This dissertation looks at nine works by contemporary black women writers and argues that the relationships between the major characters in the text reflect and emphasize the importance of mentoring bonds in black communities. ...

Concluding paragraph: "Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and "Three Women" show that politics influenced Plath's writing process in both direct and subtle ways. Combining the personal with the political in these works, Plath ...

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate how City of Glass, No Country for Old Men, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Mason & Dixon invoke various aspects of the frontier myth. City of Glass evokes the myth ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] This Way Back is a creative dissertation that explores the predicament of the transmigrant, the immigrant who has the capability of returning to the ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Lauren Fath's nonfiction writing uses handicraft as an entree to examining familial history and the inheritance of objects. Each essay in her collection ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] This dissertation argues that even though Harriet Beecher Stowe participated in models of circulation throughout her career, they were shaped by drastic ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] I'm Here, I'm Listening is a creative dissertation that makes the case for non-realist speculation as a fundamental tool for creative writers. The ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Between 1790 and 1820, women published more novels than men -- unlike any period before or after. It is remarkable that women assumed dominant authorship ...

This thesis examines Civil War reenactment as it is practiced and performed by residents of Missouri. Using fieldwork (interviews and participant observation) conducted by the researcher at reenactment events, the thesis ...

Last summer, I spent three weeks on the island of Thassos, Greece discovering, eating, and savoring life. Immersing myself under the cool seawater and climbing out onto the rocky shore I was met not only by great natural ...

Though contemporary fiction has evolved significantly alongside the social and political revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there remains the tendency to return to the stigmatized classifications of ...

That poem may surely be said to be abstract in character in which the motive is more real than the deed, in which the thoughts of a man's heart are given more dramatic prominence than the facts of his appearance, in which ...

While extensive analysis has been written exploring the presence of mysticism in the works of Annie Dillard, little work has emerged which pinpoints her particular mystic sources and demonstrates how Dillard's work uses ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] The critical introduction outlines three perspectives on place identified by Robert Root--the insider, the outsider, and the traveler with a lens text. ...

Concluding paragraph: "In finality, addressing The Intuitionist and Zone One's ultimate goals rely on one motivating factor: progressive justice. Incorporating genre elements into sardonic dialogue about the current racial ...

Concluding paragraph: "Langston Hughes as a literary figure today is beloved by many and it is through analyzing his life that I have become aware of his radical nature at the beginning of his career. His life, the mistakes ...

In the second Gilded Age that we live in now, it has been surprising to me to find that Edith Wharton's presence in homes and classrooms has been waning. In order to understand why this is, I turn to one of Wharton's most ...

Concluding paragraph: "This unpleasant conclusion results from Prufrock's night in the "Pervigilium," since his encounters with ambiguous women and his fears of venereal disease disturb him so much that they distance him ...

Concluding paragraphs: "Yet even in this uncertain time in life, many Y.A. novels end in hope. The last words of the Harry Potter series are "All was well." After coping with the death of his best friend and first love, ...