English electronic theses and dissertations (MU)
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The items in this collection are the theses and dissertations written by students of the Department of English. Some items may be viewed only by members of the University of Missouri System and/or University of Missouri-Columbia. Click on one of the browse buttons above for a complete listing of the works.
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Item History, culture and memory in Recollections of Rifleman Harris and Rough Sketches of the Life of an Old Soldier(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2025) Visscher, Andrew; Hayes, RebeccaThe growing field of "new military history" presents innovative opportunities for literary scholars in the critical interpretation of military memoirs. However, reconciling literary, historical, and military studies requires careful consideration of both goals and outcomes. This thesis establishes a critical framework for the close study of military memoirs by comparing two popular accounts from soldiers who served in the same unit during the First Peninsular Campaign of the Napoleonic Wars. While Recollections of Rifleman Harris and Rough Sketches of the Life of an Old Soldier represent the perspectives of different discourses in separate literary mediums and periods, considering both texts as literary and historical documents within cultural studies allows scholars to construct a more comprehensive picture of the humans behind the war. Drawing upon recent work in cultural military historiography known as "new military history," this framework also considers John A. Lynn's distinction between "popular," "applied," and "academic" history to situate discursive boundaries in the goals of academic institutions. By exploring the contested academic history of the word "culture," considering the literary history of the texts, and conducting a close reading of the texts along lines of identity formation and literary medium, this approach establishes academic framework for the literary study of military memoirs at United States service academiesItem Civil unrest(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2025) Junaid, Alexander; Nguyen, PhongThis creative thesis is comprised of a novel-in-progress, which currently stands at approximately 72,000 words, representing approximately a quarter of a complete draft. The novel follows the foiling of a domestic terrorist plot during the 2016 election by a middle-aged mother and her teenage son, following them across the course of approximately a month as they fall in with two different, but interconnected, right-wing conspiratorial subcultures that lurk under the surface of their mid-Atlantic town. By navigating their own identities-in-crisis and resolving their strained relationship, they are able to stop chaos and destruction from taking full hold of their community. The first two chapters of the novel, which introduce the two main characters, are presented here. Additionally, a critical introduction seeks to place the creative work in context, both in terms of real-world social inspirations and with regard to previous literature which tackles both conspiracy as a subject, and the sincere, emotionally-driven, closely-observed style of the work.Item Shroud of shadow a creative work and study of the romantasy genre's legitmacy in academic discourse(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2025) Crossen, Alexandra; Lewis, Trudy"As a young girl, I often escaped the pressures of schoolwork and friendship struggles by diving into the pages of Magic Treehouse, Harry Potter, and The Chronicles of Narnia--stories that transported me to the worlds where magic was real and good always triumphed over evil. I eventually grew into adulthood, balancing the demands of full-time work and family, leaving little room for the magic of books. Yet, as time passed, the longing for that sense of wonder resurfaced. In seeking that thrill once again, I discovered a genre that has recently captivated a large female audience: romantasy. A blend of romance and fantasy, this subgenre has surged in popularity, driving significant increases in book sales. Despite its growing readership, romantasy has yet to receive substantial academic attention. This paper aims to define romantasy and explore not only its popularity but also its legitimacy within the literary world. One definition of romantasy is "a subgenre of Fantasy [and Romance] that pairs a strong romantic subplot with a Fantasy main plot. The focus can skew toward the Fantasy plot with a significant minority of romantic elements, or it can balance fairly evenly between the two" (Sager). As with the traditional romance genre, the romantasy genre is primarily written for female-identifying readers and include romance tropes set within a fantasy world. Stories are told through the female lens and sometimes take on dual narrators with the love interest or other important main characters. Romantasy stories include some of the most famous romance tropes, such as enemies-to-lovers, and build on these foundations using fantasy tropes