The purpose of this study is to give the common words, together with a collection of old expressions or terms, of the oldest residents of Ellis County and to trace their usage to the states in the Old South. The importance of recording these old words and terms is to preserve the oldest forms of the community for those who are interested in the growth and development of local speech and, also, to trace the history of these words.

The purpose of this paper is to picture the West as Mark Twain saw it. Many books have been written which describe Twain's Western years, but few have given much consideration to the accuracy of his account of the West in the 1860's. This paper attempts to portray Twain not only as a social and political satirist, but also as a possible historical satirist.

This dissertation is a collection of poems preceded by a critical preface. The preface considers Anthony’s Hecht’s long poem, “The Venetian Vespers,” and the ways in which the temporally unsettled situation of the poem’s speaker parallels a problem facing narrative-meditative poets. The preface is divided into two main sections that explore divisions of this larger conflict. The first discusses the origins and effects of the speaker’s uprootedness in time, and the ways in which he tries to both combat and embrace this dislocation by temporarily losing himself in the immediacy of observing visual art. In this section I connect the dilemma of the speaker, who wishes to escape his memory by focusing outwards, to the dilemma of a representational poet who, despite his position towards the past, must necessarily confront or recollect memories and emotions in order to create authentic descriptions or characters. The second section focuses on the production and appreciation of artistic works (both visual and literary) and how the meaning, production and appreciation of beauty are inseparable from its existence within the physical limits of time. Here I discuss the significance of Hecht’s character who is surrounded with beauty yet describes himself as a person who only …

This study analyzes the contents of the "Lounger" to fill the vacuum caused by the lack of critical material on this eighteenth-century publication edited by Henry MacKenzie. This thesis catalogues the content of these one hundred and one essays and record their authorship. Specific areas, such as fashions, manners, morals, and literature, are dealt with in detail with emphasis on their reflecting the attitudes and social conditions of the period. Biographical information on the authors is given.

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.

When I was thirty-three years old, I discovered I was an adoptee. In this memoir of secrecy and love, betrayal and redemption, I reflect on my early experiences as a doted-on only child firmly rooted in the abundant love of my adoptive family, my later struggles with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, my marriage to a fellow-adoptee, my discovery of my own adoption and the subsequent reunion with my birth family, my navigation through the thrills and tensions of newly complicated family dynamics, and my witness to God's perfect timing through it all.