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The Use of Art Objects in the Fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne
This study is not concerned with the evaluation of Hawthorne's artistic criticism but with the uses he made art objects in his writing. Such a study should give suggestions for interpretation of his works, as well as information concerning literary devices and technique in style. It should consider the contribution of the art objects to the literary artistry of the works in which they appear. Such a study has not previously been made.
Date:
June 1959
Creator:
Rodewald, Fred A.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Unlike Things Must Meet: Metaphor in the Novels of Herman Melville
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 is based consists of over fourteen thousand metaphors taken from Melville's nine novels. Each of these metaphors has been classified on the basis of its vehicle image. There are eight general categories, and tables are provided which show the number of metaphors in each category in each novel and the frequency with which the metaphors in each category occur in each novel. Overall, his metaphors suggest that Melville's vision of life was more often pessimistic than optimistic. They also reveal his growth as a writer. In the later novels, metaphors generally are more original than those in the early novels and are more skillfully related to his major themes.
Date:
May 1980
Creator:
Gongre, Charles E.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
"Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining"
A collection of poems that are history- and place-infused lyrical songs that that sounds the landscapes and distances of the South, with a critical preface that explores erotic encounters with the divine.
Date:
August 2016
Creator:
Wagenaar, Mark
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Symbolism in Six Works of Joseph Conrad
This study examines evidence as to Conrad's principles provided by the symbolism in five novels and one novelette.
Date:
1950
Creator:
Anderson, Gerald
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Transcendental Experience of the English Romantic Poets
This study is an exploration into the Romantics' transcendence of the dualistic world view and their attainment of a holistic vision. Chapter I formulates a dichotomy between the archaic (sacrosanct) world view and the modern (mechanistic) world view. Chapter II discusses the reality of the religious experience in Romanticism. Chapter III elucidates the Romantics' use of mystic myths and noetic symbols. Chapter IV treats the Romantic transcendence of the dualistic world view and the problems of expressing the transcendental experience in aesthetic form. Supporting theories include those of Henri Bergson, Martin Buber, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and M. H. Abrams. The study concludes by assessing the validity of the Romantic vision in the modern world.
Date:
August 1974
Creator:
Berliner, Donna Gaye
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Kate Chopin's The Awakening: Narcissism in the Suicide and Sexuality of Edna Pontellier
The central figure in The Awakening, Edna Pontellier, is shown in this thesis to pursue a narcissistic flight from existential reality. Following a review of contemporary criticism, Edna Pontellier's narcissism is discussed in connection with her sexuality and suicide. Sources cited range from biographies of Kate Chopin to scholarly articles to the works of modern psychologists. The emphasis throughout the thesis is on the wealth of interpretations that currently exist on The Awakening as well as the potential for further -study and interpretation in the future. Rather than viewing The Awakening as a purely feministic novel, it is stressed that The Awakening can transcend such categorization and be appreciated on many levels.
Date:
December 1988
Creator:
Lehman, Suzanne M. (Suzanne Marie)
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Graham Greene and the Idea of Childhood
A marked preoccupation with childhood is evident throughout the works of Graham Greene; it receives most obvious expression in his concern with the idea that the course of a man's life is determined during his early years, but many of his other obsessive themes, such as betrayal, pursuit, and failure, may be seen to have their roots in general types of experience which Greene evidently believes to be common to all children.
Date:
June 1966
Creator:
Bell, Martha Frances
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Choric Element in Shakespeare's Second History Tetralogy
This thesis is a study of the anticipatory remarks and choric comments in Richard II, Parts I and II of Henry IV, and Henry V.
Date:
1958
Creator:
Leath, Helen Lang
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Neckbones and Sauerfowches: From Fractured Childhood in the Ghetto to Constantly Changing Womanhood in the World
A collection of five memoiristic essays arranged about themes of family, womanhood and the African-American community with a preface. Among the experiences the memoirs recount are childhood abandonment; verbal and emotional child abuse; mental illness; poverty; and social and personal change. Essays explore the lasting impact of abandonment by a father on a girl as she grows into a woman; the devastation of family turmoil and untreated mental illness; generational identity in the African-American community. One essay describes the transition from the identity-forming profession of journalism to academia. The last essay is about complicated and conflicting emotions toward patriotism and flag-waving on the part of a black woman who has lived through riots, little known police shootings of students on black campuses, and many other incidents that have divided Americans.
Date:
May 2002
Creator:
Smith, Starita
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Melville's Vision of Society : A Study of the Paradoxical Interrelations in Melville's Major Novels
I hold that Melvillean society consists of paradoxical relationships between civilization and barbarianism, evil and good, the corrupt and the natural, the individual and the collective, and the primitive and the advanced. Because these terms are arbitrary and, in the context of the novels, somewhat interchangeable, I explore Melville's thoughts as those emerge in the following groups of novels: Typee, Omoo, and White-Jacket demonstrate the paradox of Melvillean society; Redburn, Moby-Dick, and Mardi illustrate the corrupting effects of capitalism and individualism; and The Confidence-Man, Israel Potter, and Pierre depict a collapsed paradox and the disintegration of Melville's society.
