I am interested in how current Midwestern writers are continuing to develop the Midwest's literary history, and how they relate to Midwestern artists working in different mediums, but with similar goals. These works stand ...

The culture someone grows up in helps to define that person, for better or for worse. This culture steeps itself into the writer's work, and helps make the writer into who he or she is. For Seamus Heaney, this steeping was ...

This creative dissertation is an original work in the genre of memoir. It is a mixed-form memoir, comprised of prose and verse. The memoir contains ten essays that are loosely linked by theme, chronology, or event. ...

Although undergraduate creative writing courses routinely ask students to create “emotionally complex” characters, engage peers in the emotionally charged experience of workshopping, and scrutinize their personal investments ...

What is English bourgeois tragedy? What forces produced it, and what is its significance in the first great period of English drama? It is the purpose of this dissertation to answer these questions by a detailed study of ...

This thesis compares Layamon's Brut with Beowulf to examine poetic inheritance and style. Previous studies emphasizing similarities of language and meter, without definite tests of verse rhetoric, may lead to the false ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] In this dissertation, through examination of narrative form, particularly narration and characterization, in both travel writing and fiction by several ...

A popular myth of American English is that, due to the influence of national media and increased inter-connectivity, regional dialects are disappearing. In fact, linguistic research has shown that, in many ways, Americans ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] This project is the first book-length study of the oral traditional aspects of the fourteenth-century long-line alliterative poems the Morte Arthure ...

Flann O�Brien�s novel, The Third Policeman, consists of many unrealistic events, thus sharing similarities with the fantastic piece, Alice�s Adventures in Wonderland. The events and characters within the O�Brien�s storyline ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] With the advent of widespread, user-driven video sharing on Internet sites like YouTube, a recognizable folk genre of the vlog has sprung up, with its ...

[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 ...

Social drama is that type of drama which has for its theme a problem touching the interests of society at large, or a great part of that society. It deals with social conditions and with problems involving the social ...

This study will help shape our understanding of the boundaries between journalism and the novel, the ways in which the journalist problematizes our understanding of 9/11 and subverts the traditional trauma narrative ...

Through original fieldwork, this dissertation compares narrative occupational humor of white American social workers to that of white American prison workers, concluding that both occupational groups use humor, both performed ...

In her narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs recounts the intended suppression and destruction of her own virtue by her master Dr. Flint. Rather than submit to Dr. Flint's demands, she subverts not only ...

This study examines the cross-influences of Great Britain and Latin America in the Romantic epoch. The study argues that the reflexively imperialist notions and self-assured superiority of the British were slowly being ...

The dissertation traces John Horne Burns's life and career as a novelist and English teacher, from his origins in Andover through his literary success with The Gallery (1947), Lucifer with a Book (1949), and A Cry of ...

One of the most common reader responses to Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go has been to question the passivity of the clones, claiming that this inaction reveals a lack of humanity in characters who are otherwise presented ...