The Critical Introduction, titled "James Merrill's Queer Muse," uses Queer Theory to analyze Merrill's creative process when writing The Changing Light at Sandover. It argues that Merrill queers the heteronormative orientation ...

This dissertation on illustrated British fiction from the 1740s to 1830s argues that a vital part of novelistic interpretation is omitted when illustrations are overlooked. Rather than viewing the novels of the eighteenth ...

This dissertation explores the merging of two unlikely literary - natural history writing and fantasy - as a subgenre of mid - to late nineteenth century British children's literature. Tailoring natural history for children, ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI--COLUMBIA AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Book of Apparitions is an account of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, narrated by one of the assassins, Vaso Čubrilović. On the eve of World...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Representations of the violently displaced black female self in contemporary African literature is a study of my broad interests in the peculiar intersectionalities of violent...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] The creative dissertation The Eight Leaves is a deconstructed memoir, composed in a series of inter-connected lyric essays structured in a ring composition. The manuscript...

When this dissertation first began to take shape, it was in response to a period of wide reading of African diaspora fiction--my comprehensive exam preparations-- wherein I began noticing the sheer number of suicides I was encountering. After some...

Refrain is set in 1950s Larissa, TX, where the disappearance of four local girls catapults the town into crisis, forcing them to confront their complicity and disregard for Native American life. Told from multiple points ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI--COLUMBIA AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This dissertation includes the critical introduction "My Mother is My Homeland: Subversive Representations of the Black Puerto Rican Matriarch" and a collection...