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Knowing is Seaing: Conceptual Metaphor in the Fiction of Kate Chopin

Description: This paper examines the metaphoric structures that underlie Chopin's major novel, The Awakening, as well as those underlying selected short stories. Drawing on the modern theory of metaphor described by Mark Turner, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson, the author argues that conceptual metaphors are the structural elements that underlie our experiences, thoughts, and words, and that their presence is revealed through our everyday language. Since these conceptual structures are representative of hum… more
Date: May 1997
Creator: Green, Suzanne Disheroon, 1963-
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Rebellion and Reconciliation: Social Psychology, Genre, and the Teen Film 1980-1989

Description: In this dissertation, I bring together film theory, literary criticism, anthropology and psychology to develop a paradigm for the study of teen films that can also be effectively applied to other areas of pop culture studies as well as literary genres. Expanding on Thomas Doherty's discussion of 1950s teen films and Ian Jarvie's study of films as social criticism, I argue that teen films are a discrete genre that appeals to adolescents to the exclusion of other groups. Teen films subvert social… more
Date: December 1996
Creator: Hubbard, Christine Karen Reeves
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Reverberating Reflections of Whitman: A Dark Romantic Revealed

Description: Walt Whitman has long been celebrated as a Romantic writer who celebrates the self, reveres Nature, claims unity in all things, and sings praises to humanity. However, some of what Whitman has to say has been overlooked. Whitman often questioned the goodness of humanity. He recognized evil in various shapes. He pondered death and the imperturbability of Nature to human death. He exhibited nightmarish imagery in some of his works and gory violence in others. While Whitman has long been called a … more
Date: August 1999
Creator: Lundy, Lisa Kirkpatrick
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Dickens in the Context of Victorian Culture: an Interpretation of Three of Dickens's Novels from the Viewpoint of Darwinian Nature

Description: The worlds of Dickens's novels and of Darwin's science reveal striking similarity in spite of their involvement in different areas. The similarity comes from the fact that they shared the ethos of Victorian society: laissez-faire capitalism. In The Origin of Species, which was published on 1859, Charles Darwin theorizes that nature has evolved through the rules of natural selection, survival of the fittest, and the struggle for existence. Although his conclusion comes from the scientific eviden… more
Date: August 1996
Creator: Moon, Sangwha
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Visions of Light In the Poetry of William Blake and Emily Dickinson

Description: In this study the author compares the broad outlines of Blake's and Dickinson's thought, pointing out evidence of decisive Biblical influence not only on the content of their thought but on their attitude toward language as well. the author argues that both poets assumed the philosophical position of Job as they interpreted the Bible independently and as they explored many dimensions of experience in the fallen world. The author represents their thought not as a fixed system but as a faith-base… more
Date: December 1996
Creator: Nuckels, Rosa Turner
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Disfigured Muse : Supreme Readers in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Description: In "Discourse in the Novel," Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that "Every discourse presupposes a special conception of the listener, of his apperceptive background and the degree of his responsiveness." My study of Wallace Stevens's poetry examines Stevens's "conception of the listener"—in the form of his intratextual readers, their responsiveness, and the shapes that responsiveness takes—and attempts to formulate out of that examination Stevens's theory of reading embodied in his canon of poems.
Date: August 1993
Creator: Hobbs, Michael B. (Michael Boyd)
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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In Awesome Wonder

Description: The dissertation is a collection of eighteen short stories. These stories relate the life experiences of the first-person narrator and chronicle a period of twenty years. They are arranged in five thematic groups: Expectations, Questions, Lighter Moments, Answers, and Separation. The focus of each one represents the narrator's experiences with his father, as the narrator attempts to understand a man who exerts such control over his life. Expectations contains three stories, with the first depic… more
Date: August 1996
Creator: McMurtry, William Charlie
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Friendship, Politics, and the Literary Imagination: the Impact of Franklin Pierce on Hawthorne's Works

