws developed into a full-scale open range property regime. The southern plain folk developed a culture based on extensive use of this legally protected range. Under this set of laws, anyone could use unfenced lands for hunting, gathering or livestock grazing. Some even timbered and cultivated unclaimed lands. This study chronicles the rise and fall of the open-range property regime in the South. Starting from the colonial laws protecting free-ranging livestock, the open range emerged as the dominant property law concept of the antebellum years. In these years, planters and railroads had no success in wresting control over their unfenced land from the plain folk. Attacks on the range, both by landowners claiming their common law rights to control land usage and by railroads claiming the mantle of progress, merely served to strengthen Southern court's and legislature's commitment to the open range. After war and reconstruction, however, the emerging New South elite of planters, merchants and industrialists began an aggressive attack on the open range. With the ebbing of plain folk political power, especially after disfranchisement, the prerogatives of the range were gradually taken from them. The vigor of the open range system and the tenacity with which the southern plain folk fought to keep it, require us to re-evaluate our presumptions about nineteenth century law and society, particularly claims about upperclass dominance of the law.