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Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
This collection of poetry explores the intersections between devotion and loss, anger and guilt, grief and hope. While some poems are buttressed by straightforward narratives, others are more impressionistic. The poems strive for...
Evoking the Salon: Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator & The Conversation of Protofeminist Space reads Eliza Haywood's 18th century periodical, The Female Spectator, as a reenactment of the feminocentric French salon within the...
The work contained in this manuscript stems from personal experience and a desire to portray life in honest, detailed poems. Some events are factual while others are speculative, all of which spins on an axis of imagery. The actions of...
This creative thesis is a collection of poems that tells the story of three queer women in the late-nineteenth century American Midwest and the various ways they withstood their dangerous position on the margins of society. The book is...
Ghost City is a collection of poetry about Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It travels through the history, landscape, and family of the writer's hometown. The poems take up themes of love, loss, food, hope, and family. The author seeks to...
'Surviving Suburban Malls' is a collection of original poems that question expectations placed upon women in popular female consumerist culture. The collection is divided into three parts: the first section focuses on expectations placed...
Set in Maddley, Connecticut, The Fictionist tells the story of Henry Riordan, a young man unable to come to terms with loss. As Henry pursues a series of unattainable dreams in order to recover an unalterable past, he learns that love, ...
To complete my Master of Arts degree I am submitting Part One of my novel-in-progress Horse Show Circuit. This first section presents the novel's set up of characters, setting, and situation. The novel is written in the tradition of...
The Cutting Room Floor explores the life of Frankenstein's monster, as narrated by the creature himself. True to Mary Shelley's original book, the monster has no name but recognizes that he is often mistakenly called 'Frankenstein, '...
A book of poetry that uses avant-garde, post-modernist writing practices such as fragmented syntax, disjunctive narrative, a multiplicity of speakers and collage to explore female American identity in the 21st century as a historical...
The Paper Machine is a collection of narrative and contemplative poems whose speakers explore the significance of domestic relationships that shape everyday life. Works in this series of poems engage rural and urban southern settings in...
Contingency tells the story of Richard MacMurray, a political analyst and advocate for freedom of expression. On New Year's Day, Richard learns that his estranged sister has been killed in a plane crash, and that he will be asked to...
Inscriptions is a collection of poems inspired, in part, by the twenty-four poem opening section of Walt Whitman's 1892 "Death-bed" edition of Leaves of Grass, entitled "Inscriptions." The poems of direct address in the first section...
In SALVATION PHILOSOPHY FOR TODAY, Melinda Wilson explores questions and grievances regarding feminism, everyday sexism, motherhood, fertility, marriage, love and domesticity. The poems approach and unearth our darkest appetites in...
This dissertation investigates the resources that students use to learn new digital technologies to complete course assignments. This work is particularly important in a time when teachers are assigning more multimodal projects. If...
The Shambling is a collection of poems that centers around the American cinematic image of the zombie, a creature brought back from the dead and bent on consuming the flesh of the living. Unlike the ghost who returns from the dead in...
THE HEART IS A SLOW LEARNER AND OTHER STORIES explores love's vagaries in settings that range from the Deep South to Alaska. The stories depict relationships between lovers, friends, and family members--especially mothers and daughters....
Heavenward is a semi-autobiographical novel that follows Cillian O’Mara, who has recently left a Catholic seminary run by the Society of Jesus, more commonly known as the Jesuits. He goes to confession with his former superior who for...
In this manuscript, I explore issues of masculinity, mental illness, and spirituality—often using the form of elegy. Many of the elegies in this manuscript are in conversation with critic Jahan Ramazani's arguments about elegies: "the...
Postmodern theorists and authors have long argued that history is a constructed system of knowledge, and therefore prone to error. Yet, despite memory's connection to history, postmodern authors have continued to utilize it as a stable...
This thesis is an examination of David Cronenberg's Videodrome. In the course of the thesis I compare a fictional account of terrorist activity to the behaviors and organizational machinery of genuine terrorist organizations such as the...
Understanding the Journals That Write Us: Exploring the Relationship Between the Field of Composition and the Subdiscipline of Computers and Composition
This project works to explore the relationship between the larger field of composition and the smaller subdiscipline of computers and composition by examining articles published in College Composition and Communication (CCC) and...
Burning Down the Grief Motel is a collection of poems that combines explorations of a central speaker's personal grief, his transition into fatherhood, and his negotiations with identity in relation to landscape, folklore, local history, ...
