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5203 L $$aWilliam Hale White's posthumously published autobiographical memoir, The Early Life of Mark Rutherford (1913), is examined in terms of its origin, nature, and intent to provide a new perspective on the writer's life and beliefs. Through investigation of its setting and by analysis of the life described, White is re-framed within the wider historical and theological context.

In both fact and fiction, the lower-class intellectual is a significant figure of the years 1880--1911. I concentrate on the three novelists who have made the most sustained artistic enquiry into the subject. In the process I hope to show how in practice Victorianism developed into modernism. Hale White and his obscure provincials experience loss of faith but are unable to reject certain values that were fundamental to that faith. If they cannot return to old certainties they cannot embrace the new ones of secularism find mass opinion; significantly, White sets his novels early, rather than late, in the nineteenth century. Gissing writes of his own times but he and his characters are poor struggling scholars in a society given to vulgarity and materialism. They can, however, still respond to certain worldly preoccupations---notably gentility. They are perpetual lodgers seeking a real home. Unlike White and Gissing, Wells is consciously committed to the future. However, his ambitious young scientist or utopian is an 'Anachronic Man', a term just as applicable to a White or Gissing protagonist. The Wellsian hero, ostensibly confident, can still suffer a crisis of identity and identification. I emphasise the individual nature of every chosen example of this character-type; each of them, however, suffers from a conflict between the need to find his unconventionally individual bearings and his need to relate to his fellow human beings in the community, however crass or mediocre that community may be. He faces undesirable extremes of isolation and integration. He is in limbo, and even 'unclassed'. If he originates between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, he cannot belong to either. His intellectual qualities cut him off from the class or community of his birth but do not necessarily enable him to place himself in another. I show how the ultimate condition for him is one of isolation, but I end on a positive note.

U.M.

Parapinopsin (PNP) is a novel pigment protein present in pineal gland of the brain. PNP protein is similar in function to the human visual pigment protein rhodopsin, found in the eye. The aim of project is to sequence and characterize PNP in different frogs species to understand more about PNP as little is known about its structure and function. Tadpole cDNA from different frogs species (X.laevis, Rana temporaria and Rana tigrina) were used during the project. PCR primers were designed against Xenopus tropicalis PNP cDNA the only reported sequence at NCBI. PNP PCR products were cloned into pGEM vectors and sequenced. The cDNA sequencing results of X. laevis showed 100% homology but R. temporaria and R. tigrina showed ~99.9% similarity with X. tropicalis. The 0.1% dissimilarity is due to a point mutation from G to A at the 2nd position in the 156th codon. Genomic DNA sequence study results revealed a heterozygosity in R. temporaria and a point mutation in R. tigrina PNP. This point mutation is very important as it creates a stop codon possibly resulting in protein truncation. These findings were further confirmed by SSP-PCR (sequence specific primers- PCR) results. Western blotting was used to determine more about the size of the protein produced. Two peptides regions were selected at N and C termini. Western Blotting results support the cDNA study results with a 37 kDa protein band of PNP in the X. laevis protein sample only. Bioinformatics softwares were used to study evolutionary genetics and to predict the 2D structural elements and a 3D structural model for PNP from X. laevis. Further studies were conducted on X. laevis melanophores to look for PNP expression. Northern Blotting results indicated the absence of PNP in melanophores. For protein expression studies the entire coding sequence of PNP gene was chemically synthesized and subsequently cloned into the vector pASKGPCR for expression in E. coli. The aim of this study was to overexpress and purify the protein for functional studies as well as structural studies using X-ray crystallography and high field NMR.

Much critical attention has been given to the effects of the Victorian religious climate on the literature of the period, and on the novel in particular. Most studies, however, either focus on the numerous "Novels of Faith and Doubt" (to quote the title of a long series of novels republished in the mid 1970s), seeking simply to demonstrate that Christian belief continued to be an important clement in the cultural matrix., and often viewing the novel primarily as a historical document, or, alternatively, stress is laid upon the process of "sccularisation", by which the language of orthodox. religion is seen as being adapted, through the medium of the novel, to the purposes of the new humanism. This study challenges hath these approaches by asking specifically what happens to religious belief when it is voiced from within the realist novel. Because this literary form is, by definition, ill-equipped to describe a transcendent level of ex.perience, faith as held by characters in the novel is shown in this study to be limited and distorted as compared with historical records of Victorian religious ideas and feelings. The study also argues, however, that the persistent and positive accounts of Christian belief, even in novels by writers, such as George Eliot, whose personal allegiance is primarily to humanism, and in particular, the frequent demonstration of moral strength possessed specifically by characters whose religious faith gives them a spiritual, other-worldly perspective on human ex.perience, indicates that the so-called "secularising" novelists still retain, at the least, strong emotional tics with Christian belief. For them, faith offers not merely a uniquely powerful language for profound human feelings, but, agreeing here with orthodox. believers, a means of communicating with truth absolutely beyond the human world which is real in every sense. If the nineteenth-century novel transforms faith into a means of voicing humanist concerns, then, the study contends, this is the etTect not so much of the novelists' conscious desire to conquer new territories for secular morality as of the this-worldly focus of the novel form itself. The study opens by discussing two "Novels of Faith and Doubt" - Charlotte Yongc's The Heir of Redclyffe, and George Macfxmald's David Elglnbrod - in order to show how the novel form both distorts and is distorted by a religious content. The following four chapters undertake detailed ex.aminations of a number of novels, including tex.ts by George Eliot, Thomas I lardy, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell and Mark Rutherford, looking at these works in the light of various specifically religious writings to demonstrate the relations within the Victorian novel between the individual's consciousness of his or her self, of the world of human ex.perience, and of both moral and other-worldly levels of being. Chapter Six., focusing primarily on Charlotte Bronte's Villette, ex.plores the difficulty of finding any means at all by which experience beyond the scope of secularised speech can be communicated in the social and cultural environment of the Victorian age. The study concludes with a brief look at nineteenth century religious poetry as an alternative literature which attempts to convey both the importance and the limitations of Christian faith in the period, suggesting that, by contrast with poetry, the novel has unique strengths and weaknesses in this area. Throughout, the Bible is appealed to as the standard of faith, but also as a central religious text for Victorian writers. Relevant quotations are used to provide a perspective from which to evaluate the transformations of doctrine in these novels.