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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-

"Her Terrible Splendor"

Description: Her Terrible Splendor is a poetry collection that transports the Greek witch-goddess Circe from her mythical island of Aeaea to modern-day East Texas, where I was raised. By locating Circe in the Piney Woods, I heighten the strangeness that I identify with that setting and open up new contexts for considering Circe as a woman, as an enchanter, and as figure of retelling and revision. Circe appears in an array of roles—friend, lover, mentor, alter-ego, muse—as the poems view her through differen… more
This item is restricted from view until June 1, 2028.
Date: May 2023
Creator: Pace, Aza

Chicana Decolonial Feminism: An Interconnectedness of Being

Description: Chicana decolonial feminism asks us to re envision a world that allows for various forms of beings, creating identities based on political coalitions, having an active compassion that translates into direct action that seeks to dismantle binaries that reinscribe colonialism. Chicana decolonial feminist thought actively seeks to dismantle sexism, to dismantle racism, to focus on personal experience as theory, to focus on the body as knowledge, reconceptualize knowledge, envision new ways of bein… more
This item is restricted from view until June 1, 2028.
Date: May 2023
Creator: Gómez, Maricruz Yvette

Stay for the Heron: Essays

Description: Hameline, Cassia Leigh. "Stay for the Heron: Essays." Doctor of Philosophy (English), May 2023, 146 pp., works cited, 27 titles. Stay for the Heron: Essays is an essay collection that explores truth, perception, and loss as it follows the writer's movement across landscapes that speak to a past she had, for so long, tried to run from. The essays in this collection seek to understand how we can write about difficult topics like abandonment, infidelity, and acts of self-destruction: do we get cl… more
This item is restricted from view until June 1, 2024.
Date: May 2023
Creator: Hameline, Cassia

The World We Want to Leave Behind: White Supremacy in the Apocalyptic Genre's Past, Present, and Future

Description: This dissertation examines the rise of the racialized apocalyptic genre from 1978 to 2019. The period chosen reflects the social shift of the American political right into a party that accepts white supremacy as a tenet. In the post-Civil Rights era, white Americans considered the issue of racism to be solved. With the historic Voting Rights Act and other major victories in the 1960s there was a moment when it seemed America may turn a corner. However, when Richard Nixon took office in 1969, he… more
This item is restricted from view until June 1, 2028.
Date: May 2023
Creator: Gentry, Jay Axline
open access

Queerness, Futurity, and Desire in American Literature: Improvising Identity in the Shadow of Empire

Description: This dissertation deploys queer theory and temporality to investigate the ways in which American authors were writing about identity at the turn of the twentieth century. I provide a more expansive use of queer theory, and argue that queerness moves beyond sexual and gender identity to have intersectional implications. This is articulated in the phrase "queer textual libido" which connects queer theory with affect and temporal theories. Queerness reveals itself on both narrative and rhetorical … more
Date: May 2021
Creator: Vastine, Stephanie Lauren
open access

Poor Things: Objects, Ownership, and the Underclasses in American Literature, 1868-1935

Description: This dissertation explores both the production of underclass literature and the vibrancy of material between 1868-1935. During an era of rampant materialism, consumer capitalism, unchecked industrialism, and economic inequality in the United States, poor, working class Americans confronted their socioeconomic status by abandoning the linear framework of capitalism that draws only a straight line between market and consumer, and engaging in a more intimate relationship with local, material thing… more
Date: May 2019
Creator: Johnson, Meghan Taylor

Given That the Body Was Made

Description: A collection of poems that explores notions of disability, family, and belief, with a preface that meditates on questions related to the ethical ramifications of various approaches to the making of poetry and art that takes up the suffering of others as subject matter.
Access: Restricted to UNT Community Members. Login required if off-campus.
Date: May 2019
Creator: Burke, Conor William

Brazos

Description: Brazos is a collection of poetry that comments on and critiques life in a small town in Texas. These poems situate the speaker both in this town and in spaces removed from the town, but the work always grapples with questions of how the speaker identifies himself via the relationship to that space. The creative portion is accompanied by a critical introduction that looks at the intersections of poetry and the lyric essay.
Access: Restricted to UNT Community Members. Login required if off-campus.
Date: May 2019
Creator: Carter, Justin
open access

