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open access

The Hoboken War Bride: A Novel

Description: The Hoboken War Bride is a work of historical fiction set in Hoboken, New Jersey during World War II. A young soldier named Daniel and an aspiring actress named Hildy marry days after meeting, though the marriage is doomed to fail. This young couple is not compatible. Daniel ships out to basic training the day after their hasty marriage, leaving Hildy behind with his family, the Anellos, who she quickly becomes attached to. Hildy is exposed to family in a way she had never lived with her own, e… more
Date: August 2018
Creator: Riccardelli, Charlie Frank
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Xenotopia: Death and Displacement in the Landscape of Nineteenth-Century American Authorship

Description: This dissertation is an examination of the interiority of American authorship from 1815–1866, an era of political, social, and economic instability in the United States. Without a well-defined historical narrative or an established literary lineage, writers drew upon death and the American landscape as tropes of unity and identification in an effort to define the nation and its literary future. Instead of representing nationalism or collectivism, however, the authors in this study drew on lands… more
Date: December 2017
Creator: Lewis, Darcy Hudelson
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

"Goodness and Mercy"

Description: The stories in this collection represent an increasingly transcultural world by exploring the intersection of cultures and identities in border spaces, particularly the Mexican-American border. Characters, regardless of ethnicity, experience the effects of migration and deportation in schools, hometowns, relationships, and elsewhere. The collection as a whole focuses on the issues and themes found in Mexican-American literature, such as loss, separation, and the search for identity.
Date: May 2016
Creator: Craggett, Courtney, 1986-
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Ours is the Kingdom of Heaven: Racial Construction of Early American Christian Identities

Description: This project interrogates how religious performance, either authentic or contrived, aids in the quest for freedom for oppressed peoples; how the rhetoric of the Enlightenment era pervades literatures delivered or written by Native Americans and African Americans; and how religious modes, such as evoking scripture, performing sacrifices, or relying upon providence, assist oppressed populations in their roles as early American authors and speakers. Even though the African American and Native Amer… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Robinson, Heather Lindsey
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Welcome to the Rest of It: Essays

Description: This creative nonfiction dissertation is a book of essays that explore the author's life and relationship to Upstate New York. The project also connects this experience to gender and trauma. Though the topics range from local history to cosmetic surgical procedures, the essays are collected by how they illuminate cultural tensions and universal truths. These essays are preceded by a critical preface that examines the differences between essays collections, books of essays, and argues for the re… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Murphy, April
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

With the Earth in Mind: Ecological Grief in the Contemporary American Novel

Description: "With the Earth in Mind" responds to some of the most cutting-edge research in the field of ecocriticism, which centers on ecological loss and the grief that ensues. Ecocritics argue that ecological objects of loss abound--for instance, species are disappearing and landscapes are becoming increasingly compromised--and yet, such loss is often deemed "ungrievable." While humans regularly grieve human losses, we understand very little about how to genuinely grieve the loss of nonhuman being, natur… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Reis, Ashley E.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Bass Reeves: a History • a Novel • a Crusade, Volume 1: the Rise

Description: This literary/historical novel details the life of African-American Deputy US Marshal Bass Reeves between the years 1838-1862 and 1883-1884. One plotline depicts Reeves’s youth as a slave, including his service as a body servant to a Confederate cavalry officer during the Civil War. Another plotline depicts him years later, after Emancipation, at the height of his deputy career, when he has become the most feared, most successful lawman in Indian Territory, the largest federal jurisdiction in A… more
Date: August 2015
Creator: Thompson, Sidney, 1965-
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Down and Out: a Novel

Description: A creative dissertation consisting of two parts: a novel and a critical preface. The critical preface, titled “Novel without Falsehood” deals directly with David Shields’s Reality Hunger, touching on issues of reality as it pertains to truth, writing, fiction, and contemporary culture. The novel is entitled Down and Out and follows the fortunes of a small town in Arkansas before, during, and after its sole source of employment ceases to exist.
Date: May 2015
Creator: Briseño, J. Andrew
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Development of Myth in Post-World-War-II American Novels

Description: Most primitive mythologies recognize that suffering can provide an opportunity for growth, but Western man has developed a mythology in which suffering is considered evil. He conceives of some power in the universe which will oppose evil and abolish it for him; God, and more recently science an, technology, were the hoped-for saviors that would rescue him. Both have been disappointing as saviors, and Western culture seems paralyzed by its confrontation with a future which seems death-filled. Th… more
Date: August 1974
Creator: Hall, Larry Joe
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Reverberating Reflections of Whitman: A Dark Romantic Revealed

Description: Walt Whitman has long been celebrated as a Romantic writer who celebrates the self, reveres Nature, claims unity in all things, and sings praises to humanity. However, some of what Whitman has to say has been overlooked. Whitman often questioned the goodness of humanity. He recognized evil in various shapes. He pondered death and the imperturbability of Nature to human death. He exhibited nightmarish imagery in some of his works and gory violence in others. While Whitman has long been called a … more
Date: August 1999
Creator: Lundy, Lisa Kirkpatrick
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Getting It On Home: Ways of Telling the Story

Description: In this collection of poems and essays, the author demonstrates two different methods for examining the same theme: the notion of "home"—how to get there, how to remain there and bear articulate witness to the forces which drive that author to write. The introduction sets forth an explanation for the use of the specific form chosen for expression, with an analysis of the intent behind that form. In these essays and poems, the author accounts for her years on the Texas Panhandle, in Montana, an… more
Date: May 1996
Creator: Vanek, Mary
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Religious Dimensions of William Faulkner: An Inquiry into the Dichotomy of Puritanism

Description: "The Religious Dimensions of William Faulkner: An Inquiry into the Dichotomy of Puritanism" traces a secular mode of thinking of American moral superiority and the gospel of success to its religious origins. The study shows that while the basis for American moral superiority derives from the typological correspondence between sacred history and American experience, the gospel of success results from the Puritan preoccupation with work as a virtue instead of a necessity because labor improves on… more
Date: May 1999
Creator: Wu, John Guo Qiang
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

American Grotesque from Nineteenth Century to Modernism: the Latter's Acceptance of the Exceptional

Description: This dissertation explores a history of the grotesque and its meaning in art and literature along with those of its related term, the arabesque, since their co-existence, specifically in literature, is later treated by a well-known nineteenth-century American writer in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque- Theories or views of the grotesque (used in literature), both in Europe and America, belong to twelve theorists of different eras, ranging from the sixteenth century to the present period, es… more
Date: August 1994
Creator: Kisawadkorn, Kriengsak
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Mark Twain, Nevada Frontier Journalism, and the "Territorial Enterprise" : Crisis in Credibility

Description: This dissertation is an attempt to give a picture of the Nevada frontier journalist Samuel L. Clemens and the surroundings in which he worked. It is also an assessment of the extent to which Clemens (and his alter ego Twain) can be considered a serious journalist and the extent to which he violated the very principles he championed.
Date: May 1995
Creator: Wienandt, Christopher
Partner: UNT Libraries
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