[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This thesis is devoted to arguing for recognition of the urban neo-slave narrative, and to analyzing two examples of such novels: Richard Wright's ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Much of the scholarly work on Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler focuses on the importance of the R/reader in the text by looking at ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This dissertation consists of two parts: a critical essay on the Canadian poet Anne Carson's place in the lineage of confessional poetry, as well as ...

[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 ...

My dissertation offers a culturally-based examination of the aid-driven western marketplace for Central Asian crafts based on detailed textual and visual analysis of websites, film, online and print catalogues, and comics ...

Standing at the core of American culture, Thanksgiving is an invented tradition celebrated by millions of Americans. This dissertation examines contemporary representations of Thanksgiving in "the media of everyday life" ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Migratory patterns is a collection of short stories that examine the experience of Americans traveling abroad. The stories are set in a wide range of ...

When novels first originated in the mid eighteenth century, they were seen as lowbrow and unworthy of serious study. Now, the study of novels is a staple to academia, but certain types of novels are still considered with ...

Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions is, primarily, a novel about nervous conditions. It's about many other things, too. It's about power. It's about women. About men and poverty and riches. It's about education and ...

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 ...

The visually arresting nature of the graphic form has appealed to youth from its international emergence in the early twentieth century. Comics of the past, from Little Nemo to The Yellow Kid, were brief and insubstantial, ...

In many of William Shakespeare's plays, women play a central role in moving the plot forward. These women become catalysts for the drama that unfolds, especially in Shakespeare's tragedies, where the reactions of the other ...

"Mr. Boswell Peels an Orange" is a dissertation in two parts. Part I is a critical essay that explores the concept of the "lyric object," which is a physical, man-made object that appears in a lyric poem. This object forms ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Octavia Butler's Wild Seed and Dawn, and Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills are three novels that expose the abjection of their black, maternal protagonists ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] A satirical novel of post-WWII America depicted through the fictitious memoirs of an ex-Nazi on an absurdist quest to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

This thesis focuses on two models for Chicana womanhood, which are the La Virgen de Guadalupe archetype and the La Malinche archetype. They are both mythic figures in Mexican culture that are diametrically opposed to one ...

Myth has a fluid function within culture, literature, and time. How myth is interpreted depends upon which element of it inspires or interests a person. The mythical figure of Prometheus has become embedded in the cultural ...

This dissertation examines the writing of religious writers during the Anglo-Saxon period in England (410- 1066). The purpose of this work is to better understand how religious writing also functioned as political writing. ...

This dissertation presents two related works, one creative non-fiction and the other fiction, that engage in representing and adapting medieval texts. The non-fiction work consists of annotated transcripts of twelve episodes ...

In the new digital era, novelists have developed new tools to aid them levy political criticism against targets that have traditionally fallen outside the reach of the novel. By examining four contemporary American novels, ...