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The Development of Keats's Mythic Understanding of the Function of the Poet

Description: John Keats is a mythopoeic poet who created his own mythical substructure, often adapting traditional figures from mythology to give a special meaning to the entire canon of his major work. The early poems are hesitant, imitative, and groping, but the mature poems receive a large part of heir symbolic meaning from the substructure of Keats's myth of the poet on which they rest. In the works of John Keats, then, the reader finds a touchstone of experiences common to all humanity, shaped into Kea… more
Date: August 1971
Creator: Glenn, Priscilla Ray
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Robert Penn Warren's Archetypal Triptych: A Study of the Myths of the Garden, the Journey, and Rebirth in The Cave, Wilderness, and Flood

Description: Robert Penn Warren, historian, short story writer, teacher, critic, poet, and novelist, has received favorable attention from literary critics as well as the general reading public. This attention is merited, in part, by Warren's narrative skill and by his use of imagery. A study of his novels reveals that his narrative technique and his imagery are closely related to his interest in myth.
Date: December 1971
Creator: Phillips, Billie Ray Sudberry, 1937-
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Samuel Johnson's Epistolary Essays: His Use of Personae in The Rambler, The Adventurer, and The Idler

Description: One goal of the present study is to emphasize Johnson's "talent for fiction, the range of his comic invention, and the subtlety of his tone." A substantial group of essays from all three serials, those written in the form of letters ostensibly submitted to the essayist by his readers, appears to offer many examples of the inventiveness of Johnson's mind, and it is to this group that the term epistolary essays refers. Johnson was following a well-established tradition in utilizing the device of … more
Date: August 1972
Creator: Vonler, Veva Donowho
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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"A Straunge Kinde of Harmony": The Influence of Lyric Poetry and Music on Prosodic Techniques in the Spenserian Stanza

Description: An examination of the stanzas of The Faerie Queene reveals a structural complexity that prosodists have not previously discovered. In the prosody of Spenser's epic, two formal prosodic orders function simultaneously. One is the visible structure that has long been acknowledged and studied, eight decasyllabic lines and an alexandrine bound into a coherent entity by a set meter and rhyme scheme. The second is an order made apparent by an oral reading and which involves speech stresses, syntactica… more
Date: August 1972
Creator: Corse, Larry B.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Absalom, Absalom! A Study of Structure

Description: The conclusion drawn from this study is that the arrangement of material in Absalom, Absalom! is unified and purposeful. The structure evokes that despair that is the common denominator of mankind. It reveals both the bond between men and the separation of men; and though some of the most dramatic episodes in the novel picture the union of men in brotherly love, most of the material and certainly the arrangement of the material emphasize the estrangement of men. In addition, by juxtaposing chap… more
Date: August 1973
Creator: Major, Sylvia Beth Bigby
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Some Linguistic Aspects of the Heroic Couplet in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley

Description: This dissertation is an examination of the characteristics of Phillis Wheatley's couplet poems in the areas of meter, rhyme, and syntax. The metrical analysis employs Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser's theory of iambic pentameter, the rhyme examination considers the various factors involved in rhyme selection and rhyme function, and the syntactic analysis is conducted within the theoretical framework of a generative grammar similar to that proposed in Noam Chomsky's "Aspects of the Theory of … more
Date: August 1973
Creator: Holder, Kenneth R.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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The Restoration Players: Their Performances and Personalities

Description: Some of the older actors of the Restoration provided a link between the pre- and post-Commonwealth stages by preserving their craft during the years from 1642 to 1660, despite the harsh and numerous restrictions enacted by the Parliament. Some of the younger players, on the other hand, quickly mastered their art and continued the tradition preserved for them by men such as Charles Hart and Michael Mohun. The greatest actors and actresses of the period certainly influenced the direction of Resto… more
Date: May 1974
Creator: Rosenbalm, John O.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Self-Alienating Characters in the Fiction of John Steinbeck