Reading the Ruptured Word: Detecting Trauma in Gothic Fiction from 1764-1853

Description: Using trauma theory, I analyze the disjointed narrative structure of gothic works from 1764-1853 as symptomatic of the traumatic experience. Gothic novels contain multiple structural anomalies, including gaps in experience that indicate psychological wounding, use of the supernatural to violate rational thought, and the inability of witnesses to testify to the traumatic event. These structural abnormalities are the result of trauma that characters within these texts then seek to prevent or repa… more
Date: August 2016
Creator: Laredo, Jeanette A.
open access

The Spinning Place

Description: "The Spinning Place" finds its impetus in the intersection of the spiritual and material, and while often dwelling in a domestic milieu, the poems move outward both figuratively and literally. For instance, one poem re-narrates the tale of Rumpelstiltskin, several poems are about divination by various means (frogs, animal behavior), and another performs an erasure of the last supper so that it instead tells a woman's experience in a delivery room. I borrow the title of the collection from a sta… more
Date: August 2016
Creator: Wagenaar, Chelsea

Resurrection Attempts: Essays

Description: This dissertation is composed of a critical preface, "Reconciling Art and Account in the Creative Essay," and the essay collection Resurrection Attempts: Essays. The preface situates the following essay collection within the genre of contemporary creative nonfiction. Specifically, it argues that genre-bending or genre hybridity are inherent and unavoidable features of creative nonfiction writing and should be celebrated, rather than denied or lamented. It points to other writers who deliberatel… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Al-Qasem, Ruby

Improvisation without Accompaniment and What Passes Here for Mountains

Description: "Improvisation without Accompaniment" is a lyric investigation into the ways that an awareness of mutability and death can clarify or distort our experience of the world. The poems in this collection draw upon the speaker's small-town Texas upbringing to explore broader questions that arise as a consequence of his burgeoning awareness of mortality: What are the moral imperatives for an individual citizen in a larger political community? What are the bidirectional effects of our relationship wit… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Morton, Matthew Travis
open access

Spectral Evidence

Description: Spectral Evidence is a collection of poems that instigates a variety of omens, signs, divinations, and folktales to explore the concept of wish fulfillment. They arise in obedience to the compulsion to repeat past dramas brought on by failed love, the nostalgia of childhood, the damning legacy of language, the restriction of gender roles, death, etc. In order to quell these anxieties, the speaker looks beyond the self to both history and mythology, often invented mythologies as an attempt to co… more
Date: May 2017
Creator: Edwards, Trista
open access

Cultures of Elite Theatre in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Masque: Four Incarnations

Description: The early modern English masque is a hybrid form of entertainment that included music, dance, poetry, and visual spectacle, and for which there is no modern equivalent. This dissertation looks at four incarnations of the Elizabethan and Jacobean masque: the court masque, the masque embedded in the progress entertainment, the masque embedded in the commercial play, and the masque embedded in the commercial play performed at court. This study treats masques as a form of elite theatre (that is, th… more
Date: May 2022
Creator: Rogener, Lauren J
open access

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
open access

Unlike Things Must Meet: Metaphor in the Novels of Herman Melville

Description: For the purpose of this study, metaphor is defined as a comparison which is not literally true. Such a comparison may be explicitly stated, as in a simile, or it may merely be implied, as in synecdoche, metonymy, hyperbole, or personification. In each case the primary or tenor image, a person, place, object, or idea in the novel, is compared to a secondary or vehicle image, a person, place, object, or idea not literally the same as the tenor image. The body of data on which this investigation i… more
Date: May 1980
Creator: Gongre, Charles E.
open access

The Divine Coming of the Light

Description: The Divine Coming of the Light is a memoir-in-essays that covers an experience, from 2007 to 2010, when I lived in Kosuge Village (population 900), nestled in the mountains of central Japan. I was the only foreigner there. My memoir uses these three years as a frame to investigate how landscape affects identity. The book profiles who I was before Japan (an evangelical and then wilderness guide), why I became obsessed with mountains, and the fall-out from mountain obsession to a humanistic outlo… more
Date: May 2018
Creator: Peters, Clinton Crockett
open access

Reconsidering Regionalism: The Environmental Ethics of Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Willa Cather

Description: This study identifies environmentalist themes in the fiction and nonfiction of Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Willa Cather and argues that these ideals are interdependent upon the authors’ humanistic objectives. Focusing on these three authors’ overlapping interest in topics such as women’s rights, environmental health, and Native American history, this dissertation calls attention to the presence of a frequently unexplored but distinct, traceable feminist environmental ethic in American … more
Date: August 2011
Creator: Clasen, Kelly
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