Search Results

open access

Empty Pockets: Poems with an Introduction

Description: This thesis is composed of a collection of thirty-four original poems with an introduction by the author. The introduction attempts to justify the collection by discussing common influences and techniques employed in its creation. The introduction also supplies background information on each poem and, on occasion, discusses the relation of a poem to the rest of the collection.
Date: December 1976
Creator: Morgan, William Bradford
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

A Solemn Music: Three Stories

Description: This thesis consists of three short stories dealing with loss. "A Solemn Music" depicts Frederick's attempt to maintain his comfortable life apart from Nature, which, in the form of cicadas, is bent on moving him from his complacency. "The Waker" explores Floyd's reactions to the death of a girlfriend. "Appetites" relates the story of Allen's encounter with a beauty pageant queen and his subsequent attempt to begin a relationship with her.
Date: December 1982
Creator: Howard, Lyle David
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

“Night Shaping Itself” and Forty Other Poems

Description: The forty-one poems comprising this thesis are written in a variety of styles and reflect my general international eclecticism. The most prominent influences on my work are ancient Chinese verse, as exemplified by the poems for N., and Zen tanka and haiku, as exemplified by "Detail from a Cubistic Autobiography." Largely imagistic rather than narrative, the poems were conceived in an effort to record my experiences and to define my reactions to those experiences.
Date: May 1981
Creator: Wise, Timothy E.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Selected Poems: Does This Pen Write?

Description: This thesis is a collection of poetry written between 1970 and 1975. The quality of the poems is admittedly uneven, but the inclusion of earlier, weaker poems may indicate a progression in the areas of flexibility, control of material, and strength of poetic voice. The poems are arranged into five sections, entitled "Love," "Rabbits," Poetry about Poetry," "Religion and Ancestors," and "Henry. Poems collected here are intended to demonstrate that experimentation with various forms contributes t… more
Date: December 1975
Creator: Shaw, Delora V.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Retro

Description: "Retro" is a novel which attempts to depict the psychological reality of the spiritually isolated individual characterized in traditional gothic novels, in this case the alienated individual in the contemporary American South. The novel follows the doctrine set down by Roland Barthes, Frank Kermode, and other postmodern critics, which holds that, as Kermode puts it, "all closure is in bad faith." Therefore, rather than offering resolution to the problems and events presented in the text, the no… more
Date: August 1992
Creator: Norwood, Robert N. (Robert Nicholas)
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Time Past and Time Present: Hawthorne and Warren in the American Literary Continuum

Description: Although Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) and Robert Penn Warren (1905- ) belong to different periods of American literary history, the thematic parallels in their fiction indicate their close association in the American tradition of the romance and demonstrate ideological correspondences between writers of the New England Renaissance and the Southern Renaissance. Hawthorne and Warren are appropriate subjects for comparison not only because they represent the two greatest periods of American lit… more
Date: August 1980
Creator: Harris, F. Janet (Frances Janet)
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Emperor of Ice Cream Visits Eudora Welty: The Uses of the Creative Imagination

Description: Eudora Welty and Wallace Stevens share important aesthetic beliefs, especially regarding uses of the creative imagination by artists in acts of creation and characters in acts of living. A close reading of seventeen of Welty's stories, accompanied by references to related ideas in many of Stevens' poems, reveals how the imagination functions as epistemology and eucharist, while governing the shape of individual human views of the quotidian. The more abstract patterns of thought in their later w… more
Date: December 1986
Creator: Kobler, Sheila F. (Sheila Frazier)
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Disfigured Muse : Supreme Readers in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Description: In "Discourse in the Novel," Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that "Every discourse presupposes a special conception of the listener, of his apperceptive background and the degree of his responsiveness." My study of Wallace Stevens's poetry examines Stevens's "conception of the listener"—in the form of his intratextual readers, their responsiveness, and the shapes that responsiveness takes—and attempts to formulate out of that examination Stevens's theory of reading embodied in his canon of poems.
Date: August 1993
Creator: Hobbs, Michael B. (Michael Boyd)
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Getting It On Home: Ways of Telling the Story

Description: In this collection of poems and essays, the author demonstrates two different methods for examining the same theme: the notion of "home"—how to get there, how to remain there and bear articulate witness to the forces which drive that author to write. The introduction sets forth an explanation for the use of the specific form chosen for expression, with an analysis of the intent behind that form. In these essays and poems, the author accounts for her years on the Texas Panhandle, in Montana, an… more
Date: May 1996
Creator: Vanek, Mary
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Tales of Caution

Description: This thesis contains five short stories, "The Playground at the End of the Neighborhood," "The Daylight Monster," "Union, Justice, and Confidence," "Traction," and "Exercise." The five stories presented here seek to utilize the freedom of the "tale." They vary in degree of employment of the fantastic, are the product of another culture and a different outlook, and utilize the freedom of the short story to operate on strengths other than reader-protagonist identification. A theme of caution serv… more
Date: December 1993
Creator: Landry, Sean (Sean Michael)
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Rebellion and Reconciliation: Social Psychology, Genre, and the Teen Film 1980-1989

Description: In this dissertation, I bring together film theory, literary criticism, anthropology and psychology to develop a paradigm for the study of teen films that can also be effectively applied to other areas of pop culture studies as well as literary genres. Expanding on Thomas Doherty's discussion of 1950s teen films and Ian Jarvie's study of films as social criticism, I argue that teen films are a discrete genre that appeals to adolescents to the exclusion of other groups. Teen films subvert social… more
Date: December 1996
Creator: Hubbard, Christine Karen Reeves
Partner: UNT Libraries
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.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Sanctifying the Profane: Religious Themes in the Fiction of Frederick Buechner

