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open access

Across Borders and Barlines: Chicana/o Literature, Jazz Improvisation, and Contrapuntal Solidarity

Description: In this study, I examine Chicana/o writings and Black and Brown musical traditions as they entwine in urban centers and inform local visions of inclusion and models of social change. By analyzing literature and music from South Texas, Southern California, and Northeastern Michigan, I detail how the social particularities of each zone inform Chicana/o cultural productions rooted in the promise of empowerment and the possibility of cross-cultural solidarity. I assert that highlighting localized v… more
Date: May 2014
Creator: Leal, Jonathan J.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

“The Angular Degrees of Freedom” and Other Stories

Description: The preface, " Performing Brain Surgery: The Problematic Nature of Endings in Short Fiction," deals with the many and varied difficulties short story writers encounter when attempting to craft endings. Beginning with Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Connor and moving to my own work, I discuss some of the obscure criteria used to designate a successful ending, as well as the more concrete idea of the ending as a unifying element. Five short stories make up the remainder of this thesis: "In-between … more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Feagin, Aprell McQueeney
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Conjugal Rights in Flux in Medieval Poetry

Description: This study explores how four medieval poems—the Junius manuscript’s Genesis B and Christ and Satan and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Parliament of Fowls—engage with medieval conjugal rights through their depictions of agentive female protagonists. Although many laws at this time sought to suppress the rights of women, especially those of wives’, both pre- and post-conquest poets illustrate women who act as subjects, exercising legal rights. Medieval canon and common law suppor… more
Date: May 2014
Creator: Ward, Jessica D.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

“The Inevitable: Withdrawn”

Description: The Inevitable: Withdrawn is a critical preface and collection of non-fiction writing: personal essay, lyric essay, fragments, and experimental forms. The work’s cohesive subject matter is the author’s European vacation directly following her divorce. Within the pieces, the author attempts to reconcile who she is when starting over and she begins to ask questions regarding the human condition: How do I learn to exhibit intimacy again, not just with romantic partners, but with also in a familial… more
Date: May 2014
Creator: Christy, Gwendolyn Anne
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Networks of Social Debt in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Description: This thesis argues that social debt profoundly transformed the environment in which literature was produced and experienced in the early modern period. In each chapter, I examine the various ways in which social debt affected Renaissance writers and the literature they produced. While considering the cultural changes regarding patronage, love, friendship, and debt, I will analyze the poetry and drama of Ben Jonson, Lady Mary Wroth, William Shakespeare, and Thomas Middleton. Each of these writer… more
Date: August 2014
Creator: Criswell, Christopher C.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Paralysis As “Spiritual Liberation” in Joyce’s Dubliners

Description: In James Joyce criticism, and by implication Irish and modernist studies, the word paralysis has a very insular meaning. The word famously appears in the opening page of Dubliners, in “The Sisters,” which predated the collection’s 1914 publication by ten years, and in a letter to his publisher Grant Richards. The commonplace conception of the word is that it is a metaphor that emanates from the literal fact of the Reverend James Flynn’s physical condition the narrator recalls at the beginning o… more
Date: May 2014
Creator: Heister, Iven Lucas
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Penumbra

Description: This thesis consists of a collection of poems. The poems entail a discussion of the weight of human decisions with regards to gender, sexuality, music, religion, and environment. A great deal of these pieces are in conversation with a type of death or an eclipsed ending in order to examine the outcome of each varied individual response to mortality.
Date: August 2014
Creator: Brizendine, Elizabeth Katherine
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Room of Windows

Description: This thesis consists of a collection of poems and a critical preface. The preface examines the collaborative process as integral to art-making. Using a range of poems and prosody essays as support, I argue that reciprocal relationships are intrinsic to poetry, providing a model for actual collaboration. I also examine my own collaboration with a visual artist, which resulted in many of the poems in this collection.
Date: August 2014
Creator: Lynch, Erin
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

"Stealing Dreams" and Other Stories

Description: The critical preface, "Learning to Break the Rules" discusses workshop rules as guidelines, as well as how and why I learned to break them. The creative portion of this thesis is made up of eight short stories: "The Many Incarnations of Blazer Chief," "Anna's Monsters," "The Pecan Tree's Daughter," "When the Seas Emptied," "The Umbrella Thief," "How to Forget," "Fracture," and "Stealing Dreams."
Date: December 2014
Creator: Matthews, Elise
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Underground Men: Alternative Masculinities and the Politics of Performance in African American Literature and Culture

Description: This study explores intersections between performance, race and masculinity within a variety of expressive cultural contexts during and after the African American Civil Rights Movement. I maintain that the work of James Baldwin is best situated to help us navigate this cross section, as his fiction and cultural criticism focus heavily on the stage in all its incarnations as a space for negotiating the possibilities and limits of expressive culture in combating harmful racial narratives imposed … more
Date: May 2014
Creator: Gray, Jezy J.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

“Werewolves and Time Machines”

Description: This collection consists of a critical preface and five short stories. The preface considers the use of the fantastical in fiction and how it works as a tool to reach readers in comparison with realistic fiction. The stories investigate this in by following several strange characters put in everyday human situations.
Date: May 2014
Creator: Edwards, Frisco
Partner: UNT Libraries
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