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Interactions Between Texts, Illustrations, and Readers: The Empiricist, Imperialist Narratives and Polemics of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Description: While literary critics heretofore have subordinated Conan Doyle to more "canonical" writers, the author argues that his writings enrich our understanding of the ways in which Victorians and Edwardians constructed their identity as imperialists and that we therefore cannot afford to overlook Conan Doyle's work.
Date: December 1995
Creator: Favor, Lesli J.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Quest for the Father

Description: This dissertation explores Elizabeth Barrett's dependency on the archetypal Victorian patriarch. Chapter I focuses on the psychological effects of this father-daughter relationship on Elizabeth Barrett. Chapter II addresses Barrett's acceptance of the conventional female role, which is suggested by the nature and the situation of the women she chooses to depict. These women are placed in situations where they can reveal their devotion to family, their capacity for passive endurance, and their w… more
Date: December 1996
Creator: Yegenoglu, Dilara
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Why Orville and Wilbur Built an Airplane

Description: This dissertation comprises two sections. The title section collects a volume of the author's original poetry, subdivided into four parts. The concerns of this section are largely aesthetic, although some of the poems involve issues that emerge in the introductory essay. The introductory essay itself looks at slightly over three centuries of poetry in English, and focuses on three representative poems from three distinct periods: the long eighteenth century and the Romantic period in England, a… more
Date: August 1999
Creator: Jenkinson, John S.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Overcoming the Regional Burden: History, Tradition, and Myth in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy

Description: In Overcoming the Regional Burden: History, Tradition, and Myth in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy, I contend that McCarthy's literary aesthetic develops and changes as he moves from Tennessee to Texas. McCarthy's conspicuous Southern and Southwestern regional affiliations have led critics to expect his works to recapitulate native history, traditions, and myths. Yet, McCarthy transcends provincial regionalism by challenging the creation of the regional and national myths we confuse with our actu… more
Date: August 1997
Creator: Wegner, John M. (John Michael)
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Rhetoric of Androgyny: Gender and Boundaries in Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness

Description: The androgyny of the Gethenians in The Left Hand of Darkness is a vehicle for Ursula Le Guin's rhetoric concerning gender roles. Le Guin attempts to make the reader identify with an ideal form of androgyny, through which she argues that many of the problems of human existence, from rape and war to dualistic thought and sexism, are products of gender roles and would be absent in an androgynous world. The novel also links barriers of separation and Othering with masculine thought, and deconstruct… more
Date: August 1996
Creator: Gleason, Benjamin P. (Benjamin Patrick)
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Dark Houses: Navigating Space and Negotiating Silence in the Novels of Faulkner, Warren and Morrison

Description: Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," as early as 1839, reveals an uneasiness about the space of the house. Most literary scholars accept that this anxiety exists and causes some tension, since it seems antithetical to another dominant motif, that of the power of place and the home as sanctuary. My critical persona, like Poe's narrator in "The House of Usher," looks into a dark, silent tarn and shudders to see in it not only the reflection of the House of Usher, but perhaps the whole of what … more
Date: December 2000
Creator: Berger, Aimee E.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Themes of Exodus and Revolution in Ellison's Invisible Man, Morrison's Beloved, and Doctorow's Ragtime

Description: In my dissertation I examine the steps in and performance of revolution through the writings of three Postmodern authors, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and E. L. Doctorow, in light of the model of the biblical Exodus journey and the revolution which precipitated that movement. I suggest that the revolution which began with the Israelites' bondage in Egypt has provided the foundation for American literature. I show that Invisible Man, Beloved, and Ragtime not only employ the motif of the Exodus … more
Date: December 2000
Creator: Turner, Tracy Peterson
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Hand Amputees have an Altered Perception of Images at Arm's Length

Description: The preface to this collection "Dust Clouding: Ambiguity and the Poetic Image," highlights the ways in which poets such as W.S Merwin and Donald Revell use ambiguity and the poetic image to strengthen their poems and encourage equality between reader and writer. Hand Amputees have an Altered Perception of Images at Arm's Length is a collection of poems and poem like adventures.
Date: May 2010
Creator: Irizarry, Justin Lee
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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A Reading of Shakespeare's Problem Plays into History: A New Historicist Interpretation of Social Crisis and Sexual Politics in Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure

Description: This study is aimed to read Shakespeare's problem comedies, Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure into the historical and cultural context of dynamically-changing English Renaissance society at the turn of the sixteenth century. In the historical context of emerging capitalism, growing economic crisis, reformed theology, changing social hierarchy, and increasing sexual control, this study investigates the nature of complicated moral problems that the plays consistently present. The prima… more
Date: December 1998
Creator: Jin, Kwang Hyun
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries

Anne Brontë's New Women: Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as Precursors of New Woman Fiction

Description: Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were published more than forty years before the appearance of the feminist type that the Victorians called the “New Woman;” yet, both novels contain characteristics of New Woman fiction. By considering how Brontë's novels foreshadow New Woman fiction, the reader of these novels can re-enact the “gentlest” Brontë as an influential feminist whose ideology informed the construction of the radical New Woman. Brontë, like the New Woman writ… more
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Date: August 2001
Creator: Phillips, Jennifer K.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Happiness Is a By-Product of Function: William Burroughs and the American Pragmatist Tradition

