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After the Planes

Description: The dissertation consists of a critical preface and a novel. The preface analyzes what it terms “polyvocal” novels, or novels employing multiple points of view, as well as “layered storytelling,” or layers of textuality within novels, such as stories within stories. Specifically, the first part of the preface discusses polyvocality in twenty-first century American novels, while the second part explores layered storytelling in novels responding to World War II or the terrorist attacks of 9/11. T… more
Date: May 2012
Creator: Boswell, Timothy
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The American Eve: Gender, Tragedy, and the American Dream

Description: America has adopted as its own the Eden myth, which has provided the mythology of the American dream. This New Garden of America, consequently, has been a masculine garden because of its dependence on the myth of the Fall. Implied in the American dream is the idea of a garden without Eve, or at least without Eve's sin, traditionally associated with sexuality. Our canonical literature has reflected these attitudes of devaluing feminine power or making it a negative force: The Scarlet Letter, Mob… more
Date: May 1993
Creator: Long, Kim Martin
Partner: UNT Libraries
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"Among Waitresses": Stories and Essays

Description: The following collection represents the critical and creative work produced during my doctoral program in English. The dissertation consists of Part I, a critical preface, and Part II, a collection of seven short stories and two nonfiction essays. Part I, which contains the critical preface entitled "What to Say and How to Say It," examines the role of voice in discussions of contemporary literature. The critical preface presents a definition of voice and identifies examples of voice-driven … more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Hobbs, Jessica
Partner: UNT Libraries
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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.
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Hell: the Rhetoric of Universality in Bessie Head

Description: This dissertation approaches the work of South African/Botswanan novelist Bessie Head, especially the novel A Question of Power, as positioned within the critical framework of the postcolonial paradigm, the genius of which accommodates both African and African American literature without recourse to racial essentialism. A central problematic of postcolonial literary criticism is the ideological stance postcolonial authors adopt with respect to the ideology of the metropolis, whether on the one … more
Date: May 1998
Creator: Edwards, George, Jr.
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Awen, Barddas, and the Age of Blake

Description: Studies of William Blake's poetry have historically paid little attention to the Welsh literary context of his time, especially the bardic lore (barddas), in spite of the fact that he considered himselfto be a bard and created an epic cosmos in which the bardic had exalted status. Of particular importance is the Welsh concept of the awen, which can be thought of as "the muse," but which must not be limited to the Greek understanding of the term For the Welsh, the awen had to do with the Christi… more
Date: May 1997
Creator: Franklin, William Neal
Partner: UNT Libraries
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"Beowulf": Myth as a Structural and Thematic Key

Description: Very little of the huge corpus of Beowulf criticism has been directed at discovering the function and meaning of myth in the poem. Scholars have noted many mythological elements, but there has never been a satisfactory explanation of the poet's use of this material. A close analysis of Beowulf reveals that myth does, in fact, inform its structure, plot, characters and even imagery. More significant than the poet's use of myth, however, is the way he interlaces the historical and Christian eleme… more
Date: May 1990
Creator: Aitches, Marian A. (Marian Annette)
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Body Matters: Gary Snyder, The Self and Ecopoetics

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 relat… more
Date: May 2000
Creator: Murray, Matthew
Partner: UNT Libraries

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
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Calling Up the Dead

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 old, three female, three male and one balcony.
Date: May 2000
Creator: Weaver, Brett
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Can These Bones Live? A Collection of Stories

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. M… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Hoey, Danny M., Jr.
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Chaucer and the Rhetorical Limits of Exemplary Literature

Description: Though much has been made of Chaucer's saintly characters, relatively little has been made of Chaucer's approach to hagiography. While strictly speaking Chaucer produced only one true saint's life (the Second Nun's Tale), he was repeatedly intrigued and challenged by exemplary literature. The few studies of Chaucer's use of hagiography have tended to claim either his complete orthodoxy as hagiographer, or his outright parody of the genre. My study mediates the orthodoxy/parody split by viewing … more
Date: May 1999
Creator: Youmans, Karen DeMent
Partner: UNT Libraries

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
Partner: UNT Libraries
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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
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Damned Good Daughter.

Description: My dissertation is a memoir based on my childhood experiences growing up with a mentally ill mother. She exhibited violence both passive and aggressive, and the memoir explores my relationship with her and my relationship with the world through her. "Damned Good Daughter" developed with my interest in creative nonfiction as a genre. I came to it after studying poetry, discovering that creative nonfiction offers a form that accommodates both the lyric impulse in poetry and the shaping impulse of… more
Date: May 2003
Creator: Yeatts, Karen Rachel
Partner: UNT Libraries

"Dear Bone Mother"

Description: This dissertation begins with a critical preface that examines the haunted present and its impact on writing for third and fourth generation Holocaust survivors. Then follows a collection of poetry and prose that examine themes of intergenerational trauma, experiences of the Shoah, grief, and chronic illness.
This item is restricted from view until June 1, 2027.
Date: May 2022
Creator: Macheret, Minadora
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Dirty Jokes and Fairy Tales: David Mamet and the Narrative Capability of Film

Description: David Mamet is best known as a playwright, but he also has a thriving film career, both as screenwriter and as director. He has taken very seriously each of these roles, formulating theories that, he suggests, account for the creative choices he makes. Though Mamet sometimes contradicts himself, as when he suggests that viewers should have the satisfaction of constructing their own meaning of a work, but at the same time is devoted to montage, which works by juxtaposing images that lead to a si… more
Date: May 1997
Creator: Haspel, Jane Seay
Partner: UNT Libraries
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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
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Down and Out: a Novel

Description: A creative dissertation consisting of two parts: a novel and a critical preface. The critical preface, titled “Novel without Falsehood” deals directly with David Shields’s Reality Hunger, touching on issues of reality as it pertains to truth, writing, fiction, and contemporary culture. The novel is entitled Down and Out and follows the fortunes of a small town in Arkansas before, during, and after its sole source of employment ceases to exist.
Date: May 2015
Creator: Briseño, J. Andrew
Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Dynamic Encounter: Shakespearean Influence on Structure and Language in Moby-Dick

Description: An understanding of the influence of Shakespeare on the structure and language of Moby-Dick is important because the plays of Shakespeare gave Melville a sudden insight into the significance of form and because his absorption of Shakespearean rhetoric enabled him to solve a serious artistic problem. In Moby-Dick Melville wished to write a work of symbolic fiction which would have both epic scope and tragic depth, but his difficulty lay in finding a structural and stylistic method which would pr… more
Date: May 1981
Creator: Smith, Marion L. (Marion Lynch), 1937-
Partner: UNT Libraries

Eleven: A Novel

Description: Trauma novel refers to a work of fiction that discloses serious loss or intense fear on individuals and groups. The traumatic experience is repetitious, timeless, and unspeakable. Gayl Jones, Jesmyn Ward, Tayari Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison are only a few authors who have written this type of novel. The traumatic events that occur in the books are rape, miscarriage of justice, and slavery, to name a few. The experienced trauma manifest as fragmented memory, silence, commitment phobia,… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Smith, Sanderia Faye
Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Elusive Mother in William Faulkner's Major Yoknapatawpha Families

Description: Families in much of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction are built upon traditional patriarchal structure with the father as head and provider and the mother or mother figure in charge of keeping the home and raising the children. Even though the roles appear to be clearly defined and observed, the families decline and disintegrate.
Date: May 1995
Creator: Bunnell, Phyllis Ann
Partner: UNT Libraries
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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
Partner: UNT Libraries
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