Description: Frederick Buechner is an American novelist, born in 1926, who, since 1950, has created eight novels and five works of nonfiction. Although his work has been reviewed and admired by prestigious critics, no lengthy study has yet appeared. Yet the merit of Buechner's work deserves wider critical attention. This study does not attempt to deal comprehensively with Buechner's twenty-five year span of creativity. Instead it presents a consideration of what has been Buechner's most consistent concern t… more
Date: August 1976
Creator: Myers, Nancy B.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Edgar Allan Poe's Use of Archetypal Images in Selected Prose Works

Description: This study traces archetypal images in selected prose fiction by Edgar Allan Poe and shows his consistent use of such imagery throughout his career, and outlines the archetypal images that Poe uses repeatedly throughout his works: the death of the beautiful woman, death and resurrection, the hero's journey to the underworld, and the quest for forbidden knowledge. The study examines Poe's use of myth to establish and uphold archetypal patterns. Poe's goal when crafting his works was the creation… more
Date: May 1993
Creator: Brackeen, Stephanie E. (Stephanie Ellen)
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Scam King

Description: "Scam King" is a full-length feature screenplay and follows standard script format. The idea behind "Scam King" came originally from the James Joyce short story "Two Gallants" in Dubliners. "Scam King" is, however, not an adaption of Joyce's story, but rather was inspired by the gaps in his story pertaining to the characters' way of life on the street.
Date: May 1994
Creator: Kopchick, Laura A. (Laura Ann)
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Lizzie's Story: Scenes from a Country Life

Description: An episodic novel set in rural north Texas in the 1920s, this thesis concerns the life of Lizzie Brown and her son Luke. Suffering from a series of emotional shocks combined with a chronic hormonal imbalance, Lizzie is hospitalized shortly after Luke's fourth birthday. Just as she is to be discharged, he husband dies unexpectedly. Viewed by society as incompetent to care for Luke and operate her ranch alone, she finds herself homeless. She returns to her brother's home briefly, but eventually i… more
Date: December 1989
Creator: Chalkley, Linda Brown
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

A Semantic Field Approach to Passive Vocabulary Acquisition for Advanced Second Language Learners

Description: Current ESL instructors and theorists agree that university students of ESL have a need for a large passive vocabulary. This research was undertaken to determine the effectiveness of a semantic field approach to passive vocabulary acquisition in comparison to a traditional approach. A quantitative analysis of the short-term and long-range results of each approach is presented. Future research and teaching implications are discussed. The outcome of the experimentation lends tentative support to … more
Date: August 1986
Creator: Quigley, June R. (June Richfield)
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Eighteenth-Century Rhetorical Figures in British Romantic Poetry: A Study of the Poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth Byron, Shelley, and Keats

Description: Rhetoric, seen either as the art of persuasion or as the art of figurative expression, has been largely neglected as an approach to the poetry of the Romantics. The most important reason for this seems to be the rejection of rhetoric by the Romantics themselves. As a result of negative comments about rhetoric by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, scholars seeking clues about the Romantics' literary principles in their critical writings have agreed that eighteenth-century rhetoric was ei… more
Date: August 1975
Creator: Kennelly, Laura B.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

From Boyd City to the Big City and Beyond: Six Stories with a Critical Introduction

Description: The critical introduction to this collection of short fiction argues that writing is reading and that reading is writing. The argument draws descriptions of writing as reading from such diverse sources as Sherwood Anderson, Roland Barthes, Neil Simon, J. Hillis Miller and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as well as from the author's own experience. Descriptions of reading from phenomenological and subjective criticism, including the theories of Georges Poulet, Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish and David Bleic… more
Date: December 1993
Creator: Barringer, Bobby D. (Bobby Dewayne)
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Theme of Isolation in Selected Short Fiction of Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty

Description: "The Theme of Isolation in Selected Short Fiction of Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty" examines certain prototypical natures of isolation as recurrent and underlying themes in selected short fiction of Chopin, Porter, and Welty. Despite the differing backgrounds of the three Southern women writers, and despite the variety of issues they treat, the theme of isolation permeates most of their short fiction. I categorize and analyze their short stories by the nature and the trea… more
Date: August 1998
Creator: Arima, Hiroko, 1959-
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

West African Journal: A Travel Account

Description: West African Journal: A Travel Account is a narrative of the author's trip in twelve West African countries. In the first chapter the author describes her previous travels and preparations for this trip and introduces her husband. She begins the second chapter with a discussion of the benefits and hardships of independent travel and describes the hotels, restaurants, forms of transportation, and difficulties with language. The remainder of Chapter II is a close account of the first sixteen days… more
Date: December 1980
Creator: Hudson, Jacquelyn Fuller
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Apostasy (and Return) of Lenny Gorsuch

Description: This comic romantic novel engages the question of how the Christianity of the southern, fundamentalist world of the Texas bible belt, finding its primary cultural assumptions about human existence challenged by the more confusing elements of a modern sensibility, a sensibility over-laden with strange-attractors, mechanistic psychologies, relativistic physics and ethics, evolutionary premises, newly proclaimed rights and freedoms, a deterioration in cultural political naivete, and the advent of … more
Date: August 1998
Creator: Guidici, Guy R.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Agolmirth Conspiracy

Description: Written in the tradition of the classic spy novels of Ian Fleming and the detective novels of Raymond Chandler, The Agolmirth Conspiracy represents the return to the thriller of its traditional elements of romanticism, humanism, fast-moving action, and taut suspense, and a move away from its cynicism and dehumanization as currently practiced by authors such as John Le Carre' and Tom Clancy. Stanford Torrance, an ex-cop raised on "old-fashioned" notions of uncompromising good and naked evil and … more
Date: December 1996
Creator: Elston, James C. (James Cary)
Partner: UNT Libraries
Back to Top of Screen