This thesis argues that a socially conservative tendency informed much of George Orwell's commentary between 1934 and 1943, and that the same tendency reflected a general European trend. The main sources of this thesis are a large selection of George Orwell's works and a smaller selection of works by Frantz Fanon, Jose Ortega y Gasset, and Antonio Gramsci. This thesis relies upon Orwell's involvement in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1937 and his embrace of nationalism in 1940 as major organizational points of reference. This thesis concludes that Orwell's commentary was an example of a general European conservative reaction against Marxist-Leninist thought.

This thesis investigates, analyzes, and discusses Picasso's imagery in the cultural context of the nineteenth-century Spanish tradition of flamenco. Two published photographs featuring the elderly artist with the gypsy guitarist Manitas de Plata initiated the study, and led me to the conclusion that selected works by Picasso were influenced psychologically, thematically, and formally by his youth which was spent in the Andalusian province of Malaga and later in Barcelona. Picasso's early artistic education occurred at precisely the same time and place as The Golden Age of Flamenco in Spain, a cultural phenomenon that profoundly affected both his life and art.

Earl suffers from a guilty obsession with a monster catfish. Eddie Klomp searches dog tracks for the ghosts of his lost childhood. Mike Towns is a hopeless blues musician who loses everything he cares for. Blair Evans learns to love a pesky wart. Americana becomes confused with the difference between knowledge and sex. Do Not Eat Fish from These Waters And Other Stories is a collection of short stories that explores the strange and often defeated lives of these Southern characters (and one from the point-of-view of a feral hog). Each man, woman, and hog flails through a period of potential metamorphosis trying to find some sort of meaning and worth in the past, present and future. Not all of these characters succeed.