The Department of English, one of the academic units of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Missouri-Columbia, with more than one hundred M.A. and Ph.D students and about five-hundred undergraduate majors, is one of the larger and more diverse departments on the Columbia campus. They offer a wide range of courses in British and American Literature and Creative Writing, as well as special emphases in African Diaspora Studies, Critical Theory, English Language and Linguistics, Folklore and Oral Tradition, and Rhetoric and Composition. The Department of English also maintains close working relationships with other units on campus such as Black Studies, Film Studies, Women's & Gender Studies, and the Honors College.

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  • Middleton's dramaturgy : a study of the major comedies 

    Zappen, James Philip (University of Missouri--Columbia, 1974)
    "Throughout a career covering most of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, Thomas Middleton produced a body of work remarkable for both its quantity and variety. Those features of Middleton's work are nowhere more ...
  • The dramas and prose works of John Rastell 

    Geritz, Albert J (University of Missouri--Columbia, 1976)
    A study of the literary career of John Rastell (1475- 1536), Thomas More's brother-in-law, this dissertation re-evaluates and adds insights to previous scholarly work. Its purposes are to collect and evaluate published and ...
  • "To move wild laughter in the throat of death" : an anatomy of Black Humor 

    Freisinger, Randall R. (University of Missouri--Columbia, 1975)
    This dissertation presents an extended definition of a literary genre that has been labelled "Black Humor" by many contemporary critics. Though the phrase has been used with increasing frequency in the last ten years, it ...
  • Clyomon and Clamydes a critical edition 

    Littleton, Betty J. (University of Missouri--Columbia., 1962)
    "Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes (Greg, Bibliography, no. 157) was printed by Thomas Creede in 1599--the same year he printed the second quarto of Romeo and Juliet and Greene's Alphonsus, King of Aragon. Like Creede's other ...
  • The nature of nothingness in King Lear 

    Summers, Jon L. (University of Missouri--Columbia, 1974)
    "The approach toward life in the sixteenth century was paradoxical. Writers and thinkers struggled with the questions and problems of life; they tried to determine if life had any value, and if it consisted of something. ...
  • The pleasure-pain motif in the poetry of John Keats 

    Dunham, Larry Dean (University of Missouri--Columbia, 1972)
    This study is intended to show that one of the commonly noted motifs in the poetry of Keats is also a feature of considerable importance. The swift interchange of pleasure and pain or the ability of the poet to be happy ...
  • Comic pattern in the novels of Smollett 

    Batesel, Paul (University of Missouri--Columbia, 1973)
    This dissertation focuses upon the disparity between the bodies of Smollett's novels and their endings. The former is set in a society which historians identify as the "real world" of eighteenth-century London, a world ...
  • The Old English Herbal in Cotton Ms. Vitellius C. iii : studies 

    Voigst, Linda Sue Ehrsam (University of Missouri--Columbia, 1973)
    Even for experts in the field, early English medicine seems to present difficulties. For the uninitiated, it is a trackless jungle...the field of medical and other scientific vernacular manuscripts is still a Yukon territory ...
  • Romantic love, romanticism, and Romeo and Juliet : authentic mimesis of emotion in music 

    Beran, Lauren (University of Missouri--Columbia, 2023)
    Since ancient times, music has been utilized by humanity as an almost divine manipulator of the senses and emotions. Its evolution throughout history can be tracked in multiple ways, though one sticks out. Romeo and Juliet, ...
  • Bury the key : a book of houses 

    Fowler, Lindsay (University of Missouri--Columbia, 2023)
    [EMBARGOED UNTIL 5/1/2024] Bury the Key: A Book of Houses is a book-length work of creative nonfiction that engages with implicit cultural beliefs in houses as stable, somewhat permanent, and a clear boundary between the ...
  • Fathoming 

    Boyd, Bailey Madison (University of Missouri--Columbia, 2023)
    [EMBARGOED UNTIL 5/1/2024] Fathoming is a mixed-genre collection that uses personal essays, poems, and photographs to interrogate and meditate upon the concepts of home, responsibility to place, climate change and climate ...
  • Inner meaning almost expressed : a return to agency in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway 

    Davis, Kelly M (University of Missouri--Columbia, 2023)
    This essay focuses on both a response to a crisis of agency in the modern world. T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and Virginia Woolf's Mrs.Dalloway explore the relationship between a fractured relationship to meaning-making and ...
  • We must look a long time before we can see : the art and science of Thoreau's early works 

    Regneri, Erin Christine (University of Missouri--Columbia, 2023)
    By the mid-nineteenth century, American Romanticism had replaced the predominant idea of nature as an exploitable resource with a different vision of nature -- one steeped in beauty and reverence. Perhaps no writer has ...
  • Eighteenth-century sensibility and the subversive female body 

    Heckman-McKenna, Heather M. (University of Missouri--Columbia, 2023)
    Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Subversive Female Body argues that bodily actions of sensibility (i.e. feminized actions, such as trembling and fainting) were employed to subversive effect by women writers of the ...
  • A novel narratological framework for the analysis of self-involving interactive fictions 

    Nichols, Shane (University of Missouri, College of Arts and Science., 2021)
  • The wise avenue 

    Netro, Angela (University of Missouri--Columbia, 2022)
    My dissertation's creative portion is a short story cycle constructed around two organizing principles: a place and a protagonist group. The cycle's setting is Dundalk, Maryland, a predominately white, working-class suburb. ...
  • The ties that bind 

    Chambers, Bryn (University of Missouri--Columbia, 2022)
    Inspired by Alexander Chee's recent How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, a memoir-in-essays, "The Ties that Bind" is lyric, personal, and a coming-of-age collection of nonfiction. In "Swimming Lessons," Bryn Chambers ...
  • Gender, power, madness: the narrative possibilities of hereditary mental illness in Louisa May Alcott's sensation fiction 

    Sarafianos, Mary-Claire (University of Missouri--Columbia, 2022)
    While she was better known for her career as a writer of children's fiction, Louisa May Alcott published sensational stories of drugs, madness, and revenge both anonymously and under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard. Since this ...
  • Linguistics peculiarities of contemporary feline narrative 

    Kazakov, Andrei (University of Missouri--Columbia, 2022)
    The focus of this work is linguistic peculiarities of a feline point of view in textual narratives. Non-human/animalistic narration is barely studied, if it all, in Russian scientific discourse. In western linguonarratology ...
  • Spatial politics and genre in the 21st century Arabic novel in English 

    Guerra, Elijah (University of Missouri--Columbia, 2022)
    This dissertation is a study of four 21st century Arabic novels translated to English, each of which narrates a regionally specific process of state-sanctioned property theft. I argue that the authors of these novels use ...

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