Browsing Dissertations (UMKC) by Thesis Department "English (UMKC)"
Now showing items 1-18 of 18
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Beneath Mark Twain: Judgments of Justice and Gender in Twain's Early Western Writing, 1861-1873
(2013)By the time Samuel Clemens began writing journalism and crafting what he called the “sensation hoax” for Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise in 1862, Americans had been devouring sensational novels and journalism by ... -
Blasphemous bodies: Transgressive morality as cultural interrogation in romance fiction of the long nineteenth century
(2011)The long nineteenth century was characterized by advances in medical, biological and technological knowledge that often complicated definitions of human life and blurred the lines between life and death. These changes ... -
A Case Study of the Literacy Experiences of 3rd Grade Struggling Readers with the Use of Interactive Digital Books
(University of Missouri -- Kansas City, 2018)Students who score one or more grade levels below the standard expectations in reading tests are defined as struggling readers. Struggling readers have difficulty in reading and/or comprehending a text, which affects ... -
Elegit Domum sibi Placabilem: Choice and the Twelfth-Century Religious Woman
(2015)This dissertation probes medieval sources to identify how and why women made transformative choices in their own lives and analyzes the consequences of those choices. The major case study investigates the life of Marie ... -
Feminizing Grief: Victorian Women and the Appropriation of Mourning
(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2016)The Victorians didn’t invent the culture of mourning. But they certainly codified how the culture of grief should be one largely shouldered and sustained by women. Mourning rules for women were characterized by restraint ... -
From Revolution To Ruin: A Preliminary Look at Rwanda’s First Two Presidents, Grégoire Kayibanda and Juvénal Habyarimana, and Their Administrations
(2015)This paper brings together primary and secondary materials from a vast number of sources related to the first two presidents of Rwanda, Grégoire Kayibanda and Juvénal Habyarimana, in a preliminary look at the men and ... -
Insanity, rhetoric and women : nineteenth-century women's asylum narratives
(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2011-09-02)Among reform movements in nineteenth-century America was insane asylum reform and women played a role in this. Some women within the walls of asylums living as patients turned to the pen as a means of informing the ... -
More than a river: using nature for reform in the progressive era
(2013)The decades around the turn of the twentieth century were a time of vast social and economic change. Industrialization altered the ways people related to each other and to their social, political, and cultural institutions. ... -
A Narrative Inquiry into Experiences of Teaching Reading
(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2018)In recent years, educators have been paying attention to reading instruction and reading strategies in English classes at the high school level for several reasons. One of those reasons is the adoption of Common Core ... -
The Pen and the Pennon: Political and Social Comment Inscribed within Chivalric Romance
(University of Missouri–Kansas City, 2016)Study of the Medieval English romance has burgeoned in recent years, with a focus on the world outside of the texts being central to the resurgence. I offer in this dissertation a reading of four of these works (Athelston, ... -
Possibility and Process in Post Secondary Service Work: Constructing a Critical Pedagogy of Service
(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2017)This project examines the worth, experience, and process of post-secondary faculty service work. Service represents a third of the trifurcated, traditional understanding of a professor’s work; however, universities and ... -
Praising Girls: The Epideictic Rhetoric of Young Women, 1895-1930
(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2011-05-17)At the turn of the twentieth century, young women began to see themselves and to been seen as a distinct social group for the first time in the history of the United States. This recognition was fostered by historical ... -
Sandoz Writing (Righting) History
(2015-06-19)Mari Sandoz’s dedication to her research topics, personality, candor, and work ethic allowed her an intimate place alongside those she chose to write about. This yielded a moving written product. In the same way that Sandoz ... -
"Something at Least Human": Transatlantic (Re)Presentations of Creole Women in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
(2015-06-19)Throughout the nineteenth century, Creole women were consistently idealized, exoticized, and demonized in literature and culture on both sides of the Atlantic. While the term Creole is still hotly contested even today, ... -
Talking Texts with Teachers: A Narrative Inquiry into the Experiences of Secondary English Language Arts Teachers and Their Text Selection Practices
(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2018)The texts that teachers choose to read in the secondary English language arts classroom have been an important part of the curriculum development process for teachers of this subject. Teachers have always been interested ... -
Three Paths To Religious Integration In Ernest Hemingway’s War Fiction
(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2018)My dissertation studies religiosity in Ernest Hemingway’s war fiction in terms of how his soldier characters connect to the divine. The means to understanding this connection is in refining how the characters express ... -
The Work of Contemplation Then and Now: The Cloud of Unknowing and Present-Day Christian Mystical Practice
(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2011-01-20)The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous fourteenth-century Middle English mystical text that discusses what its author calls the “work” of contemplation. In the late twentieth century, the Cloud became an important resource ... -
World to Word: Nomenclature Systems of Color and Species
(University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2017)As the digitization of information accelerates, the push to encode our surrounding numerically instead of linguistically increases. The role that language has traditionally played in the nomenclature of an integrative ...