Description: This dissertation attempts to demonstrate how Nathaniel Hawthorne's lifelong friendship with Franklin Pierce influenced the author's literary imagination, often prompting him to transform Pierce from his historical personage into a romanticized figure of notably Jacksonian qualities. It is also an assessment of how Hawthorne's friendship with Pierce profoundly influenced a wide range of his work, from his first novel, Fanshawe (1828), to the Life of Franklin Pierce (1852) and such later works a… more
Date: August 1996
Creator: Williamson, Richard Joseph, 1962-
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Incest Taboo in Wuthering Heights : A Modern Appraisal

Description: A modern interpretation of Wuthering Heights suggests that an unconscious incest taboo impeded Catherine and her foster brother, Heathcliff, from achieving normal sexual union and led them to seek union after death. Insights from anthropology, psychology, and sociology provide a key to many of the subtleties of the novel by broadening our perspectives on the causes of incest, its manifestations, and its consequences. Anthropology links the incest taboo to primitive systems of totemism and rules… more
Date: August 1992
Creator: McGuire, Kathryn B. (Kathryn Bezard)
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Iconic Ida: Tennyson's The Princess and Her Uses

Description: Alfred Lord Tennyson's The Princess: A Medley has posed interpretative difficulties for readers since its 1847 debut. Critics, editors, and artists contemporary with Tennyson as well as in this century have puzzled over the poem's stance on the issue of the so-called Woman Question. Treating Tennyson as the first reader of the poem yields an understanding of the title character, Princess Ida, as an ambassador of Tennyson's optimistic and evolutionary views of human development and links his wor… more
Date: May 1997
Creator: Guidici, Cynthia (Cynthia Dianne)
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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The American Eve: Gender, Tragedy, and the American Dream

Description: America has adopted as its own the Eden myth, which has provided the mythology of the American dream. This New Garden of America, consequently, has been a masculine garden because of its dependence on the myth of the Fall. Implied in the American dream is the idea of a garden without Eve, or at least without Eve's sin, traditionally associated with sexuality. Our canonical literature has reflected these attitudes of devaluing feminine power or making it a negative force: The Scarlet Letter, Mob… more
Date: May 1993
Creator: Long, Kim Martin
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Historical Reconstruction and Self-Search: A Study of Thomas Pynchon's V.. John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor. Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Nicrht. Robert Coover's The Public Burning, and E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel

Description: A search for self through historical reconstruction constitutes a crucial concern of the American postmodern historical novels of Pynchon, Barth, Mailer, Coover, and Doctorow. This concern consists of a self-conscious dramatization, paralleled by contemporary theorists' arguments, of the constructedness of history and individual subject. A historian-character's process of historical inquiry and narrative-making foregrounded in these novels represents the efforts by the postmodern self to (re)co… more
Date: August 1995
Creator: Pak, Inchan
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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The West African Trickster Tradition and the Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt

Description: Analyzing Chesnutt's fiction from the angle of the West African trickster tradition explains the varying interpretations of his texts and his authorial intentions. The discussion also illustrates the influence that audience and editorial concerns may have had on African-American authors at the turn of the century.
Date: August 1995
Creator: Coleman, Arvis R. (Arvis Renette), 1961-
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Getting It On Home: Ways of Telling the Story

Description: In this collection of poems and essays, the author demonstrates two different methods for examining the same theme: the notion of "home"—how to get there, how to remain there and bear articulate witness to the forces which drive that author to write. The introduction sets forth an explanation for the use of the specific form chosen for expression, with an analysis of the intent behind that form. In these essays and poems, the author accounts for her years on the Texas Panhandle, in Montana, an… more
Date: May 1996
Creator: Vanek, Mary
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Female Inheritors of Hawthorne's New England Literary Tradition

