'Trustees of posterity': Benjamin Disraeli and the European Bildungsroman

This thesis studies Benjamin Disraeli's use of the form of the "Bildungsroman" to invent and discover himself. It shows how Disraeli's own life was developing as a "Bildungsroman" while writing four of his twelve novels, Contarini Fleming, Coningsby, Sybil and Lothair, during the period 1832-1870. As each of these four novels is studied in turn in Chapters I-IV respectively, Disraeli's recurring hero appears in four guises, thus illustrating how the form of the "Bildungsroman" undergoes subtle changes. In the open-ended Contarini Fleming (1832) with its emphasis on youth and ambition, Disraeli had intended to create a work similar to the classical German "Bildungsroman" portraying the development of a character. Despite its many comparisons with Goethe's paradigmatic Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Disraeli's early novel has more of an affinity with Stendhal's Le rouge et Ie noire. The eponymous hero of Coningsby has the distinguishing quality of "insipidness" and is seen from the perspective of an exemplary class representative of the aristocracy. This novel is taken as an example of the English "Bildungsroman", an English "fairy story" because Coningsby's destiny is already predetermined. The hero of Sybil, Charles Egremont's conviction is that one's identity is not inherited but created, which returns to the classical ideal of "Bildung", and which Disraeli reformulated as "vocation". It is argued that poverty and its relief was not the theme of Sybil but was used to point to the opportunities open to a reeducated aristocracy. In Chapter IV it is shown that it is only with Lothair, written in old age, that Disraeli discovers himself and achieves a successful classical "Bildungsroman". The narrator evaluates the represented events in a restrained and indirect manner and demonstrates a concern with analysing what is involved in the hero's discovery of himself and the world. The "Bildungsroman's" valorization of the existing social order prompts Lothair to look towards the past. He refuses to consider the future still open and his discontinuation of the quest for a philosophy of life is presented as a sign of his achieved maturity and his "Bildung" is concluded. In these four self-referential works Disraeli constructed a composite character whose biography was that of the author himself

The motion of a viscous filament in a porous medium or Hele-Shaw cell: a physical realisation of the Cauchy-Riemann Equations

We consider the motion of a thin filament of viscous fluid in a Hele-Shaw cell. The appropriate thin film analysis and use of Lagrangian variables leads to the Cauchy-Riemann system in a surprisingly direct way. We illustrate the inherent ill-posedness of these equations in various contexts

Computational analysis of the SSME fuel preburner flow

A computational fluid dynamics model which simulates the steady state operation of the SSME fuel preburner is developed. Specifically, the model will be used to quantify the flow factors which cause local hot spots in the fuel preburner in order to recommend experiments whereby the control of undesirable flow features can be demonstrated. The results of a two year effort to model the preburner are presented. In this effort, investigating the fuel preburner flowfield, the appropriate transport equations were numerically solved for both an axisymmetric and a three-dimensional configuration. Continuum's VAST (Variational Solution of the Transport equations) code, in conjunction with the CM-1000 Engineering Analysis Workstation and the NASA/Ames CYBER 205, was used to perform the required calculations. It is concluded that the preburner operational anomalies are not due to steady state phenomena and must, therefore, be related to transient operational procedures

A method of automatically stabilizing helicopter sling loads

The effect of geometric and aerodynamic characteristics on the stability of the lateral degrees of freedom of a typical helicopter sling load is examined. The feasibility of stabilizing the suspended load by controllable fins was also studied. Linear control theory was applied to the design of a simple control law that stabilized the load over a wide range of helicopter airspeeds

Uniform asymptotics of the coefficients of unitary moment polynomials

Keating and Snaith showed that the $2k^{th}$ absolute moment of the characteristic polynomial of a random unitary matrix evaluated on the unit circle is given by a polynomial of degree $k^2$. In this article, uniform asymptotics for the coefficients of that polynomial are derived, and a maximal coefficient is located. Some of the asymptotics are given in explicit form. Numerical data to support these calculations are presented. Some apparent connections between random matrix theory and the Riemann zeta function are discussed.Comment: 31 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables. A few minor misprints fixe