like found family and elemental magic. Like romance, romantasy stories also often include Happily Ever After (HEA) or Happily for Now (HFN) endings (Sager)." -- first pageItem Somewhere Like Here but Better(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2025) Capra-Thomas, Caylin Paige; Quist, DonaldThis dissertation pairs a critical introduction with a book-length collection of creative nonfiction. The introduction applies auto theory to the American road essay, examining how Joan Didion and Alice Walker navigate identity, subjectivity, and ecological attention through the episodic forms of their essays. The creative nonfiction essay collection mixes personal experience with cultural criticism and historical research to explore the human drives towards transcendence and belonging, which can be at odds with one another. Drawing unexpected parallels between the historical and the contemporary, or between literature and pop culture, two anchoring essays mine connections between subjects as disparate as sublimity and the band Sublime, and between contemporary roadside kitsch and the long, violent roads of colonization. Additional essays catalogue lilacs across personal and poetic landscapes, map backyard ecologies over 19th century Concord (Massachusetts) viticulture, and consult docents, psychics, and archives to uncover the real story behind a Vermont castle-builder. This collection also considers the way addiction's highs and lows reverberate far beyond those directly struggling with it. Ultimately, Somewhere Like Here but Better concerns itself with the quest for home and the pursuit of experiences beyond expression.Item From Caligari to Hirohito to Heisei : tyranny, leftist paranoia, and form in the post-traumatic manga of Maruo Suehiro(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2025) Garver, Jacob; Hoberek, Andrew; Yang, Dominic Meng-Hsuan; Harrison, Sheri-MarieIn the text that follows, the consistent sexual violence in the works of Japanese manga artist Maruo Suehiro (active since 1980) is argued to be his primary vector for emblematizing the traumatic nature of much of Japanese historical memory during Imperial Japan's immediate prewar and wartime saga--roughly 1926-1945. The meaning of sexual violence in Maruo's works is best understood by way of the artist's early-career adaptation of German film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in which the artists appropriates the original film's narrative so that an act of sexual assault constitutes the ultimate realization of power which the titular villain commands after hypnotizing a somnambulist to commit indiscriminate crime. Calling upon Siegfried Kracauer's interpretation of the film's villain as a premonition of the rise of Adolf Hitler, I suggest that in Maruo's adaptation Caligari is paradigmatically coded as the Emperor of Japan. Invoking the imperial era's state-sponsored religious concept of the kokutai, I suggest that Caligari becomes in Maruo the 'face' of the Japanese nation, the story's somnambulist becoming the nation's subordinate 'body.' The unification of the two characters is realized via sacrifice, the adaptation's rape victim becoming the necessary condition for maintaining the societal body. In the Imperial Japanese context, the rape symbolizes both the suffering of East Asian peoples under Japanese colonial rule and sociopolitical opponents of the fascist regime. As in the Weimar cinema, the motif of the Caligari-esque tyrant recurs throughout Maruo, as the syntagmatic configuration of 'Caligari/somnambulist/rape victim' and 'tyrant/national body/bottom rung of imperial society' is transferentially replicated time and again. I identify different figures from Maruo's base of recurring characters (or star system) with each of the three paradigmatic figures of the configuration, establishing an extensive semiotic chain in Maruo's oeuvre. I later observe how the artist draws himself into that chain, cast within perpetrator roles, which I read as a transferential implication of the artist in his representations of traumatic historical memory. I attempt to determine through this transference whether Maruo's manga work through traumatic historical memory or merely act it out, further traumatizing his readers and the memories of the past which his works have sought to interpret. This thesis posits that sexual violence is characteristic of imperial Japanese tyranny because of the industrial role that wartime sexual abuse played in the expansion and maintenance of the colonial Japanese empire. It also argues that comics possess a unique formal affordance for the representation of the 'narrative discontinuity' of trauma as they distill temporality by splaying separate moments and spaces across a single page, approximating the way that a trauma victim might engage with traumatic memory. Maruo's exploration of the theme of sexual violence through the language of comics is primarily motivated, I will suggest, by Maruo's near-paranoia that a sort of 'postwar kokutai' may be able to rise once again in Japan, as militant nationalism had begun to resurface in the decades since the war.