Description: The primary purpose of this study is to show that John Steinbeck's concern with alienation is pervasive and consistent from the beginning of his career as a writer until the end. The pervasiveness of his concern with alienation is demonstrated by examining his two early collections of short stories and by showing how alienated characters in these stories resemble alienated characters in all the author's major works of fiction. Since much confusion surrounds the meaning of the word "alienation,"… more
Date: May 1974
Creator: McDaniel, Barbara Albrecht
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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John Fowles: a Critical Study

Description: This critical introduction to the works of John Fowles focuses upon his three novels, with secondary attention to his poetry, essays, and The Aristos, his non-fiction book of personal philosophy. Giving some biographical detail, the first chapter treats the influence of other writers upon Fowles's work and discusses his thought--especially as it appears in The Aristos, the poems, and the essays. The second chapter is a study of The Magus, Fowles's first novel, although published second. The Ari… more
Date: August 1974
Creator: Huffaker, Robert, 1936-
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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A Prototypical Pattern in Dreiser's Fiction

Description: Beginning in 1911 with Jennie Gerhardt and continuing through the publication of The "Genius" in 1915, all of Dreiser's major fiction is curiously marked by the same recurring narrative pattern. The pattern is always triangluar in construction and always contains the same three figures-- a vindictive and vengeful parent, outraged by an outisder's violation of personal and societal values; an enchanted offspring; and a disrupted outsider who threatens established order. In spite of each work's d… more
Date: December 1974
Creator: Wood, Bobbye Nelson
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Anti-Christian Elements in Thomas Hardy's Novels

Description: A commonplace among Hardy critics is that as a young man Hardy lost his Christian faith and entered a serious religious disillusionment. The mainstream of Hardy criticism has followed the general consensus that Hardy suffered keenly as a result of this experience and looked back on Christianity with poignant nostalgia. If his view is not purely nostalgic, traditional criticism has insisted, then it seems at worst only ambivalent. The purpose of this dissertation is to argue that Hardy's attitud… more
Date: May 1975
Creator: Alexander, B. J.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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God's Newer Will: Four Examples of Victorian Angst Resolved by Humanitarianism

Description: One aspect of the current revaluation of Victorian thought and literature is the examination of the crisis of religious faith, in which the proponents of doubt and denial took different directions: they became openly cynical and pessimistic; they turned from religion to an aesthetic substitute; or they concluded that since mankind could look only to itself for aid, the primary duties of the individual were to find a tenable creed for himself and to try to alleviate the lot of others. The moveme… more
Date: May 1975
Creator: Speegle, Katherine Sloan
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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The Use of the Bible in George Eliot's Fiction

Description: The purpose of this study is to demonstrate George Eliot's literary indebtedness to the Bible by isolating, identifying, and analyzing her various uses of Scripture in her novels. This study is an attempt to demonstrate in some detail George Eliot's literary indebtedness to the Bible, to show that in the course of her fictional career she made virtually every possible use of the Bible. She at times presents Bibles themselves as significant objects, she refers to the Bible-reading habits of vari… more
Date: May 1975
Creator: Jones, Jesse C.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Eighteenth-Century Rhetorical Figures in British Romantic Poetry: A Study of the Poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth Byron, Shelley, and Keats

Description: Rhetoric, seen either as the art of persuasion or as the art of figurative expression, has been largely neglected as an approach to the poetry of the Romantics. The most important reason for this seems to be the rejection of rhetoric by the Romantics themselves. As a result of negative comments about rhetoric by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, scholars seeking clues about the Romantics' literary principles in their critical writings have agreed that eighteenth-century rhetoric was ei… more
Date: August 1975
Creator: Kennelly, Laura B.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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The Bob-Wheel and Allied Stanza Forms in Middle English and Middle Scots Poetry