There is no shortage of encomiums to Florida's natural environment. Many writers have conventionally depicted it as a tropical paradise, a latter-day Eden in which leisure awaits the fortunate visitor. Building on this conventional...
Water Hammer is a collection of poems that explore what it means to be online in the 21st century. Taking inspiration from the rapid pace of social media feeds—and the mysterious workings of the predictive algorithms that dictate our...
This collection of short fiction, Hoop Dancing: A Novella and Seven Stories, focuses on working class men and women living in eastern North Carolina. The majority of the characters are a single generation removed from the family farms...
This study analyzes how female characters can achieve their desires, in the following texts: Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Tale, and Marie de France's Lanval". Building on the theories of...
There is nothing new under the sun in human experiences of inevitable disappointment, suffering, and pain derived from imperfect human nature and the reality of human life. This dissertation analyzes female characters that suffer from...
This is a history of reception of Thomas Middleton. Literary critics and theater directors in the US and the UK have responded to a growing interest in Middleton by publishing and producing more Middleton-related work in the past 50...
The Age of Strongmen is the opening excerpt of a novel in progress. The excerpt covers the opening four chapters and follows the parallel stories of two characters: Jules, the child of a poor woman and a delinquent father; and Sunra, ...
This dissertation addresses the following question: how did the interaction of image and word contribute to the formation and preservation of a community of white supremacists I refer to as the cult of lynching? The value of...
Sentimental novels were the juggernaut of the publishing industry in America in the nineteenth century. Also known as novels of domesticity and, more recently, as women's fiction, these novels were written largely by and for women. The...
My thesis is a collection of five short stories, each dealing with characters who continue to wrestle with issues from their youths, specifically unresolved conflicts with their parents that affect their present lives. Having lived in...
Ernest J. Gaines' work articulates the social, political, and economic position of society's most vulnerable citizens: the poor, voiceless, disenfranchised, and invisible. From his youthful days on the plantation to his adult years in...
"That Inimitable Art": Magic in Early Modern English Culture examines representations of magical practitioners and their beliefs and practices as they appear in a variety of canonical and non-canonical early modern cultural productions....
This thesis examines the relationship between portrait photography and rhetorical ethos in nineteenth-century women rhetors. Facing a challenging rhetorical situation in which credible women were relegated to the home, the women featured...
"The King of Love" is a creative dissertation. It is a novel focusing on the struggles of the African-American community to bridge gulfs and divides within itself. The location and setting of the story are in the present day and revolve...
I designed a study of online courses that combined ethnography and teacher research. I observed and described the elements of two completely online second semester first-year composition courses in the Spring 2004 semester, one that I...
Fabulous is a creative dissertation that combines both lyric and narrative poetry to interrogate subjects such as race, class, gender, and the natural world. Poems are original work and most have appeared in notable literary journals.
This thesis will show the degree of influence that the philosophies of John Locke had upon three subsequent eighteenth century writers: Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I contend that while aspects of Locke's...
Decomposition skirts the boundary space between Autofiction (Serge Doubrovsky’s term for autobiographical fiction) and liberally Creative Nonfiction, where time has been collapsed or rearranged to tell a truer story. The collection is...
This dissertation examines the importance of female friendship alliances in Shakespeare's plays and how such alliances affect those engaged in them as well as the community around them. Their value to individuals and to the broader...
This novel is a queer coming of age story written for a teenage audience, dealing with themes of sexuality and gender. The story follows Taylor Garland, a homecoming queen in the fictional town of Hopuonk, Massachusetts in 1999, as she...
This dissertation is based on an ethnographic study of a living learning community at a large public university in the Southeastern United States. The research was conducted over a four-month period within a program called the Social...
The following poems focus upon fundamental experiences with technologies, physical forms, obsessions, and ideas in order to reveal an inherent unity in humanity. These “artifacts” are found in ancient, but also contemporary, contexts, ...
The starting point for this work is the exigency of community in the contemporary world. A number of British novels and films written and produced during Margaret Thatcher's term in office illustrate the deep social and economic...
Sister Montclair and Sister Paige are missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS/Mormon Church) and are serving in Cape Town, South Africa, when they are sexually assaulted by a group of men from a local...
Understanding religious imagery and its uses on stage is essential to interpreting drama, beginning as it did in the sacred rituals of ancient Greece. In post-World-War-II America, playwrights divested religious elements of their...
Looking for the Perfect Blueberry Pancake is the fictional story of John Smith--an ex-cook depressed with the superficiality of his ninety-hour-per-week job managing a high-end cigar bar and disenchanted with what he thought would be a...
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
