The study inquires into the dynamic relationship between Protestantism and culture in The Faerie Oueene. The American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr makes penetrating analyses of the relationship between man's cultural potentials and the insights of Protestant Christianity which greatly illuminate how Spenser searches for a comprehensive religious, ethical, political, and social vision for the Christian community of Protestant England. But Spenser maintains the tension between culture and Christianity to the end, refusing to offer a merely coherent system of principles based on the doctrine of Christianity.

This analysis of Tan's first two novels reveals that her female characters suffer from the strains critics like Amy Ling say result from the double paradox of filling the roles of mother or daughter as minority women in a white, male society. Recognizing this double paradox offers Tan's characters, and her readers, the opportunity to resolve the conflicts between mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club. Using the theories of psychologist Kathie Carlson helps readers understand how the protagonist of The Kitchen God's Wife resolves similar conflicts with her daughter and her own mother by seeking support from a mythic mother-figure, a Goddess of her own making.

Hawthorne's metafiction, fabulation, and hermeneutical semiotics are investigated in the tales and in all the novels in chronological order, including his unfinished works.

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.

The struggle for survival of an American family revolves around Mitch Wilcox, a relief pitcher for a fictional major league baseball team. Nearing the end of his long career, he must decide whether to retire or to sign a new contract. His dilemma centers on his wife, Nicole, who argues for his retirement; and his only child, Twylight, who has run away from home. The novel traces the final two weeks of a season, during which Mitch's team battles for a pennant and he delays his decision because of events that expose the precarious nature of both his professional and personal identities. During a crucial game, his journey culminates with a choice that directs him toward a new life.