School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemThe decorative works of Sir Edward Poynter and their critical reception( 1999)This thesis examines the decorative works of the nineteenth century British artist Sir Edward Poynter (1836-1919). His achievements as a decorative designer received considerable recognition during his lifetime but in more recent years have been overshadowed by his reputation as an academic painter. The neglect of this important component of Poynter's oeuvre by twentieth century scholarship is partly due to the destruction or dismantling of several of his major decorative commissions. Other schemes which were the focus of extensive public debate during the Victorian era — such as Poynter's designs for the Central Hall of the Palace of Westminster, the Lecture Theatre apse at the South Kensington Museum and the decoration of the dome of St Paul's Cathedral — were either not realised or only partially completed. This thesis aims to establish the extent and significance of Poynter's decorative career by a comprehensive analysis of the individual commissions and their historical context. These works encompass a variety of media, including painted furniture, stained glass, mosaics, ceramic tiles and frescoes. The accompanying catalogue and illustrations document the commissions with particular reference to their design and the stages of their execution. The thesis also locates Poynter's decorative schemes in the context of the wider debate regarding the nature and role of mural decoration during the second half of the nineteenth century. It elucidates, in particular, the crucial role played by materials and techniques in the contemporary reception of decorative works. Another important issue that arises from this study is the previously unrecognised importance of the Gothic Revival movement for the development of Poynter's career. Its influence is apparent in his belief in the role of architecture as a unifier of the arts, and in the emphasis in his decorative designs upon eclecticism and craftsmanship. Poynter's extensive involvement with the South Kensington Museum also had a major impact upon his decorative aesthetic. The strong Renaissance orientation of his mature work, which focusses on pictorial and narrative values, was directly reinforced by that institution. Poynter emerges from this study as an important but neglected figure in the history of nineteenth century British art, whose career illuminates both the positive and negative attitudes to mural decoration that characterise this period.
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Item'Pilgrims of the picturesque': the amateur woman artist and British colonialism, circa 1750-1860( 1996)Until recent feminist revisions of art history, British and British colonial amateur women artists have been almost totally ignored. Although biographical information is available about them, there is no general study which analyses their collective position and role in British and colonial societies. This is the broad aim of the thesis. It examines the construction of the subject of the British, middle-class, amateur, woman artist from the late eighteenth-century, her art training and employment opportunities, and her role in establishing amateur artistic culture in the colonies of Australia and India. It is an interdisciplinary study because amateur women artists typically produced hybrid, non-canonical, visual works that cross over into the fields of science and literature. The thesis explores the way amateur women’s various leisure and work practices were linked, discursively and practically, using an interdisciplinary approach which draws on feminism, postcolonialism and Foucault’s analysis of discursive practices. These approaches to historical study have in common an analysis of power in relation to the subject. Here, the power dynamics of class, race and gender are analysed in relation to the subject of the amateur woman artist. The thesis traces a key development in the ideological construction of the amateur woman artist to the 1790s in Britain, using the evidence of female conduct and other manuals. These promoted a rational, religious, domestic and maternal model of femininity, influenced by Evangelical religious ideas and gendered concepts of nature. ‘Feminine’ leisure pursuits, such as drawing, were redefined as self-disciplinary practices which would help achieve a desirable type of modern, middle-class, female subjectivity. This discourse extended into the construction of ‘feminine’ artistic genres in commercially available drawing-manuals and was practically reinforced by the conventions of amateur women’s private art training. The thesis revises definitions of the amateur woman artist, particularly the conventional split made between the amateur of the ‘female’ private sphere and the professional of the ‘male’ public sphere. These categories overlapped in middle-class women’s artistic employment. Moreover, their status was different in the nineteenth-century. While amateurs are now devalued relative to their professional counterparts, amateurism was then a mark of class superiority. The stigma attached to professional status for women, and the structural obstacles put in the way of their achieving it, meant that amateur and professional women artists trained, worked and presented themselves in similar ways. In the so-called ‘private’ sphere, it can be seen that women’s domestic, amateur, art production served the community rather than the self and therefore belonged as much to the public as to the private sphere. The thesis examines questions of white, middle-class women’s agency in raced, classed and gendered systems of colonial power. In Australia and India, male and female amateurs were central in founding artistic cultures, which were an instrument of class hegemony. Gendered hierarchies are evident within these class-based amateur cultures. In reading women’s representations of colonial lands and other races, the thesis argues that their conventional adoption of the picturesque mode of description, ostensibly a protest against ‘male’ violence and ‘progress’, was ambivalent and, ultimately, compliant with it.
