Search Results

open access

Abraham Lincoln and the American Romantic Writers: Embodiment and Perpetuation of an Ideal

Description: The American Romantic writers laid a broad foundation for the historic and heroic Abraham Lincoln who has evolved as our national myth. The writers were attracted to Lincoln by his eloquent expression of the body of ideals and beliefs they shared with him, especially the ideal of individual liberty and the belief that achievement of the ideal would bring about an amelioration of the human condition. The time, place and conditions in which they lived enhanced the attraction, and Lincoln's able l… more
Date: December 1992
Creator: Hicks, Mary G. (Mary Geraldine)
open access

Active or Passive Voice: Does It Matter?

Description: This thesis reports on the use of active and passive voice in the workplace and classroom through analysis of surveys completed by 37 employees and 66 students. The surveys offered six categories of business writing with ten sets of two sentences each, written in active and passive voice. Participants selected one sentence from each set and gave a reason for each selection. The participants preferred active over passive 47 to 46 percent of opportunities, but they preferred mixed voice over both… more
Date: December 1993
Creator: Watson, Rose E. (Rose Elliott)
open access

The Angel in the House and The Woman in White: The Unfolding and Decoding of a Victorian Stereotype

Description: Abstract: Modern readers frequently perceive female characters in Victorian novels as insipid and inane, blaming the static portrayals on the angel in the house stereotype attributed to Coventry Patmore's poem of the same name. The stereotype does not accurately reflect the actual Victorian woman's life, however. Examining how the stereotype evolved and how the middle-class Mid-Victorian woman really lived provides insight into literary devices authors employed either to reinforce the angel ide… more
Date: August 1991
Creator: Spencer, Sandra L.
open access

Bearclaw: a Novel

Description: Written in the tradition of American political suspense thrillers such as "Fail-Safe" and "Seven Days In May," "Bearclaw" uses their idealistic and nationalistic elements to tell a story of an American President eager to lead the world's peoples in a quest to achieve man's "highest destiny," the conquest of space. Believing that this common goal will cause mankind to come together in a spirit of brotherhood, he misreads the historical purpose of the United States and, in the end, refuses to rec… more
Date: May 1992
Creator: Elston, James C. (James Cary)
open access

Billy and Me and Other Stories

Description: The thesis begins with an introductory chapter that explains the problems that short story theorists encounter when they try to define the short story genre. Part of the problem results from the lack of a definition of the short story in the Aristotelian sense. A looser, less traditional definition of literary genres helps solve some of the problem. Six short stories follow the introduction. "Billy and Me," "Queen of Hearts," "The Whiskey Man," and "Psychedelic Trash Cans" are representative of… more
Date: August 1992
Creator: Champion, Laurie
open access

Browning and Dickens: Religious Direction in Victorian England

Description: Many Nineteenth century writers experienced the withdrawal of God discussed by Miller in The Disappearance of God. Robert Browning and Charles Dickens present two examples of "Fra Lippo Lippi" and Great Expectations model effective alternatives to accepting God's absence. Conversely "Andrea del Sarto" accepts the void the other two heroes shun.
Date: December 1991
Creator: Zeske, Karen Marie
open access

Bureaucratic Writing in America: A Preliminary Study Based on Lanham's Revising Business Prose

Description: In this study, I examine two writing samples using a heuristic based on Richard A. Lanham's definition of bureaucratic writing in Revising Business Prose: noun-centered, abstract, passive-voiced, dense, and vague. I apply a heuristic to bureaucratic writing to see if Lanham's definition holds and if the writing aids or hinders the information flow necessary to democracy. After analyzing the samples for nominalizations, concrete/abstract terms, active/passive verbs, clear/unclear agents, textual… more
Date: May 1993
Creator: Su, Donna
open access

Deserts I Have Known

Description: Deserts! Have Known contains a scholarly preface exploring why writers write, examining the characteristics offictionwriters, and addressing the importance of place, both emotional and geographical, in fiction. Four original short stories are included in this thesis. "Miracle at Mita" depicts an aging surfer trying to overcome his fear of commitment. "Coyote Man" explores a father's guilt and the isolation resulting from that guilt. "Time, and Time Again" traces a young woman's fear of marriage… more
Date: May 1998
Creator: Kinsey, Saralea
open access

Diane Di Prima: The Muffled Voice of the Beat Generation

Description: The Beat rejection of conventional values meant a rejection of marriage, family, and a nine-to-five job, and few women were prepared to make that kind of radical shift in a society that condemned women for behaving the way the Beats behaved. Though she has faced difficulty in getting published, Beat writer Diane Di Prima has been publishing steadily for the past forty years. Di Prima has also lived the life of a Beat, wandering the country, avoiding nine-to-five work and supporting herself with… more
Date: August 1997
Creator: Goggans, Heather
open access

Do Not Eat Fish from These Waters and Other Stories

Description: Earl suffers from a guilty obsession with a monster catfish. Eddie Klomp searches dog tracks for the ghosts of his lost childhood. Mike Towns is a hopeless blues musician who loses everything he cares for. Blair Evans learns to love a pesky wart. Americana becomes confused with the difference between knowledge and sex. Do Not Eat Fish from These Waters And Other Stories is a collection of short stories that explores the strange and often defeated lives of these Southern characters (and one from… more
Date: August 1995
Creator: Taylor, William Nelson
open access

The Evolution of Dexter and Me

Description: The Evolution of Dexter and Me is a collection of one vignette and four short stories. All of the stories deal with young men figuring out and coping with their daily life and environment. The "Dexter stories" deal with a character I developed and evolved, Dexter, a sane young man trying to find the best way to cope in an insane system.
Date: May 1996
Creator: Bond, Ray (Edgar Ray)
open access