Date:
May 1995
Creator:
Terzis, Timothy R. (Timothy Randolph)
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Significance of Animals in the Life and Writings of Lord Byron
It is the purpose of this research to explore the role that animals played in both the life and writings of Lord Byron. The first areas of concentration are on the specific examples of Byron's affection for animals and on the psychological aspects of this love. Secondly, the thesis attempts to explore the symbolic importance of animals in relation to Byron and his works. Finally, the research is focused on Byron's concepts and ideas, which he frequently illustrated and clarified by animal symbolism.
Date:
August 1965
Creator:
Mathews, Alice Jean
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Mary Austin's Contribution to the Culture of the Southwest
An examination of Mary Austin's works and how she contributed to the culture of the Southwest.
Date:
1946
Creator:
Wilson, Cora Mae
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Negro as a Character in Recent American Fiction
This study aimed to assess the character in Recent American fiction. It concludes that writers of Negro literature have been quick to see the effectiveness of the use of Negro religious beliefs and practices in giving reality and substance to their racial pictures. Black men have to live in a white man's world. As a whole, contemporary American fiction gives a panorimic view of Negroes of almost every section.
Date:
August 1936
Creator:
Early, Minnie Lee
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Reconsidering Regionalism: The Environmental Ethics of Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Willa Cather
This study identifies environmentalist themes in the fiction and nonfiction of Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Willa Cather and argues that these ideals are interdependent upon the authors’ humanistic objectives. Focusing on these three authors’ overlapping interest in topics such as women’s rights, environmental health, and Native American history, this dissertation calls attention to the presence of a frequently unexplored but distinct, traceable feminist environmental ethic in American women’s regional writing. This set of beliefs involves a critique of the threats posed by a patriarchal society to both the environment and its human inhabitants, particularly the women, and thus can be classified as proto-ecofeminist. Moreover, the authors’ shared emphasis on the benefits of local environmental knowledge and stewardship demonstrates vital characteristics of the bioregionalist perspective, a modern form of environmental activism that promotes sustainability at a local level and mutually beneficial relationships among human and nonhuman inhabitants of a naturally defined region. Thus, the study ultimately defines a particular form of women’s literary activism that emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century and argues for these authors’ continued theoretical relevance to a twenty-first-century audience increasingly invested in understanding and resolving a global environmental predicament.
Date:
August 2011
Creator:
Clasen, Kelly
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Corporate Christians and Terrible Turks: Economics, Aesthetics, and the Representation of Empire in the Early British Travel Narrative, 1630 - 1780
This dissertation examines the evolution of the early English travel narrative as it relates to the development and application of mercantilist economic practices, theories of aesthetic representation, and discourses of gender and narrative authority. I attempt to redress an imbalance in critical work on pre-colonialism and colonialism, which has tended to focus either on the Renaissance, as exemplified by the works of critics such as Stephen Greenblatt and John Gillies, or on the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as in the work of scholars such as Srinivas Aravamudan and Edward Said. This critical gap has left early travel narratives by Sir Francis Moore, Jonathan Harris, Penelope Aubin, and others largely neglected. These early writers, I argue, adapted the conventions of the travel narrative while relying on the authority of contemporary commercial practices. The early English travelers modified contemporary conventions of aesthetic representation by formulating their descriptions of non-European cultures in terms of the economic and political conventions and rivalries of the early eighteenth century. Early English travel literature, I demonstrate, functioned as a politically motivated medium that served both as a marker of authenticity, justifying the colonial and imperial ventures that would flourish in the nineteenth century, and as …
Date:
December 2003
Creator:
Abunasser, Rima Jamil
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Theatrical Criticism in "The Tatler" and "The Spectator"
This paper discusses the publications of the Tatler and the Spectator and their influences and criticisms of local theater, actors and audiences.
Date:
January 1970
Creator:
Davis, Kathryn Yvonne Harris
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Orality, Literacy, and Heroism in Huckleberry Finn
This work re-assesses the heroic character of Huckleberry Finn in light of the inherent problems of discourse. Walter Ong's insights into the differences between oral and literate consciousnesses, and Stanley Fish's concept of "interpretive communities" are applied to Huck's interactions with the other characters, revealing the underlying dynamic of his character, the need for a viable discourse community. Further established, by enlisting the ideas of Ernest Becker, is that this need for community finds its source in the most fundamental human problem, the consciousness of death. The study concludes that the problematic ending of Twain's novel is consistent with the theme of community and is neither the artistic failure, nor the cynical pronouncement on the human race that so many critics have seen it to be.
