This study defines and applies a theory of tragedy which is based on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. In the first chapter the writer argues for the need of a widely accepted theory of tragedy and show that we do not presently have one. In the same chapter, the writer presents the theory that tragedy is a very specific art type which transcends genre and which is the product of a synthesis of the Dionysiac and Apollonian forces in Western culture. The writer argues that by understanding the philosophical and aesthetic nature of the forces as they are expressed in tragedy we can isolate and define the essential elements of tragedy. Tragedy must have a person of heroic stature as its main protagonist. It must have a specific kind of plot in which a reversal of the hero's experience of the universe occurs. It must have a choric element, which is a combination of two components: communality and lyricism. Finally, tragedy must contain a mythic background which allows for the expression of two themes, the Dionysiac theme and the Apollonian theme.

Wuthering Heights is a composite of opposites. Its two houses, its two families, its two generations, its two planes of existence are held in place by Emily Bronte's careful manipulation of repetitive, yet differentiated, symbols associated with each of these pairs. Using symbols to develop her polarities and to unify them along the imaginatively rendered horizontal axis connecting Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, the vertical axis connecting the novel's several "heavens" and "hells," and the third dimensional axis connecting the spiritual and corporeal worlds, Emily Bronte gives the divided world of Wuthering Heights an almost perfect symmetry. This study divides the more than seven hundred symbols into physical and nonphysical. The physical symbols are subdivided into setting, animal life, plant life, people, celestial objects, and miscellaneous objects. The fewer nonphysical symbols are grouped under movement, light, time, emotions, concepts, and miscellaneous terms. Verticality and thresholds, the two most important symbolic motifs, are drawn from both physical and nonphysical symbols.

An understanding of the influence of Shakespeare on the structure and language of Moby-Dick is important because the plays of Shakespeare gave Melville a sudden insight into the significance of form and because his absorption of Shakespearean rhetoric enabled him to solve a serious artistic problem. In Moby-Dick Melville wished to write a work of symbolic fiction which would have both epic scope and tragic depth, but his difficulty lay in finding a structural and stylistic method which would provide the amplitude necessary to epic and at the same time could achieve the compression and verbal economy necessary to tragedy. He solved this problem by learning from Shakespeare to create a multi-layered dramatic structure and to use a dramatic language which becomes one layer of that structure. In Shakespeare's greatest plays there is a virtual fusion of form and meaning, and it is this fusion which, in its greatest moments, the language of Moby-Dick achieves.

The Old English Apollonius of Tyre survives as only a fragment of a popular medieval romance which is recorded in numerous Latin manuscripts. Approximately half the story is missing; therefore, studies of this prose romance are usually restricted to linguistic and stylistic analyses. Hence this study focuses on the word order of phrases and clauses and on features of style apparent in the Old English version, with comparison to the Latin source where significant divergences occur.

In this dissertation I argue that in the characters in Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet there is consistently evidenced a psychological orientation towards growth. An introductory Chapter One surveys and a concluding Chapter Six summarizes the dissertation, but the body of the text is four chapters demonstrating the growth-orientation in four characters.

This thesis addresses the possible sources of melancholy evident in Eighteenth Century writing. Possibilities include nature, mental state, attitudes, sentimentalism, and significant works of fiction.

This thesis resulted from an examination of the influence of witchcraft superstitions upon Elizabethan-era dramas.

This dissertation traces imperialist ideology as it functions in the texts of two radical Liberal critics of imperialism, Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster. In chapters two and three respectively, I read Woolf's autobiographical account Growing and his novel The Village in the Jungle to examine connections between "nonfictional" and "fictional" writing on colonialism. The autobiography's fictive texture compromises its claims to facticity and throws into relief the problematic nature of notions of truth and fact in colonialist epistemology and discursive systems.

This thesis is focused on the motivations and influences on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's work and letters are used to support the hypothesis that his work resulted from a desire to be recognized.

This thesis presents a the satire of Jonathan Swift's writings framed within the context of the historical events and conditions as they existed during his lifetime.

This thesis is an analysis of the comic and tragicomic styles that are evident in plays written by Beaumont and Fletcher.

This thesis presents the results of a study conducted to determine if visual aids impacted the general science capabilities of middle school students.

This creative thesis collects five fictional stories, as well as a critical preface entitled “Fractals and the Gestalt: the Hybridization of Genre.” The critical preface discusses genre as a literary element and explores techniques for effective genre hybridization. The stories range from psychological fiction to science fiction and fantasy fiction. Each story also employs elements from other genres as well. These stories collectively explore the concept of the other and themes of connection and ostracization.

This doctoral dissertation applies user experience and complex systems theory, combining eye-tracking data with verbal and observational data from user test instances, to study the effectiveness of metadata records that accompany digital primary source objects available on The Portal to Texas History.

This thesis examines some selective cases of morphophonemic alternation in Mandarin Chinese. It presents analyses of the function -of the retroflex suffix -r and describes several conditions for tone sandhi. The suffix -r functions not simply as a noun formative. Some of the suffixed forms have consistently different meanings from the roots on which they are based. The suffix -r also plays a role in poetry as a time-filler to make each line of a poem fulfill the requirements of the strict number of characters and rhyme. This thesis also explains what causes the tone pattern of words such as xiaojie and jiejie to be pronounced differently. These tonal changes are found to be related to the way in which a word is formed. Compounding, reduplication and suffixation differ with respect to how they effect tone sandhi. Tone alternations in actual speech are explored to determine how tone sandhi produces each pronunciation and how grammatical structure and other factors are relevant.

