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Browsing University of Oregon Administration by Subject "19th century"

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    Documents of Culture, Documents of Barbarism: Gothic Literature, Empiricism, and the Rise of Professional Science
    (University of Oregon, 2013-07-11) Grace, Andrew; Spillman, Deborah
    The trope of the discovered manuscript, in which a narrator or character finds a document and presents it to the readers or other characters, has been a part of the Gothic genre since its inception. The discovered manuscript trope persists, despite criticism and satire, in part because it enables Gothic stories to situate their readers. In the nineteenth-century, as the presence of lawyers, doctors, scientists, journalists and other experts grew in society, Gothic novelists drew upon their methodologies and their records to revise the discovered manuscript trope. This project examines the trope of the discovered manuscript throughout Gothic literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to discuss how the Gothic functions as a literature of terror and how its techniques evolved in response to the epistemologies espoused by empiricist philosophers and professional scientists. I draw upon Jacques Rancière's theories about the representative and aesthetic regimes for the identification of the artistic image to support three central, interrelated claims about the role, and evolution, of the discovered manuscript trope within Gothic fiction: 1) Gothic literature responds to an epistemological problem in the empiricist tradition revolving around the connections between sensory uncertainty and linguistic gaps; 2) reading and interpreting documents play vital roles in the Gothic tradition; and 3) examining documents in Gothic fiction as image operations illuminates how they participate in a story's epistemological drama. In order to support these claims, this project presents four chapters that discuss a broad range of Gothic texts from Walpole's The Castle of Otranto to Stoker's Dracula.
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    Nineteenth-century Italian ballet music before national unification: Sources, style, and context
    (University of Oregon, 2010-09) Ertz, Matilda Ann Butkas, 1979-
    Though not widely acknowledged, ballet and its music were important to the nineteenth-century Italian theatre-goer. While much scholarship exists for Italian opera, less study is made of its counterpart even though the ballet was an important feature of Italian theatre and culture. This dissertation is the first in-depth survey of the music for Italian ballets from 1800-1870, drawing from the hundreds of ballet scores in two important collections: The John and Ruth Ward Italian Ballet Collection, part of the Harvard Theatre Collection, and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Research Collections. After discussion of primary and secondary sources (Chapters II and III), I provide an overview of the context in which ballets were performed during the period (Chapter IV). In Chapter V I discuss musical styles for mime and for dance, and dance sub-categories such as the pas de deux, ballabile, and national dances. I also explore specific commonly occurring choreo-musical sub-topics such as anger, love, storms, hell, witches, devils, and sylphs. Finally, I examine two complete ballets in detail. Chapter VI on Salvatore Viganò's La Vestale includes a discussion of the hitherto neglected manuscript full score and of the published piano reduction. Chapter VII on Giuseppe Rota's Bianchi e Negri explores the musical and dramatic adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin . While examining the traits of Italian ballet music as a genre and exploring relationships between music, dance, and libretto, this dissertation initiates a wider discussion of the social-political context of ballet music in nineteenth-century Italian theatrical life during the turbulent decades spanning the 'Risorgimento' period.