This dissertation is an exercise in intertextual analysis and an effort toward historicizing film referentiality in American fiction. It focuses on four novels, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's ...

This project argues that such widely differing figures in twentieth-century American literature as the immigrant and the expatriate, the colonizer and the colonized, whether human or extraterrestrial, can all be described ...

The American small-town as a literary construction has been studied extensively in criticism. These studies mostly concentrate on the different manifestations of the small-town America during the 19th and 20th century. In ...

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, ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] In this comparative study, I examine the two novelists' approach to history, against the background of their respective cultures' understanding of ...

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.] Until recently, Beat women writers have been overlooked as artists by scholarship. They have been pigeonholed as prostitutes, chicks, or conventional ...

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 ...

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 ...