Fade Away: A Novel

Description: The struggle for survival of an American family revolves around Mitch Wilcox, a relief pitcher for a fictional major league baseball team. Nearing the end of his long career, he must decide whether to retire or to sign a new contract. His dilemma centers on his wife, Nicole, who argues for his retirement; and his only child, Twylight, who has run away from home. The novel traces the final two weeks of a season, during which Mitch's team battles for a pennant and he delays his decision because o… more
Date: May 1993
Creator: Wilson, Steven L. (Steven Lawrence)
open access

The Feminist Trollope: Hero(in)es in The Warden and Barchester Towers

Description: Although Anthony Trollope has traditionally been considered an anti-feminist author, studies within the past decade have shown that Trollope's later novels show support for female power and sympathy for Victorian women who were dissatisfied with their narrow roles in society. A feminist reading of two of his earliest novels, The Warden and Barchester Towers, shows that Trollope's feminism is not limited to his later works. In The Warden, Trollope acclaims female power and "woman's logic" throug… more
Date: August 1992
Creator: Kohn, Denise Marie
open access

From Skeletons to Orchards

Description: This thesis is a creative work that is segmented into three main phases in order to display the developing poetic growth and control in the work of Paul Andrew Thies. The first phase is titled "Skeletons and Rhinoceri." It was a phase where I focused on more classical forms of poetry, namely accentual and syllabical sonnets. This phase was greatly influenced by both Charles Baudelaire and William Butler Yeats. The second phase, titled "Clandestinies," was one in which I tried to develop a more… more
Date: May 1999
Creator: Thies, Paul Andrew
open access

D. H. Lawrence: Misogyny as Ideology in His Later Works of Fiction and Nonfiction

Description: Critics continue to debate Lawrence's attitude toward women: Some say Lawrence is a misogynist, some say he is an egalitarian, and others say he is ambivalent toward women. If Lawrence's works are divided into two chronological periods, before and after 1918, these differences of opinions begin to dissolve. Lawrence is fair in his treatment of women in the earlier works; however, in his later works Lawrence restricts women to what he calls the sensual realm, the realm of feelings and emotions.… more
Date: August 1991
Creator: Hester, Vicki M. (Vicki Martin)
open access

If I Could Live Next Door for a Day

Description: If I Could Live Next Door for a Day is a collection of short stories with the recurrent theme of taking life for granted. "Climbing the Fence" is a story about a sexually unfulfilled woman who has an unfulfilling affair. In "Chained Melody" a condescending young man learns about life in and out of jail. "An Educated Man" shows the inferiority of one man in the presence of others he considers more important. A deluded school counselor brings a jealous boy and his younger brother together in "Pig… more
Date: May 1993
Creator: Yoke, Tad M. (Tad Mitchell)
open access

Jonica Run

Description: The thesis begins with an introductory chapter that helps to define and locate the point of view from which the novella is told. The introduction also cites modern authors who influenced the tone, structure, and content of the novella. Thirteen chapters and an epilogue follow the introduction. Every third or fourth chapter is written as a vignette. The vignettes function as interchapters with the intention of giving contrast and balance to the main plot chapters.
Date: December 1992
Creator: Crowder, Wade (Wade Allen)
open access

Languages in Contact: Polish and English

Description: The purpose of this study was to examine the Polish language of immigrants who came to the United States during or after World War II and to test two related hypotheses: 1. Speakers of Polish use a number of lexical intrusions. 2. Lexical intrusions differ in scope depending on whether those speakers had immigrated with minimal education or they received at least 12 years of schooling prior to their immigration. The study was conducted in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in January and February of 19… more
Date: August 1990
Creator: Beauchamp, Hanna O. (Hanna Olga)
open access

Melville's Vision of Society : A Study of the Paradoxical Interrelations in Melville's Major Novels

Description: I hold that Melvillean society consists of paradoxical relationships between civilization and barbarianism, evil and good, the corrupt and the natural, the individual and the collective, and the primitive and the advanced. Because these terms are arbitrary and, in the context of the novels, somewhat interchangeable, I explore Melville's thoughts as those emerge in the following groups of novels: Typee, Omoo, and White-Jacket demonstrate the paradox of Melvillean society; Redburn, Moby-Dick, and… more
Date: May 1995
Creator: Terzis, Timothy R. (Timothy Randolph)
open access

Non-Native Speakers of English and Denominal Regularization

Description: The purpose of this study was to determine whether nonnative speakers of English have access to specifically-linguistic constraints governing past tense morphology. Forty non-native speakers of English rated the naturalness of 29 exocentric, or headless, verbs in a partial replication of Kim, Pinker, Prince, and Prasada (1991) which looked at the same phenomenon in native speakers. Nonnative speaker performance was similar to the 40 subject native speaker control group. A correlation also exist… more
Date: August 1994
Creator: Borden, David S. (David Scott)
open access

Personal Archaeology: Poems

Description: A collection of poems focused primarily on rural America and the South, the creative writing thesis also includes material concerned with the history of Mexico, particularly Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. The introduction combines a personal essay with critical material discussing and defining the idea of the Southern writer.
Date: May 1992
Creator: Sweeden, R. Renee
open access

The Possible House

Description: The thesis begins with an introductory chapter that explains the creative process, providing quotes from well-known poets and examples from my own personal history and ideas. Some of the creative concepts discussed are different manifestations of inspiration, such as the duende and the Muses. However, the act of creating a work of art--what actually occurs when an artist works--remains undiscovered. Every poet is part of the poetic tradition, yet she also strives to supersede that very traditio… more
Date: August 1993
Creator: Herbst, Elke Maria
Back to Top of Screen