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ItemVikingälamningar: den nordiska påverkan på de olika språken i Storbritannien( 1994)From English abstract: This study is my investigation into the effects of the Scandinavian languages on English, and to a lesser extent, on the other languages of Great Britain. It is not meant to be an exhaustive work: rather its aim is to consider the influence which the Nordic languages have exerted on the languages of Britain and Ireland at various times in history, and to note the similarities and differences by which the languages were affected. The greatest influence on English occurred during the Viking period, when England was invaded and settled by hordes of Danes and Norwegians. As Old Norse and Old English were mutually comprehensible languages, a great deal of ‘language mixing’ took place, with Old English adopting many Old Norse words into its vocabulary. Since the languages were so similar, however, with many words identical in both languages, it is often hard to determine the extent of the language borrowing. I have categorised the Old English borrowings from Scandinavian into various groups of influence. Often the English adopted Scandinavian words needles sly; in these cases the Norse words either replaced the native ones, or were kept to form synonyms. Sometimes a distinction developed over time between two words which originally had the same meaning. Often such 'Word pairs did not endure into standard English, and are best preserved in the northern dialects of England, and in Lowland Scots. Sometimes, owing to the similarity of the languages in question, an English word underwent a subtle change in meaning, keeping its English form but becoming semantically closer to the Scandinavian word. Many words were evidently borrowed to describe things with which the English people had not previously come into contact: the sailing expertise of the Vikings accounts for a large borrowed nautical vocabulary, much of which did not survive. Terms relating to battle, and conversely, to law and order were adopted, although most of these were later replaced by Norman expressions. A great many words which were, however, taken into the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary were so called 'homely' words; and these common, everyday words are the ones which have lasted to form a core of the basic English vocabulary. These can be used to illustrate the close degree of intermingling which must have taken place between the Anglo Saxons and Vikings, people who shared a common German heritage. Many of the words were given English inflections, and are thus hard to distinguish from the native vocabulary. The linguistic effect of the Norsemen was not restricted to loanwords. The Anglo Saxons borrowed the Norse pronouns 'they', 'them' and 'their'; and many prepositions, if not directly borrowed from the invaders, probably owe their existence to being reinforced by their language. Many grammatical peculiarities attributable to the Scandinavians survive in the various dialects, particularly those of the Danelaw. Even the elimination of grammatical inflexions has been thought to have been traced to the Norsemen. Since the two peoples did not need to become bilingual in order to understand each other, it is natural to assume that they conversed in a kind of pidgin, which stripped the language of its grammatical complexities. Many Norse elements can also be found in place names dating from this time all over Britain, and the Nordic suffix '-son', found in so many English surnames, is a perpetual reminder of the Viking presence. The influence of the Viking languages was not confined to English, but its effect on the other languages was decidedly less. The Celtic languages differed so markedly from the Germanic ones that the integration of Norse words which were decidedly foreign was not nearly so smooth. In Wales the Norse influence is restricted almost exclusively to place names, but in the Gaelic of Ireland, Scotland and Man, where the Vikings settled for centuries, their legacy is easily discernible. Most noticeable is the impact on the languages of the Orkney and Shetland Isles: although Norn died out a few centuries ago, many words survive in local dialect, and the Islanders are proud of their Scandinavian heritage. Scandinavian loanwords from later times are scarcer, and their sphere of influence much reduced. Literary borrowings were popular in the Romantic period, and several technical terms have entered the English language at a later date, but these are not common. Later borrowings are often restricted to describing Scandinavian concepts. The Scandinavian languages in America may at first be thought to form a parallel case to the earlier Norse in England, but this is shown not to be the case. Since the languages had become so different, most Scandinavians were forced to learn English to survive in America, and although English borrowings are common in 'American-Swedish' and, American-Norwegian', the reverse is not true. English loanwords' are, indeed, numerous in all the Scandinavian languages today, and now it is English which exerts a great influence on all its northern cousins. That this has not always been the case, however, and that the consequences of the Scandinavian invasion are still felt in the English language and its neighbours is shown by my investigation: Den nordiska paverkan pa de olika spdiken i Storbritannien.