Since the only consistent feature of medieval English begging poems is the fact that they beg, usually for funds due, the form cannot quite be considered a genre. However, the relationships between poets and patrons that ...

This ethnographic study examines the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, a thirty-two-year-old, week-long event that features women performers and relies on an all female staff who produce the event for an audience of women ...

The Old English poem The Gifts of Men has received little attention in contemporary scholarship, and when it has been referenced in recent decades, the primary trend has been to comment on its unique structure and position ...

The legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus is a fascinating part of medieval oral tradition, and eminently worthy of further consideration. The legend was obviously popular and widespread during the medieval period, yet ...

This project assesses enthusiasm and the sublime as important eighteenth-century phenomena for establishing the limits and bases of reason and polite discourse. My research focuses eighteenth-century and current sources ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] "Ruin Nation: Antiquarian Objects and Political Narratives in the Long Eighteenth Century" examines representations of architectural ruins and ...

The Dream of the Rood is celebrated as one of the most beautiful poems in the Old English corpus, mostly due to its blending of Christian and Germanic heroic traditions. In this dream vision, the cross as Christ's retainer ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Current scholars of cinematic embodiment recognize limitations in psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship, but their works are still too dependent on ...

The family in London of the seventeenth century resided at the intersection of practices heard from the pulpit and of generic forms those listeners might see in the theaters. Upon both of these ideals lie the inevitable ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Derived formally from Aristotle's Minor Work of the same title, my variation of "On Marvellous Things [Seen and] Heard" explores a range of literary ...

This empirical study examines the role of lexical priming in first-year college student writers' abilities to consider multiple audiences. The writing topic assigned to all 165 first-year students is identical except for ...

This project, which on the broadest level can be defined as a comparative study of Augustine's Confessions, Rousseau's Confessions, and Wordsworth's Prelude, is an attempt to bridge a notable gap in the critical literature. ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This thesis is a fieldwork-based examination of personal experience narratives told by Deaf and hearing mothers of Deaf children. Using participant ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This dissertation consists of a book-length collection of poems entitled Famous Last Words and a critical essay examining the development of an "American ...

Though O. Henry's The Four Million was intended as an attack on Ward McAllister's idea of the Four Hundred, each man is mentioned only in passing in studies of the other. One chapter therefore contrasts the two men by ...

Guilt as a rhetorical device is an aspect of the study of rhetoric that is largely ignored by the academic community. It has been used effectively, as in the case of conduct literature, for a number of years and continues ...

While Mark Twain has long been viewed as irreligious, scholarship in recent years has underscored the fact that Christianity, the God of the Bible, and the Presbyterianism of his youth play an integral part in his work. ...

Though John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam is not completely unfamiliar to literary scholars studying eighteenth-century depictions of African chattel slavery, ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Gaze and anxiety are the pivotal constructs in Hugo's magisterial Notre Dame de Paris, with Esmeralda as the Ur-object for both Claude Frollo and ...

This thesis argues that deconstruction as a practice has been, from its inception, inherently ethical, focusing in particular on Derrida's reading of the gift. Deconstruction, insofar as it remains committed to interrogating ...