Description: This dissertation examines the techniques and themes of William Burroughs by placing him in the American Pragmatist tradition. Chapter One presents a pragmatic critical approach to literature based on Richard Rorty and John Dewey, focusing on the primacy of narration over argumentation, redescription and dialectic, the importance of texts as experiences, the end-products of textual experiences, and the role of critic as guide to experience rather than judge. Chapter Two uses this pragmatic crit… more
Date: December 2000
Creator: Goeman, James Robert
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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John Graves and the Pastoral Tradition

Description: John Graves's creative non-fiction has earned him respect in Texas letters as a seminal writer but scarce critical commentary of his work outside the region. Ecological criticism examines how language, culture and the land interact, providing a context in which to discuss Graves in relation to the southwestern literary tradition of J. Frank Dobie, Walter P. Webb, and Roy Bedichek, to southern pastoral in the Virgilian mode, and to American nature writing. Graves's rhetorical strategies, includi… more
Date: August 2001
Creator: Anderson, David Roy
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Moral Training for Nature's Egotists: Mentoring Relationships in George Eliot's Fiction

Description: George Eliot's fiction is filled with mentoring relationships which generally consist of a wise male mentor and a foolish, egotistic female mentee. The mentoring narratives relate the conversion of the mentee from narcissism to selfless devotion to the community. By retaining the Christian value of self-abnegation and the Christian tendency to devalue nature, Eliot, nominally a secular humanist who abandoned Christianity, reveals herself still to be a covert Christian. In Chapter 1 I introduce… more
Date: August 2001
Creator: Schweers, Ellen H.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Orality-Literacy Theory and the Victorian Sermon

Description: In this study, I expand the scope of the scholarship that Walter Ong and others have done in orality-literacy relations to examine the often uneasy juxtaposition of the oral and written traditions in the literature of the Victorian pulpit. I begin by examining the intersections of the oral and written traditions found in both the theory and the practice of Victorian preaching. I discuss the prominent place of the sermon within both the print and oral cultures of Victorian Britain; argue that th… more
Date: May 1995
Creator: Ellison, Robert H. (Robert Howard)
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries

Gender and Desire in Thomas Lovell Beddoes' The Brides' Tragedy and Death's Jest-Book

Description: Thomas Lovell Beddoes' female dramatic characters are, for the most part, objectified and static, but these passive women perform a crucial narrative and thematic function in the plays. Alongside the destructive activity of the male characters, they dramatize masculine-feminine unions as idealized and contrived and, thus, unstable. Desire, power and influence, as well as the constrictive aspects of physicality, all become gendered concepts in Beddoes' plays, and socially normative relationships… more
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Date: May 2002
Creator: Rees, Shelley S.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Working Whiteness: Performing And Transgressing Cultural Identity Through Work

Description: Early in Richard Wright's Native Son, we see Bigger and his friend Gus “playing white.” Taking on the role of “J. P. Morgan,” the two young black men give orders and act powerful, thus performing their perceived role of whiteness. This scene is more than an ironic comment on the characters' distance from the lifestyle of the J. P. Morgans of the world; their acts of whiteness are a representation of how whiteness is constructed. Such an analysis is similar to my own foc… more
Date: May 2002
Creator: Polizzi, Allessandria
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Bridging the Gap: Finding a Valkyrie in a Riddle

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 pu… more
Date: May 2007
Creator: Culver, Jennifer
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Exploring Fear and Freud's The Uncanny

Description: Fear is one of the oldest and most basic of human emotions. In this thesis, I will explore the topic of fear in relation to literature, both a staple of the horror genre as well as a device in literary works, as well as in my own writings. In addition, I will use Sigmund Freud's theory of the “uncanny” as a possible device to examine the complexities of fear and its effects both on the mind and body through the medium of literature, and, more specifically, where and how these notions are used w… more
Date: May 2007
Creator: Grizzle, Eric
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Literature in the Age of Science: Technology and Scientists in the Mid-Twentieth Century Works of Isaac Asimov, John Barth, Arthur C. Clarke, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut

Description: This study explores the depictions of technology and scientists in the literature of five writers during the 1960s. Scientists and technology associated with nuclear, computer, and space science are examined, focusing on their respective treatments by the following writers: John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Despite the close connections between the abovementioned sciences, space science is largely spared from negative critiques during the sixties. Th… more
Date: August 2010
Creator: Simes, Peter A.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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A Chorus of Trees

Description: This two-part thesis includes a critical preface and a collection of my poems. Using three poems-Louise Glück's "Lullaby," Bob Hicok's "Poem for My Mother's Hysterectomy," and Nick Flynn's "Memento Mori"-the critical preface examines how, in poetry, the transformation of a body negotiates trauma and triggers a conceptual shift, the creation and revision of identity, and the release of the duende's inspirational force. The collection of poetry that follows seeks to transfigure the body as a way … more
Date: August 2010
Creator: Lyons, Renée Kathleen
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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She "Too much of water hast": Drownings and Near-Drownings in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Women

Description: Drowning is a frequent mode of death for female literary characters because of the strong symbolic relationship between female sexuality and water. Drowning has long been a punishment for sexually transgressive women in literature. In the introduction, Chapter 1, I describe the drowning paradigm and analyze drowning scenes in several pre-twentieth century works to establish the tradition which twentieth-century women writers begin to transcend. In Chapter 2, I discuss three of Kate Chopin's wor… more
Date: December 2001
Creator: Coffelt, J. Roberta
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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