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open access

The Hostess

Description: The following is a critical preface and portion of a novel-in-progress produced during my master's program in creative writing at the University of North Texas. The preface analyzes the way time and point of view work together to create or determine structure in fiction, as well as provide added meaning. In order to explore these topics I focus on two novels, Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, and speak to how these elements have influenced my own … more
Date: August 2012
Creator: Tomberlin, Jessica
open access

"How Can We Know the Dancer from the Dance?": Cognitive Poetics and William Butler Yeats's Poetry

Description: Cognitive poetics, the recently developed field of literary theory which utilizes principles from cognitive science and cognitive linguistics to examine literature, is applied in this study to an exploration of the poetry of William Butler Yeats. The theoretical foundation for this approach is embodiment theory, the concept from cognitive linguistics that language is an embodied phenomenon and that meaning and meaning construction are bodily processes grounded in our sensorimotor experiences. A… more
Date: May 2017
Creator: Pagel, Amber Noelle
open access

How Shakespeare Used His Sources in Richard II

Description: The subject of this investigation is how Shakespeare used his sources in Richard II. The sources to be investigated are Edward Hall's History of England, Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Ireland and Scotland; The Civil Wars between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York, by Samuel Daniel; and The First Part of the Reign of King Richard the Second: Or Thomas of Woodstock, an anonymous manuscript play.
Date: 1949
Creator: Quinn, Florence Kell

How to Factor Loss

Description: How to Factor Loss is a collection of poems and translations prefaced by a critical paper over Robert Hass's “Meditation at Lagunitas.” The preface, “A Sensuous Theory, A Sensuous Poem,” explores how Hass merges the discourses of theory and poetry to create a poem that hangs suspended between a confidence and an anxiety about language. The poems in this thesis are primarily responses to finitude. The first section turns toward an “other” as a strategy of placating desire and of reaching both in… more
Access: Restricted to UNT Community Members. Login required if off-campus.
Date: May 2002
Creator: Hall, Todd R.
open access

The Human Body is Not Designed for Ambivalence: Odes

Description: The critical analysis section of this dissertation seeks to define the ode using examples in translation from Greek and Latin odes and examples in English written from the 1500s to the 2000s. Although most definitions of the ode contend that this subgenre of the lyric is an occasional poem of praise that includes a meditative or mythological element, the ode is far more complex. An ode is an occasional poem, but it works to privilege rather than strictly praise its subject, allowing for the sp… more
Date: December 2007
Creator: Walker, Tammy
open access

Human Relationships in the Poetry of Robert Frost

Description: Since the beginnings of recorded literature, authors have been most interested in the human situation, the relationships of mankind: man's struggle to accept himself and his life situation, to achieve harmony with his fellow man, to realize happiness with one of the opposite sex, and to seek answers to his relationship with his Creator. This thesis attempts to illustrate that Robert Frost was among those who found these the most significant themes for poetic expression.
Date: August 1969
Creator: Myers, Nancy B.
open access

The Hybrid Hero in Early Modern English Literature: A Synthesis of Classical and Contemplative Heroism

Description: In his Book of the Courtier, Castiglione appeals to the Renaissance notion of self-fashioning, the idea that individuals could shape their identity rather than relying solely on the influence of external factors such as birth, social class, or fate. While other early modern authors explore the practice of self-fashioning—Niccolò Machiavelli, for example, surveys numerous princes identifying ways they have molded themselves—Castiglione emphasizes the necessity of modeling one's-self after a vari… more
Date: December 2017
Creator: Ponce, Timothy Matthew

Iconoclast in the mirror.

Description: This work explores identity positions of speakers in modern and contemporary poetry with respect to themes of subjectivity, self-awareness, lyricism, heteroglossia, and social contextualization, from perspectives including Bakhtinian, queer, feminist and postructuralist theories, and Peircian semiotics. Tony Hoagland, W.H. Auden, Adrienne Rich, and the poetic prose of Hélène Cixous provide textual examples of an evolving aesthetic in which the poet's self and world comprise multiple dynamic, op… more
Access: Restricted to UNT Community Members. Login required if off-campus.
Date: August 2005
Creator: Alexander, Lydia L.

"if i am a phoenix..."

Description: An essay and short story collection about rebirth and being trans and neurodivergent. The essays and stories cover the entire length of my MA, but are mostly written before I came out as trans and edited after. The arc follows this discovery as well as the discovery of my writing following more experimental means including the twisting and playing with the braided essay, the introduction of essaying moves to fiction forms, and moving from what I thought was about death to what I realized I was … more
This item is restricted from view until June 1, 2027.
Date: May 2022
Creator: Huff, Jasmyn
open access

If I Could Live Next Door for a Day

Description: If I Could Live Next Door for a Day is a collection of short stories with the recurrent theme of taking life for granted. "Climbing the Fence" is a story about a sexually unfulfilled woman who has an unfulfilling affair. In "Chained Melody" a condescending young man learns about life in and out of jail. "An Educated Man" shows the inferiority of one man in the presence of others he considers more important. A deluded school counselor brings a jealous boy and his younger brother together in "Pig… more
Date: May 1993
Creator: Yoke, Tad M. (Tad Mitchell)
open access

The Image of Germany in the Novels of Günter Grass

Description: This thesis will attempt to scrutinize Günter Grass's message to his people and show his concern for the spiritual health of his country. Each of his three novels bears directly upon political, religious, and moral issues vital to Germany and to the world. The examination is based upon the assumption that Grass as an author is more concerned that Germans see themselves as they are and as they have been than he is concerned with the image of Germany which his novels present to the world. It is, … more
Date: January 1968
Creator: Boyar, Billy T.
open access

Imagining The Reader: Vernacular Representation and Specialized Vocabulary in Medieval English Literature

Description: William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman was probably the first medieval English poem to achieve a national audience because Langland chose to write in the vernacular and he used the specialized vocabularies of his readership to open the poem to them. During the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, writers began using the vernacular in an attempt to allow all English people access to their texts. They did so consciously, indicating their intent in prologues and envois when they forma… more
Date: August 2000
Creator: Walther, James T.
open access

Improving Topic Tracking with Domain Chaining

Description: Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) research has produced some successful statistical tracking systems. While lexical chaining, a non-statistical approach, has also been applied to the task of tracking by Carthy and Stokes for the 2001 TDT evaluation, an efficient tracking system based on this technology has yet to be developed. In thesis we investigate two new techniques which can improve Carthy's original design. First, at the core of our system is a semantic domain chainer. This chainer relie… more
Date: August 2003
Creator: Yang, Li

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

The Incest Taboo in Wuthering Heights

Description: Contemporary analysis of Wuthering Heights necessitates a re-appraisal in light of advancements in the study of incest in non-literary fields such as history, anthropology, and especially psychology. A modern reading suggests that an unconscious incest taboo impeded Heathcliff and Cathy's expectation of normal sexual union and led them to seek union after death. John Milton's Paradise Lost provides a paradigm by which to examine the consequences of incest from two perspectives: that of incest a… more
Date: August 1987
Creator: McGuire, Kathryn B. (Kathryn Bezard)
open access

The Indian Figure in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans and William Gilmore Simm's The Yemassee

Description: Though it is important to establish the authenticity of Cooper's and Simm's thematic and historical Indians, it is more important to show that the writers were accurate in their delineation of the customs, personalities, and thoughts of the Indian tribes represented in the two books.
Date: August 1969
Creator: Maness, Ella Mae
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