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 ...

The Token and The Atlantic Souvenir, two of the most popular and successful American gift books between 1825 and 1840, balance claims about the merit and possibility of American literature and art while exploring Americans' ...

In this project, I examine the responses of filmgoers to three adaptations of Victorian novels: Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice (2005), Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist (2005), and Alfonso Cuarón's Great Expectations (1998). ...

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 ...

In his final dramatic work, William Wycherley eschews the typical standards of Restoration comedy in order to provide his audience with more than just a few good laughs and a reassuring message of social superiority. Instead ...

But In the Night We Are All the Same, a critical dystopian novel, explores the creation and perpetuation of power structures, gender identity, and desire. The protagonist, Lemon, is a member of the oppressed class. She ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Based on the research of Lakoff and Turner, combined with studies in Burkean theory, and the representation of rape, this work presents the problematic use of metaphoric language in US Court rape trials. These are the cause ...

Although Philip Roth's style has gone through dramatic self-reinventions over the years, war has remained one of his major themes. After providing an introduction to Roth's career, this thesis examines how he represents ...

While the American Dream is an oft trod, even clich'ed, terrain in literary criticism, discourse around the topic tends to rely on a dichotomized discourse of celebration or critique. This tendency is a result of understanding ...

[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.] Ordination consists of a collection of eight short stories and an introductory essay that situates the author and his work in contexts biographical, ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] In the same vein of their spiritual forbearers, the African griots, African American wordsmiths utilize their time-binding capabilities in oral ...

[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 ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] The January Party is an original volume of poems accompanied by a critical essay entitled Graphs of Totality. The poems engage and revise historical ...

[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 ...

[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 ...