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"Be" in Dallas Black English

Description: This dissertation purposes to answer the question of whether or not the verb system of Black English in Dallas has the same features as those that characterize Black English in other sections of the country. Specifically, it describes in detail the use of the verb "be" within the speech of blacks in the Dallas metropolitan area and accounts for these usages formally within the framework of a transformational-generative grammar of the type proposed by Noam Chomsky.
Date: August 1972
Creator: Jones, Nancy (Nancy N.)
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Some Linguistic Aspects of the Heroic Couplet in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley

Description: This dissertation is an examination of the characteristics of Phillis Wheatley's couplet poems in the areas of meter, rhyme, and syntax. The metrical analysis employs Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser's theory of iambic pentameter, the rhyme examination considers the various factors involved in rhyme selection and rhyme function, and the syntactic analysis is conducted within the theoretical framework of a generative grammar similar to that proposed in Noam Chomsky's "Aspects of the Theory of … more
Date: August 1973
Creator: Holder, Kenneth R.
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Byronic Hero and the Renaissance Hero-Villain: Analogues and Prototypes

Description: The purpose of this study is to suggest the influence of certain characters in eighteen works by English Renaissance authors upon the Byronic Hero, that composite figure which emerges from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the Oriental Tales, the dramas, and some of the shorter poems.
Date: August 1973
Creator: Howard, Ida Beth
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Samuel Johnson's Epistolary Essays: His Use of Personae in The Rambler, The Adventurer, and The Idler

Description: One goal of the present study is to emphasize Johnson's "talent for fiction, the range of his comic invention, and the subtlety of his tone." A substantial group of essays from all three serials, those written in the form of letters ostensibly submitted to the essayist by his readers, appears to offer many examples of the inventiveness of Johnson's mind, and it is to this group that the term epistolary essays refers. Johnson was following a well-established tradition in utilizing the device of … more
Date: August 1972
Creator: Vonler, Veva Donowho
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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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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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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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Failure of the Warrior-Hero in Shakespeare's Political Plays

Description: The problem with which this investigation is concerned is that of the warrior-hero ideal as it evolves in Shakespeare's English and Roman plays, and its ultimate failure as a standard for exemplary conduct. What this study demonstrates is that the ideal of kingship that is developed in the English histories, especially in the Second Tetralogy, and which reaches its zenith in Henry V, is quite literally overturned in three Roman plays--Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. The met… more
Date: December 1976
Creator: Ferguson, Susan French
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Sanctifying the Profane: Religious Themes in the Fiction of Frederick Buechner

Description: Frederick Buechner is an American novelist, born in 1926, who, since 1950, has created eight novels and five works of nonfiction. Although his work has been reviewed and admired by prestigious critics, no lengthy study has yet appeared. Yet the merit of Buechner's work deserves wider critical attention. This study does not attempt to deal comprehensively with Buechner's twenty-five year span of creativity. Instead it presents a consideration of what has been Buechner's most consistent concern t… more
Date: August 1976
Creator: Myers, Nancy B.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Anne Tyler's Treatment of Managing Women

Description: Among the most important characters in contemporary writer Anne Tyler's nine novels of modern American life are her skillfully-drawn managing women who choose the family circle as the arena in which to use their skills and exert their influence. Strong, competent, independent, capable of caring for themselves, their husbands, their children, and others, too, as well as holding outside jobs, these women are the linchpins of their families. Among their most outstanding qualities are their abiliti… more
Date: August 1985
Creator: Brock, Dorothy Faye Sala
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Praeceptor Amoris in English Renaissance Lyric Poetry: One Aspect of the Poet's Voice

Description: This study focuses on the praeceptor amoris, or teacher of love, as that persona appears in English poetry between 1500 and 1660. Some attention is given to the background, especially Ovid and his Art of Love. A study of the medieval praeceptor indicates that ideas of love took three main courses: a bawdy strain most evident in Goliardic verse and later in the libertine poetry of Donne and the Cavaliers; a short-lived strain of mutual affection important in England principally with Spenser; an… more
Date: December 1985
Creator: Clarke, Joseph Kelly
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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God's Newer Will: Four Examples of Victorian Angst Resolved by Humanitarianism

Description: One aspect of the current revaluation of Victorian thought and literature is the examination of the crisis of religious faith, in which the proponents of doubt and denial took different directions: they became openly cynical and pessimistic; they turned from religion to an aesthetic substitute; or they concluded that since mankind could look only to itself for aid, the primary duties of the individual were to find a tenable creed for himself and to try to alleviate the lot of others. The moveme… more
Date: May 1975
Creator: Speegle, Katherine Sloan
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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John Fowles: a Critical Study

Description: This critical introduction to the works of John Fowles focuses upon his three novels, with secondary attention to his poetry, essays, and The Aristos, his non-fiction book of personal philosophy. Giving some biographical detail, the first chapter treats the influence of other writers upon Fowles's work and discusses his thought--especially as it appears in The Aristos, the poems, and the essays. The second chapter is a study of The Magus, Fowles's first novel, although published second. The Ari… more
Date: August 1974
Creator: Huffaker, Robert, 1936-
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Development of Myth in Post-World-War-II American Novels

