This thesis discusses Mark Twain as a political satirist in Nevada and during the Gilded Age. There are also chapters covering Politics and Slavery, Democracy and Monarchy, as well as Imperialism and War.

The status of bilingual education in Texas has been examined in this paper in order to explore the nature of bilingual education and bilingual education programs, to ascertain whether the implementation of bilingual education programs has been successful in Texas, and to determine if there is sufficient justification for the continuation of such programs.

This thesis is a comparative study of Juvenal and Lord Byron, with emphasis on the particularly kindred aspects of the poets' works.

This thesis will concern itself with the development of the religious thought of Eliot as it is expressed in his poetry and plays.

This study explores six utopias by female authors written at the turn of the twentieth century: Mary Bradley Lane's Mizora (1881), Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant's Unveiling Parallel (1893), Eloise O. Richberg's Reinstern (1900), Lena J. Fry's Other Worlds (1905), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), and Martha Bensley Bruère's Mildred Carver, USA (1919). While the right to vote had become the central, most important point of the movement, women were concerned with many other issues affecting their lives. Positioned within the context of the late nineteenth century women's rights movement, this study examines these "sideline" concerns of the movement such as home and gender-determined spheres, motherhood, work, marriage, independence, and self-sufficiency and relates them to the transforming character of female identity at the time. The study focuses primarily on analyzing the expression of female historical desire through utopian genre and on explicating the contradictory nature of utopian production.

The aim of this paper is not to disprove previous interpretations of Wilder's work, but to enlarge on them. The problem is not that the opinions of the early critics and many of the later ones were incorrect; the were merely incomplete. This paper shall attempt to show that Wilder's major thematic material falls into two interlocking and overlapping groups. Repeatedly Wilder deals with the relationship of man to something beyond himself, and the relationship of man to individual man and to mankind.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the available evidence concerning Eliot's theological beliefs--particularly as that evidence is found in his plays--in an attempt to define with as much accuracy as possible the understanding of Eliot's theology which provides the most adequate understanding of and enjoyment of Eliot's writings.

This study is an inquiry into the relationship between the contemporary American writer's understanding of American reality and his attempt to convey this reality by the use of an insane first-person point of view character. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the insane narrator's point of view not only recreates the feeling of absurdity through the disjointed point of view of the madman, but also points to the absurdity in contemporary American life. The first part of this study analyzes the narrators in Henderson the Rain King, The Bell Jar, and Lancelot. The second part uses A Fan's Notes, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Breakfast of Champions to discuss the problems that arise from the use of an insane narrator.

This thesis attempts to explain the Anglo-Saxon influence on Hopkins's poetry by providing a biographical study of his life to determine when he acquired knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon.

This thesis investigates the phonological ability of exceptional second language (L2) learners of English and their levels of motivation. This study is the first of its kind to do a large-scale examination of L2 learners whose first languages (L1s) do not belong to the same Indo-European language family as English. Fifteen non-native speakers (NNSs) of English filled out a questionnaire and produced four speech samples, including a picture description task, paragraph reading task, sentence reading and word reading task. Fifteen native speaker (NS) controls also produced the same speech samples. Four NSs judged all participants' accents. Six NNSs scored as highly as NSs on some of the speech segments using a 2-standard deviation (SD) cut-off point. There was no significant correlation between their scores on pronunciation and motivation.

Though it is important to establish the authenticity of Cooper's and Simm's thematic and historical Indians, it is more important to show that the writers were accurate in their delineation of the customs, personalities, and thoughts of the Indian tribes represented in the two books.

The overt teaching of the Monitor, or conscious rule awareness, to native Spanish-speaking ESL students was examined to note possible benefits to the students' oral English production. Native Spanish-speaking students of English (the experimental group) were taught an awareness of their ability to self-correct their spoken English. They were then compared to another group of native Spanish-speaking ESL students (the control group) in four areas: Ilyin Oral Interview score, total words produced, errors produced, and interference errors produced. The results of the study lend support to the theory that overt Monitor teaching could be beneficial to native Spanish-speaking students of English. The experimental group showed a significant gain in Ilyin scores and a significant reduction in the number of errors produced.

"The purpose of this study is to examine the attitude of Mexican Americans toward their Texas Spanish in order to determine if present educational policies are successful in promoting high self-concepts for Mexican-American students..the conclusion of this thesis [is] that a sizable number of Mexican-Americans do not have a positive self-image as speakers of their native language. It is suggested that the rejection of Spanish dialects which are different and distinct from the school standard is a major factor in causing a low self-image on the part of the speaker of a non-standard dialect."-- leaves 1,3.

