Browsing by Subject "Idealism"

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From Winckelmann to Wilde : masculinity and the historical poetics of nineteenth-century British Hellenism
(2018-05) Spitzer-Hanks, Dorrel Thomas, III; Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle, 1957-; Hoad, Neville Wallace, 1966-; Baker, Samuel; King, Josh; MacKay, Carol
This dissertation is a survey of nineteenth-century British Hellenism in texts authored between 1768 and 1895 by elite, bourgeois, and working-class people both female and male. Beginning in 18th-century Germany, the dissertation tracks the influence of Johann Joachim Winckelmann on nineteenth-century British Hellenism, asserting that there is a characteristic cluster of representational attributes visible in British Hellenist texts that display a shared ideological emphasis. Winckelmann, who rose from humble beginnings to become the Vatican’s prefect of antiquities, bequeathed a systematic art-historical approach to classical Greek art that became an idealist discourse of British Greekness through the influence of the annual lectures given by Sir Joshua Reynolds, founding president of the Royal Academy of Art, to students between 1768 and 1792. Posthumously the ‘Grand Style’ aesthetics Reynolds promulgated became highly politicized, its influence clear in the debates surrounding the parliamentary purchase of the Parthenon Marbles from Lord Elgin in 1816, in the poetry, prose, art and architecture of the 1820s and 1830s, in specific exhibits at the Great Exhibition of 1851, in the anthropological debates touched off by Darwin’s Origins of Species after 1859, and in Oscar Wilde’s fin-de-siécle advocacy of Dress Reform and his reformed, Reynoldsian aesthetic idealism. Particularly during Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trials, the political valence of nineteenth-century British Hellenism is inescapable, being explicitly enunciated in Wilde’s famous “The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name” speech, but I argue throughout that nineteenth-century British Hellenism tends to create ‘enfigurations’ of subjectivity that constrain those who adopt them through insistent reference to an ideal subjectivity that is embodied in white, abled, elite, heterosexual male bodies resembling those found in classical Greek art. Thus I show that while the political valence of nineteenth-century British Hellenism could be contested, the terms of the debate remained fixed around an unmarked yet hypervisible central term, which fixity acted to foreclose radical political change throughout the nineteenth century, and particularly in the 1890s, when British sexological debates made the figure of the modern male homosexual visible at the same time that campaigns for tolerance of homosexuality were energetically quashed
A study in the sociology of Islam
(1948-08) Wardī, ʻAlī; Moore, Harry E. (Harry Estill)
The present thesis is an attempt to study some of the social theories of Islam, not as logical ideas existing in a vacuum, but rather as idealogies which are in close interaction with the social conditions in the midst of which they arise. It should be remembered at this point that this thesis is not intended to be a comprehensive research into the entire field of the sociology of Islam. The job is too enormous to be undertaken by a single researcher. This work is restricted to the study of one aspect of it, that is: the dilemma of Islam, or in other words, the conflict between idealism and realism in the history of Islam. The conflict between idealism and realism exists, as we shall see later, in almost every phase of the human society, but it may not be an exaggeration to say that in the history of Islam it manifested itself in a very intensive form. In this thesis the attempt is made to discuss the reason for, and the development of, this peculiar aspect of Islam.