Description: Most primitive mythologies recognize that suffering can provide an opportunity for growth, but Western man has developed a mythology in which suffering is considered evil. He conceives of some power in the universe which will oppose evil and abolish it for him; God, and more recently science an, technology, were the hoped-for saviors that would rescue him. Both have been disappointing as saviors, and Western culture seems paralyzed by its confrontation with a future which seems death-filled. Th… more
Date: August 1974
Creator: Hall, Larry Joe
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Anti-Christian Elements in Thomas Hardy's Novels

Description: A commonplace among Hardy critics is that as a young man Hardy lost his Christian faith and entered a serious religious disillusionment. The mainstream of Hardy criticism has followed the general consensus that Hardy suffered keenly as a result of this experience and looked back on Christianity with poignant nostalgia. If his view is not purely nostalgic, traditional criticism has insisted, then it seems at worst only ambivalent. The purpose of this dissertation is to argue that Hardy's attitud… more
Date: May 1975
Creator: Alexander, B. J.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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"A Straunge Kinde of Harmony": The Influence of Lyric Poetry and Music on Prosodic Techniques in the Spenserian Stanza

Description: An examination of the stanzas of The Faerie Queene reveals a structural complexity that prosodists have not previously discovered. In the prosody of Spenser's epic, two formal prosodic orders function simultaneously. One is the visible structure that has long been acknowledged and studied, eight decasyllabic lines and an alexandrine bound into a coherent entity by a set meter and rhyme scheme. The second is an order made apparent by an oral reading and which involves speech stresses, syntactica… more
Date: August 1972
Creator: Corse, Larry B.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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"The Living Skein": A Stylistic Study of Dylan Thomas

Description: This study examines rhythm, syntax, sound, and diction in selected early and late poems from Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems. It demonstrates, on the basis of stylistic evidence, that the later poetry is the greater achievement. The early and later poems are different in the area of rhythm. Early poems are regularly metered with a strong iambic beat, and a majority of lines are end-stopped. Rhythms in the later, finer poems are irregular, and enjambed lines predominate. The later poems show an i… more
Date: May 1978
Creator: Franco, June W.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Use of the Bible in George Eliot's Fiction

Description: The purpose of this study is to demonstrate George Eliot's literary indebtedness to the Bible by isolating, identifying, and analyzing her various uses of Scripture in her novels. This study is an attempt to demonstrate in some detail George Eliot's literary indebtedness to the Bible, to show that in the course of her fictional career she made virtually every possible use of the Bible. She at times presents Bibles themselves as significant objects, she refers to the Bible-reading habits of vari… more
Date: May 1975
Creator: Jones, Jesse C.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Self-Alienating Characters in the Fiction of John Steinbeck

Description: The primary purpose of this study is to show that John Steinbeck's concern with alienation is pervasive and consistent from the beginning of his career as a writer until the end. The pervasiveness of his concern with alienation is demonstrated by examining his two early collections of short stories and by showing how alienated characters in these stories resemble alienated characters in all the author's major works of fiction. Since much confusion surrounds the meaning of the word "alienation,"… more
Date: May 1974
Creator: McDaniel, Barbara Albrecht
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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A Study of Body-and-Soul Poetry in Old and Middle English

Description: In this paper I will examine the sources for the tradition of the address of the soul to the body or the dialogue between, the two. I will consider the Old and Middle English poetic expressions of the body-and-soul legend in terms of the criticism of the ten poems which specifically belong to that tradition and the elements which constitute that genre. I will also deal with those poems written at the same time which exhibit one or more of those elements, with the body-and-soul tradition in Engl… more
Date: August 1979
Creator: Tuck, Mary Patricia
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Unlike Things Must Meet: Metaphor in the Novels of Herman Melville

Description: For the purpose of this study, metaphor is defined as a comparison which is not literally true. Such a comparison may be explicitly stated, as in a simile, or it may merely be implied, as in synecdoche, metonymy, hyperbole, or personification. In each case the primary or tenor image, a person, place, object, or idea in the novel, is compared to a secondary or vehicle image, a person, place, object, or idea not literally the same as the tenor image. The body of data on which this investigation i… more
Date: May 1980
Creator: Gongre, Charles E.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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A Prototypical Pattern in Dreiser's Fiction

Description: Beginning in 1911 with Jennie Gerhardt and continuing through the publication of The "Genius" in 1915, all of Dreiser's major fiction is curiously marked by the same recurring narrative pattern. The pattern is always triangluar in construction and always contains the same three figures-- a vindictive and vengeful parent, outraged by an outisder's violation of personal and societal values; an enchanted offspring; and a disrupted outsider who threatens established order. In spite of each work's d… more
Date: December 1974
Creator: Wood, Bobbye Nelson
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Eighteenth-Century Rhetorical Figures in British Romantic Poetry: A Study of the Poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth Byron, Shelley, and Keats

Description: Rhetoric, seen either as the art of persuasion or as the art of figurative expression, has been largely neglected as an approach to the poetry of the Romantics. The most important reason for this seems to be the rejection of rhetoric by the Romantics themselves. As a result of negative comments about rhetoric by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, scholars seeking clues about the Romantics' literary principles in their critical writings have agreed that eighteenth-century rhetoric was ei… more
Date: August 1975
Creator: Kennelly, Laura B.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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