The elegies, as a major body of John Donne's poetry, have been unjustly slighted by critics. In order to correct this imbalance in Donne criticism, this study will examine the whole body of Donne's formal elegies. Despite their diversity, it will be shown that they fall into several broad groupings based on tonal quality and elegiac type: complaintive, lamentive, amatory, and abusive and satiric. By examining Donne's elegies individually and in light of both the Elizabethan and the classical elegy, it will be seen that Donne is the only English poet who utilizes the full scope allowed by the classical elegy.

This study attempts to list subjects in the field of Science, in which Poe had an interest. For the purpose of this study, the writer has divided the field of Science into the following heads: medicine, chemistry, biology, navigation, metrology, astronomy, physics, mathematics, and invention. Pseudo-sciences classified as: psychology, metphysics, phrenolgy, astrology, galvanism, mesmerism, logic reasoning, cryptography, and graphology.

Don Juan was Byron's effort to come to terms with the reality of his own environment, and he demanded the liberty to try to understand life and to present his conclusions without editorial or social oppression. It is an examination of the problem of appearance and reality; as a satire, the poem attacks appearances maintained by hypocrisy by placing them against the background of reality which is apparent to Byron.

The purpose of this thesis is to make an unbiased presentation of the many facets of Byron's religious beliefs.

This thesis examines the contributions of Ezra Pound to the modern readers' awareness of the classics.

Evidence is presented to support the notion that US regional accents influence decisions in the hiring process. Fifty-six people who hire for a variety of corporations participated in a computerized survey, during which they listened to speakers from regions of the US reading the same passage. Respondents judged the speakers on personal characteristics commonly considered in hiring decisions, attempted to identify the speakers' regions, and selected job categories for each speaker, in addition to providing information about their own linguistic security. Results indicate: 1) judgments based on regional accents strongly correlate to selection of job categories, 2) respondents were not able to identify regional accents correctly, and 3) negative judgments were assigned to the speakers of accents that were correctly identified.

Wilderness landscape, a setting common in Romantic literature and painting, is generally overlooked in the art of the Middle Ages. While the medieval garden and the city are well mapped, the medieval wilderness remains relatively trackless. Yet the use of setting to represent interior experience may be traced back to the Neo-Platonic use of space and movement to define spiritual development. Separating themselves as far as possible from the material world, such writers as Origen and Plotinus avoided use of representational detail in their spatial models; however, both the visual artists and the authors who adopted the Neo-Platonic paradigm, elaborated their emotional spaces with the details of the classical locus amoenus and of the exegetical desert, while retaining the philosophical concern with spiritual transition. Analysis of wilderness as an image for spiritual and emotional transition in medieval literature and art relates the texts to an iconographic tradition which, along with motifs of city and garden, provides a spatial representation of interior progress, as the medieval dialectic process provides a paradigm for intellectual resolution. Such an analysis relates the motif to the core of medieval intellectual experience, and further suggests significant connections between medieval and modern narratives in regard to the …

This is a collection of short stories written to satisfy the requirements for a Master of Arts degree. These stories are done in several different forms in an attempt to help the author discover which one suits his personal style best. The preface to these stories is an examination of how and why the author goes about the creative process. The author has examined the lives and methods of other literary figures to see what their individual inspirations were and how they worked. This preface also looks at some of the obstacles and hazards that these men and women face while they are writing.

This thesis on William Faulkner's concept of knowledge beyond reason includes a study of style and characterization and a study of possible sources.

This paper concentrates on the viability of using metaphor as a teaching tool in the English as a Second Language classroom. In doing so, a semantically-based theory of metaphor, like that presented by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), is employed as a base for the examination. Such a theory of metaphor presents a dramatic shift from theories, especially Aristotle's, of the past. The theory of metaphor proposed by Lakoff and Johnson contends that language is essentially metaphorical and that much of our 'commonsense' knowledge about the world is derived from interpretations of reality and is manifested in metaphors central to a culture and its language. If this theory is true, then it stands to reason that a student attempting to learn English as a Second Language could profit greatly from metaphor instruction because such instruction would aid all areas of the language acquisition process.

Pulling Tangled Strings: "The Puppeteer" and Other Stories is a collection of stories with strong thematic and emotional connections that includes an opening preface describing the process used when writing the stories. Each of the stories is united by a main character that desperately wants to gain control of his environment. From a character acting out a classic revenge tale on his friend to a comatose teenager victimized by an ambiguous tragedy, these are characters who have been put into difficult life situations and need to feel like they are pulling the strings in their lives again. In all cases, however, the characters come to find that control does not come easily and that the motivations for their behavior are never clear cut, even to themselves.