The thesis systematically explicates Dostoevsky's portrayal of the origin of human evil on earth through the novel The Brothers Karamazov. Drawing from the novel and from Augustine, Pelagius, and Luther, the explication compares and contrasts Dostoevsky's doctrine of original conflict against the three theologians' views of original sin. Following a brief summary of the three earlier theories of original sin, the thesis describes Dostoevsky's peculiar doctrine of Karamazovism and his unique account of how human evil originated. Finally, the thesis shows how suffering, love, and guilt grow out of the original conflict and how the image of Christ serves as an icon of the special kind of social unity projected by Zosima the Elder in The Brothers Karamazov.

American writers of narrative fiction frequently manipulate the words of their narrators in order to convey a significance of which the author and the reader are aware but the narrator is not. By causing the narrator to reveal information unwittingly, the author develops covert themes that are antithetical to those espoused by the narrator. Particularly subject to such subversion is the first-person narrator whose "I" is not to be interpreted as the voice of the author. This study examines how and why the first-person narrator is subverted in four works of twentieth-century American fiction: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to , and Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus

The prevailing analyses of the structure of the Gospel of Mark represent modifications of the form-critical approach and reflect its tendency to regard the Gospel not as a unified narrative but as an anthology of sayings and acts of Jesus which were selected and more or less adapted to reflect the early Church's theological understanding of Christ. However, a narrative-critical reading of the Gospel reveals that the opening proclamation, the Transfiguration, and the concluding proclamation provide a definite framework for a close pattern of recurring words, repeated questions, interpolated narrative, and inter locking parallels which unfold the basic theme of the Gospel: the person and work of Christ.

Over 13-weeks a control group (n=7) had all errors corrected, while an experimental group (n=9) had only article and sentence construction (run-on sentences, fragments, comma splices) errors corrected. Separating the two types of errors is essential, since the latter (representing grammar) are subject to theories of acquisition and the former (representing usage) are not. One-way analyses of variance ran on pretest versus posttest found no significant difference in either groups' article errors; however, the experimental group had significantly fewer sentence construction errors, implying that teachers should be sensitive to both the correction technique and error type; researchers should not combine the two error types in gathering data.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that the concept of a godless universe governed by a consciousless and conscienceless Immanent Will in Hardy's poetry is an ineluctable outcome, given the expanded scientific knowledge of the nineteenth century, of the pantheistic views of the English Romantic poets. The purpose is accomplished by tracing characteristically Romantic attitudes through the representative poetry of the early Victorian period and in Hardy's poetry. The first chapter is a brief introduction. Chapter II surveys major Romantic themes, illustrating them in Wordsworth's poetry. Chapter III treats the decline of the Romantic vision in the poetry of Tennyson and Arnold. Hardy's views and the Victorian poets' influence are the subject of Chapter IV. Chapter V demonstrates Wordsworth's influence on Hardy in several areas.

Undergraduate thesis exploring criticisms of patriarchy in women's captivity narratives by examining Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1862) and Sarah Wakefield's Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees: A Narrative of Indian Captivity (1862). Both used their socially acceptable roles in order to assert their own ideas regarding the patriarchy. The author concludes that both narratives therefore assert that patriarchal societies did not necessarily produce justice for English or American women who were a part of these societies, or for the Dakota Indians who lived in close contact with a patriarchal society.

Undergraduate thesis examining representations of media and technology in two contemporary American novels, "White Noise" by Don DeLillo (1985) and "Super Sad True Love Story" by Gary Shteyngart (2010), with the goal of elucidating the attributes and significance of the technological contexts in fiction as well as contributing to a broader discussion of its operations on consciousness, society, and the cultural imagination.

Undergraduate thesis expanding exploring the 1836 captivity narrative "An Authentic Narrative of the Seminole War; and the Miraculous Escape of Mrs. Mary Godfrey, and Her Four Female Children." Unlike Mary Rowlandson's "The Sovereignty and Goodness of God," the anonymously-authored "An Authentic Narrative" is almost certainly fabricated. There are no records of a Mrs. Mary Godfrey being captured and redeemed, or even existing at all. However, like Rowlandson's captivity narrative, it attempts to use a woman's experience of captivity to defend and stabilize a national male identity. "An Authentic Narrative" is a variation on the captivity genre that indicates a shift toward the white fraternal national identity described by Dana E. Nelson, even as the female captive's rescue by an escaped slave and the deaths of the white, male rescuers point to the fundamental incoherence of this national identity.

Undergraduate thesis that is a collection of short stories preceded by critical preface. The preface, which is divided into two sections, contextualizes the function and presence of the modular narrative. The first section explores the criticism of the form and the second section provides contextual examples of contemporary stories which more or less exhibit elements of the modular. This collection entitled "We Were Once All Gentle Creatures" employs the many conventions and elements of the modular story as means to show how the modular replicates the atemporal qualities of human experience.