Date:
August 1986
Creator:
Barrow, William David, 1955-
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Divine Coming of the Light
The Divine Coming of the Light is a memoir-in-essays that covers an experience, from 2007 to 2010, when I lived in Kosuge Village (population 900), nestled in the mountains of central Japan. I was the only foreigner there. My memoir uses these three years as a frame to investigate how landscape affects identity. The book profiles who I was before Japan (an evangelical and then wilderness guide), why I became obsessed with mountains, and the fall-out from mountain obsession to a humanistic outlook. The path my narrator takes is one of a mountain hike. I was born in tabletop-flat West Texas to conservative, Christian parents in the second most Republican county by votes in America. At 19, I made my first backpacking trip to the San Juan Mountains of western Colorado and was awed by their outer-planetary-like massiveness. However, two friends and I became lost in the wilderness for three days without cell phones. During this time, an obsession possessed me as we found our way back through the peaks to safety, a realization that I could die out there, yes, but amid previously unknown splendor. I developed an addiction to mountains that weakened my religious faith. Like the Romantic …
Date:
May 2018
Creator:
Peters, Clinton Crockett
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The American in the Novels of Henry James
For the purpose of analyzing James' interpretation of the American character, it is first necessary to study his individual Americans.
Date:
1949
Creator:
Speegle, Katherine Sloan
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Persons and Places in Mark Twain's Fiction
This paper focuses on Mark Twain's writing style and characterization in his fiction. The settings and characters of his fiction are in particular focus, specifically how Mark Twain draws on personal experiences and memories to make his characters and settings more relatable and realistic. A brief biography of Twain's life is given before the author goes into the specifics of characterization and settings.
Date:
May 1947
Creator:
Sherman, Elizabeth P.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Nature and Human Experience in the Poetry of Robert Frost
This study seeks to demonstrate that nature provided Frost an objective background against which he could measure the validity of human experience and gain a fuller understanding of it. The experiences examined with reference to the poetry include loneliness, anxiety, sorrow, and hope. Attention is given to the influence of Frost's philosophical skepticism upon his poetry. The study reveals that Frost discovered correspondences between nature and human experience which clarified his perspective of existence. The experiences of loneliness, anxiety, and sorrow were found to relate to Frost's feeling of separation from nature and from the source of existence. The experience of hope was found to relate to Frost's vision of the wholeness and unity of life, a vision which derives from humanity's common source with nature.
Date:
August 1975
Creator:
Dixon, David C.
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Fifth Humor: Ink, Texts, and the Early Modern Body
This dissertation tracks the intimate relationship between writing and the body to add new dimensions to humoral criticism and textual studies of Renaissance literature. Most humor theory focuses on the volatile, permeable nature of the body, and its vulnerability to environmental stimuli, neglecting the important role that written texts play in this economy of fluids. I apply the principles of humor theory to the study of handwritten and printed texts. This approach demonstrates that the textual economy of the period—reading, writing, publishing, exchanging letters, performing all of the above on stage—mirrors the economy of fluids that governed the humoral body. Early modern readers and writers could imagine textual activities not only as cerebral, abstract concepts, but also as sexual activities, as processes of ingestion and regurgitation. My study of ink combines humoral, historical materialist, and ecocritical modes of study. Materialist critics have examined the quill, paper, and printing press as metaphors for the body; however, the ink within them remains unexamined. This dissertation infuses the figurative body of the press with circulating passions, and brings to bear the natural, biochemical properties that ink lends to the texts it creates. Considering the influence of written and printed materials on the body …
Date:
December 2012
Creator:
Polster, Kristen Kayem
System:
The UNT Digital Library
Spenser's Use of Classical Mythology in The Faerie Queene
This thesis endeavors to show how Edmund Spenser used classical mythology, and his variations from it, in his work The Faerie Queene.
Date:
1941
Creator:
Etheridge, Margaret
System:
The UNT Digital Library
The Creative Self in the Hawthornian Tradition
Through narrations presenting juxtaposition of conditions and ambivalence of conclusions, writers in the Hawthornian tradition compel the reader to interpret for himself the destiny of the creative protagonist. In these works the creative self is often threatened with psychical annihilation by its internal conflicts between pragmatic needs and aesthetic goals, social responsibility and professional dedication, idealistic pursuits and materialistic desires. Works in this tradition show creativity evolving from conflicting forces within the creative self. Female characters in the novels function as the creative imagination, leading the self towards creative consummation, sometimes bearing the creation itself, and always suggesting mythical figures associated with creativity. Male characters represent either the withdrawn, sensitive, idealistic ego, or the active, materialistic will. Confrontation between these internal forces produces the apocalyptic revelation enabling the self to transcend its condition by renewing contact with the creative source, the unconscious psyche. For these writers the unconscious has roots in myth, legend, dreams, and memory and is opposed to sterile conditions producing fragmentation of the creative self. In the Hawthornian tradition, the American Revolution separated the self from existence in the timeless universal givens and propelled it into assuming the determination of history. Bereft of traditional guidance and belief …
Date:
December 1983
Creator:
Kirsten, Gladys L. (Gladys Lucille)
System:
The UNT Digital Library