Description: Nineteenth-century women were a mainstay in the New England literary tradition, both as readers and authors. Indeed, women were a large part of a growing reading public, a public that distanced itself from Puritanism and developed an appetite for novels and magazine short stories. It was a culture that survived in spite of patriarchal domination of the female in social and literary status. This dissertation is a study of selected works from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E. Wi… more
Date: August 1994
Creator: Adams, Dana W. (Dana Wills)
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Heroism and Failure in Anglo-Saxon Poetry: the Ideal and the Real within the Comitatus

Description: This dissertation discusses the complicated relationship (known as the comitatus) of kings and followers as presented in the heroic poetry of the Anglo-Saxons. The anonymous poets of the age celebrated the ideals of their culture but consistently portrayed the real behavior of the characters within their works. Other studies have examined the ideals of the comitatus in general terms while referring to the poetry as a body of work, or they have discussed them in particular terms while referring … more
Date: May 1989
Creator: Nelson, Nancy Susan
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Symbolic and Structural Significance of Music Imagery in the English Poetry of John Milton

Description: The purpose of this study is to investigate how John Milton uses music imagery in his English poetry. This is accomplished through consideration of the musical milieu of the late Renaissance, particularly of seventeenth century England, through examination of the symbolic function of music imagery in the poetry, and through study of the significance of music imagery for the structure of the poem. Milton relies on his readers' familiarity with sounds and contemporary musical forms as well as wit… more
Date: May 1979
Creator: Woods, Paula M.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Critical Response to Philosophical Ideas in Walker Percy's Novels

Description: Walker Percy differs from other American novelists in that he started writing fiction relatively late in life, after being trained as a physician and after considerable reading and writing in philosophy. Although critics have appreciated Percy's skills as a writer, they have seen Percy above all as a novelist of ideas, and, accordingly, the majority of critical articles and books about Percy has dealt with his themes, especially his philosophical themes, as well as with his philosophical source… more
Date: December 1985
Creator: Gunter, Elizabeth Ellington, 1942-
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Pre-Raphaelites: The First Decadents

Description: The ephemeral life of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood belies the importance of an organization that grows from and transcends its originally limited aesthetic principles and circumscribed credo. The founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 really marks the beginning of a movement that metamorphizes into Aestheticism/Decadence. It is the purpose of this dissertation to demonstrate that, from its inception, Pre-Raphaelitism is the first English manifestation of Aestheticism/Decadence. Al… more
Date: October 1980
Creator: Benson, Paul F.
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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English Phonology Without Underlying Glides

Description: This dissertation demonstrates that the optimal account of English phonology denies phonemic status to oral glides. That is, it shows that all instances of phonetic [y] and [w] are predictable by rule. These occurrences include the following: formative initial glides, such as those in yet and wet; post-consonant, pre-vocalic [w] in such forms as quit, guava, and white and post-consonant, pre-vocalic [y] in such forms as cute, few, million, onion, and champion; the [y] following the tense vowels… more
Date: May 1979
Creator: Leath, Helen Lang
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Decline of the Country-House Poem in England: A Study in the History of Ideas

Description: This study discusses the evolution of the English country-house poem from its inception by Ben Jonson in "To Penshurst" to the present. It shows that in addition to stylistic and thematic borrowings primarily from Horace and Martial, traditional English values associated with the great hall and comitatus ideal helped define features of the English country-house poem, to which Jonson added the metonymical use of architecture. In the Jonsonian country-house poem, the country estate, exemplified b… more
Date: August 1988
Creator: Harris, Candice R. (Candice Rae)
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Unity, Ecstasy, Communion: The Tragic Perspective of W.B. Yeats

Description: As a young man of twenty-one in 1886, William Butler Yeats announced his ambition to unify Ireland through heroic poetry. But this prophetic urge lacked structure. Yeats had only some callow notions about needing self-possession and appropriate control of his imagery. As a result, his search for essential knowledge and experience soon led him into occult and symbolist vagueness. Yeats' mind grew flaccid, and his art languished in preciosity for over a decade. Lotos-eating had replaced prophetic… more
Date: May 1988
Creator: Brooks, John C.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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