[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This dissertation consists of a book-length work of short fiction preceded by an essay called "In Defense of Starting Early." The ten stories that ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] During the Renaissance, anatomical theaters cropped up in cities all over Europe, anatomists performed dissections open to the general public, and ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Man on extremely small island is a collection of poems in four sections. The sections follows the seasons. The poems in the first section urge a ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] The manuscript presentation volume of Jane Barker is a book largely unstudied by critics. Barker prepared A Collection of Poems Refering to the times ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] The term Yere-Wolo in Mande culture describes the process of "giving birth to oneself," a poetic way to envision the coming-of-age process. I use this ...

Felipe Alfau (1902-1999), a Spanish novelist who lived in the United States, was forgotten for many years. Critics writing on Alfau in the late 1980s and early 1990s argued for the literary value of his novels by comparing ...

This collection of original poems is entitled The Miniature Room, at least in part to reflect its attempt at mining even the smallest detail for a larger truth. The poems themselves, brief and lyric in nature, function as ...

The following is a book of poems based on the lives of several classic and contemporary painters, including Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Goya, Monet, Renoir, Magritte and many others. While the poems participate ...

Richardson's Clarissa is notable for the shocking rape of it's title character, but what is often critically overlooked about the plot is the presence of female accomplices during the crime. Clarissa's recollection of the ...

This dissertation focuses on the cinematic versions of the Robinson Crusoe story. Starting from the early 1900s, a significant number of films rewrite, reinvent, and rework the Crusoe myth. Instead of replicating Defoe's ...

Although historically scholars have viewed nineteenth-century temperance as a lesser movement in a century characterized by other weighty reforms, this dissertation builds on recent scholarship that redirects attention to ...

Thinking Locally produces an account of twentieth-century literary history that counters the literary-historical over-reliance on wars as framing events. Eschewing the standard break between pre-World War II and post-World ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] The Diminishing House is a collection of poems in three sections. The first section begins with a series of childhood confrontations of mortality; the ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This project argues that modernist authors employ transgressive sexual desires both to disrupt and regulate femininity. Early twentieth-century cultural ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Against the Terrible Death is a collection of poems about the intersections of history, ancient and comtemporary, personal and public. The collection ...

Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Dues Rex Judaeorum has been primarily discussed by literary scholars as a protofeminist text, one that celebrates and defends female community. While such readings have illuminated Lanyer's radical ...

The Dream of the Rood is celebrated as one of the most beautiful poems in the Old English corpus, mostly due to its blending of Christian and Germanic heroic traditions. In this dream vision, the cross as Christ's retainer ...

In his mock-epic masterpiece Don Juan (1819-1824), Lord Byron dwells on the example of Russia in his discussion of the politics of European imperial powers and their military ambitions. In Cantos VII-VIII, the poem's hero, ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Ordination consists of a collection of eight short stories and an introductory essay that situates the author and his work in contexts biographical, ...

Henry David Thoreau articulated his beliefs through Eastern spiritual ideas of nature and its cycles. From his own account, he was an iconoclast and bore no one religious stamp; however, the Hindu idea that nature is our ...