Body Matters: Gary Snyder, The Self and Ecopoetics
Date: May 2000
Creator: Murray, Matthew
Description: Gary Snyder has offered, in poems and essays, ways to acknowledge the interrelationships of humans with the more-than-human. He questions common notions of selfness as well as understandings of what it is to be human in relationship to other species and ecosystems, and he offers new paradigms for the relationship between cultures and the ecosystems in which these cultures reside. These new paradigms are rooted in a reevaluation of our attitudes toward our physical bodies which impacts our relationship to the earth and raises new possibilities for an ecological spirituality or philosophy. The sum of Snyder's endeavors is a foundation for an understanding of ecopoetics. Snyder's poem "The Trail is Not a Trail" is an interesting place to begin examining how human perceptions of the self are central to the kinds of relationships that humans believe are possible between our species and everything else. In this poem there is a curious fusion of the speaker and the trail. In fact, with each successive line they become increasingly difficult to separate. The physical self is central to Snyder's poetry because his is a poetry of the self physically rooted in ever-shifting relationship with the biosphere. The relationship of the self to ...
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A Boy in a Canoe
Date: August 2011
Creator: Parr, David
Description: The dissertation consists of a collection of personal essays about hunting and fishing. Because the essays are narratives and contain dialogue, characterization, description, themes, etc., they fall under the genre of creative nonfiction. The dissertation has two parts. Part I consists of an essay that discusses the author’s struggle to combine creative nonfiction with outdoor writing and also describes the author’s dilemma of writing about hunting, a topic that is often controversial at the university, while a graduate student. Part II of the dissertation consists of narratives that recount the author’s hunting and fishing experiences that occurred in North Texas and in the mountains of New Mexico. The essays discuss fishing for trout and hunting for deer, wild boars, quail, and duck. Three major themes are developed throughout the dissertation. The first theme describes the close relationship that exists between the author and his father. This closeness is partly due to the time that they have shared during decades of hunting and fishing together. The second theme discusses the ethics of hunting and especially focuses on which methods of hunting are ethical and which methods are not. The third theme explores the complex and sometimes unpleasant interactions that occur between ...
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Bridging the Gap: Finding a Valkyrie in a Riddle
Date: May 2007
Creator: Culver, Jennifer
Description: While many riddles exist in the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book containing female characters, both as actual human females and personified objects and aspects of nature, few scholars have discussed how the anthropomorphized “females” of the riddles challenge and broaden more conventional portrayals of what it meant to be “female” in Anglo-Saxon literature. True understanding of these riddles, however, comes only with this broader view of female, a view including a mixture of ferocity and nobility of purpose and character very reminiscent of the valkyrie (OE wælcyrige), a figure mentioned only slightly in Anglo-Saxon literature, but one who deserves more prominence, particularly when evaluating the riddles of the Exeter Book and two poems textually close to the riddles, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, the only two poems with a female voice in the entire Old English corpus. Riddles represent culture from a unique angle. Because of their heavy dependence upon metaphor as a vehicle or disguise for the true subject of the riddle, the poet must employ a metaphor with similar characteristics to the true riddle subject, or the tenor of the riddle. As the riddle progresses, similarities between the vehicle and the tenor are listed for the reader. Within ...
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Browning's Literary Reputation: 1833-1870
Date: August 1961
Creator: Shelton, John A.
Description: The purpose of this thesis is to present English opinion of Robert Browning, contemporary with him, from the anonymous publication in 1833 of his first poem, Pauline, through the appearance in 1868-69 of what is agreed to be his masterpiece, The Ring and the Book. This study will consider the acceptance of each of Browning's publications, in chronological order of their appearance.
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Permallink:digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc130478/
Browning's The Ring and the Book in Twentieth-century Criticism
Date: January 1955
Creator: Blakney, Paul S.
Description: Proceeding from the general judgment that The Ring and the Book is, indeed, Browning's greatest achievement, and that it, more than any other of his works, was responsible for establishing him in an extraordinary position of public acceptance and esteem, I propose, in this study, to examine the four features of The Ring and the Book which have most frequently attracted critical attention and to which the greater portion of analysis and review of The Ring and the Book have been devoted.
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Byron as Revealed in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Date: 1944
Creator: England, Helen Azaline
Description: The purpose of this thesis is to show the extent to which Byron revealed himself as the hero of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the extent to which that hero was an original creation.
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Permallink:digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc75384/
Calling Up the Dead
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
Date: May 2000
Creator: Weaver, Brett
Description: Calling Up the Dead is a collection of seven short stories which all take place over the final hours of December 31, 1999 and the first few hours of January 1, 2000. The themes of time, history, and the reactions toward the new millennium (positive, negative, indifferent) of a variety of cultures are addressed. Each of the six major continents has a story, along with its cultural perspective, delivered by narrators both young and oldthree female, three male and one balcony.
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Permallink:digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2439/
Can These Bones Live? A Collection of Stories
Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community.
Date: May 2010
Creator: Hoey, Danny M., Jr.
Description: The collection concerns itself with race, gender, masculinity, marginalization, the act of violence as a means of self expression, identity and the performance of identity, love, and loss. The collection also uses historical events-more specifically, events that are central to black culture in Northeast, Ohio- to situate the characters and witness their response to these historical events. I strive to illustrate blackness as both political and fragmented with the characters in my collection. My characters believe that what they are doing-exacting violence, abusing women, disrespecting each other- is somehow the normative; that somehow what it is that they have learned is how they should perform black identity.
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Permallink:digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28431/
Change of Condition: Women's Rhetorical Strategies on Marriage, 1710-1756
Date: December 2005
Creator: Wood, Laura Thomason
Description: This dissertation examines ways in which women constructed and criticized matrimony both before and after their own marriages. Social historians have argued for the rise of companionacy in the eighteenth century without paying attention to women's accounts of the fears and uncertainties surrounding the prospect of marriage. I argue that having more latitude to choose a husband did not diminish the enormous impact that the choice would have on the rest of a woman's life; if anything, choice might increase that impact. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Mulso Chapone, Mary Delany, and Eliza Haywood recorded their anxieties about and their criticisms of marriage in public and private writings from the early years of the century into the 1750s. They often elide their own complex backgrounds in favor of generalized policy statements on what constitutes a good marriage. These women promote an ideal of marriage based on respect and similarity of character, suggesting that friendship is more honest, and durable than romantic love. This definition of ideal marriage enables these women to argue for more egalitarian marital relationships without overtly calling for a change in the wife's traditional role. The advancement of this ideal of companionacy gave women a means of ...
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Permallink:digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4921/
Character Studies in John Steinbeck's Fiction
Date: 1951
Creator: Oyler, Martha Jo
Description: This thesis is a study of the characters in John Steinbeck's fiction.
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Permallink:digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc97037/