Description: The purposes of this study were to formulate a definition of the "bob-wheel" stanza in which a number of Middle English and Middle Scots poems were written, to inventory and describe these works, with special attention to the structure of individual stanzas, to identify the genres, the periods, and the dialects in which they were written, and to trace their origin and development between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The dissertation includes a general introduction of the topic, chapt… more
Date: August 1976
Creator: Kirkpatrick, Hugh
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Good Nature and Prudence: Moral Concepts of Character in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Description: To appreciate fully the ethical dimensions inherent in the literature of the eighteenth century it is necessary to understand the moral bias of an author, a bias often best ascertained by a study of the treatment he accords good nature and prudence. Although several scholarly articles and portions of longer studies recognize the importance of these virtues for individual writers, no single work has appeared which traces fully the history of the idea of good nature and prudence as complementary … more
Date: August 1976
Creator: Wynne, Edith J.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Sanctifying the Profane: Religious Themes in the Fiction of Frederick Buechner

Description: Frederick Buechner is an American novelist, born in 1926, who, since 1950, has created eight novels and five works of nonfiction. Although his work has been reviewed and admired by prestigious critics, no lengthy study has yet appeared. Yet the merit of Buechner's work deserves wider critical attention. This study does not attempt to deal comprehensively with Buechner's twenty-five year span of creativity. Instead it presents a consideration of what has been Buechner's most consistent concern t… more
Date: August 1976
Creator: Myers, Nancy B.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Failure of the Warrior-Hero in Shakespeare's Political Plays

Description: The problem with which this investigation is concerned is that of the warrior-hero ideal as it evolves in Shakespeare's English and Roman plays, and its ultimate failure as a standard for exemplary conduct. What this study demonstrates is that the ideal of kingship that is developed in the English histories, especially in the Second Tetralogy, and which reaches its zenith in Henry V, is quite literally overturned in three Roman plays--Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. The met… more
Date: December 1976
Creator: Ferguson, Susan French
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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"The Living Skein": A Stylistic Study of Dylan Thomas

Description: This study examines rhythm, syntax, sound, and diction in selected early and late poems from Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems. It demonstrates, on the basis of stylistic evidence, that the later poetry is the greater achievement. The early and later poems are different in the area of rhythm. Early poems are regularly metered with a strong iambic beat, and a majority of lines are end-stopped. Rhythms in the later, finer poems are irregular, and enjambed lines predominate. The later poems show an i… more
Date: May 1978
Creator: Franco, June W.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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English Phonology Without Underlying Glides

Description: This dissertation demonstrates that the optimal account of English phonology denies phonemic status to oral glides. That is, it shows that all instances of phonetic [y] and [w] are predictable by rule. These occurrences include the following: formative initial glides, such as those in yet and wet; post-consonant, pre-vocalic [w] in such forms as quit, guava, and white and post-consonant, pre-vocalic [y] in such forms as cute, few, million, onion, and champion; the [y] following the tense vowels… more
Date: May 1979
Creator: Leath, Helen Lang
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The Symbolic and Structural Significance of Music Imagery in the English Poetry of John Milton

Description: The purpose of this study is to investigate how John Milton uses music imagery in his English poetry. This is accomplished through consideration of the musical milieu of the late Renaissance, particularly of seventeenth century England, through examination of the symbolic function of music imagery in the poetry, and through study of the significance of music imagery for the structure of the poem. Milton relies on his readers' familiarity with sounds and contemporary musical forms as well as wit… more
Date: May 1979
Creator: Woods, Paula M.
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A Study of Body-and-Soul Poetry in Old and Middle English

Description: In this paper I will examine the sources for the tradition of the address of the soul to the body or the dialogue between, the two. I will consider the Old and Middle English poetic expressions of the body-and-soul legend in terms of the criticism of the ten poems which specifically belong to that tradition and the elements which constitute that genre. I will also deal with those poems written at the same time which exhibit one or more of those elements, with the body-and-soul tradition in Engl… more
Date: August 1979
Creator: Tuck, Mary Patricia
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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