[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 ...

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.] 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 ...

The critical introduction examines Linda Hutcheon's notion that the process of adaptation is worthy of observation, and that in analyzing a novelist adapting her own work for the stage, we begin to see how the interiority ...

[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 ...

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 ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This dissertation argues that an examination of innovative endings in both canonized and forgotten eighteenth-century prose fiction contributes to our ...

The two memoirs in my thesis universalize personal experience by linking it to larger historical events (war or the fall of the Soviet Union), and illuminate the historical through the lens of intimate life. The first piece ...

This collection of stories stemmed from reading Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence. For this project, I chose to “misread” Olive Kitteridge, a Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Elizabeth Strout. Strout's novel is a ...

Though it has not always been so, it is now possible to conceptualize the act of reading as a process in which we necessarily form an interpretation of a piece of literature, and in so doing, create the work, or the meaning ...

Dorothy Parker -- writer, poet, satirist, journalist -- was in her literary prime in 1920s and 30s America. America at the time was faced with considerable tensions, much of which was due to the burgeoning Women's Movement. ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Recently, Happiness Studies has become an important field of inquiry. This paper brings some of the insights of Happiness Studies to bear on three ...

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, ...

This dissertation argues that Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, and Rushdie in their fiction present experiencing moments of mutual recognition instigated by physical connection as a possible means of ameliorating the ...

[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 ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] My dissertation examines the representation of merchants in late medieval poems inspired by mirrors for princes. The mirror was a genre that had an ...

This thesis analyzes the circulation of fundamentalist women's mediated rhetoric in the wake of Texas Child Protective Services' removal of more than 400 children from the polygamist YFZ Ranch near Eldorado, Texas, in April ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] The following is a collection of poems about the transience of the human world, poems which combine an elegiac embracing of our own insignificance and ...

Kaylene Can't Drive: stories is a collection of short fiction about the lives of women, especially women in their twenties, many of whom live in New York City. Running through the stories are recurring themes. In several ...

The Kissing Party is a book of lyric poems that interrogate the tradition of love poetry and attempt to refigure and revivify the work of writers like Marvell, Donne, Carew, and the continental and English sonneteers. Some ...