Description: The present study has been undertaken in order to create an informative presentation of the scope of French influence throughout the development of English. With this goal in mind a word list has been compiled and arranged by historical periods to show to what extent the language of each period has benefited from its borrowing.

Description: This study attempts to establish the fact that Whitman was a frequent attendant at the legitimate theatre and that throughout his life he had a vital concern for it. The nature and scope of Whitman's interest in the legitimate theatre has been examined in detail to show by specific reference to his works the probable effect of his theatrical interest.

Description: This thesis is a study of Robinson's general mental and philosophical development and the forces which contributed to it, the kinds and sources of Robinson's characters and the method and importance of their portrayal, Robinson's single portraits of men, Robinson's portrayal of women characters, Robinson's historical portraits, and the relationship of the short poems to Robinson's total work.

Description: The interjection of a new and dynamically different reading of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is imperative, if scholars want to clearly see many of the hidden facets of the novel that have gone unexamined because of out-dated scholarship. Ian Watt’s assumption that Sterne “would probably have been the supreme figure among eighteenth-century novelists” (291) if he had not tried to be so odd, and the conclusion that he draws, that “Tristram Shandy is not so much a novel as a parody of a novel” (291), is incorrect. Throughout the thesis, I argue that Sterne was not burlesquing other novelists, but instead, was engaging with themes that are now being examined by postmodern theories of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean François Lyotard: themes like the impenetrability of identity (“Don’t puzzle me” (TS 7.33.633)), the insufficiency of language (“Well might Locke write a chapter upon the imperfections of words” (5.6.429)), and the unavailability of permanence (“Time wastes too fast” (9.8.754)). I actively engage with their theories to deconstruct unexamined themes inside Tristram Shandy, and illuminate postmodern elements inside the novel. However, I do not argue that Tristram Shandy is postmodern. Instead, I argue that if the reader examines the novel outside ...

Description: The purpose of this thesis is to explore the relationship between romanticism in literature and Methodism in religion, and to learn whether their common qualities are a matter of cause and effect or are merely parallel developments with a common source.