This study discusses the evolution of the English country-house poem from its inception by Ben Jonson in "To Penshurst" to the present. It shows that in addition to stylistic and thematic borrowings primarily from Horace and Martial, traditional English values associated with the great hall and comitatus ideal helped define features of the English country-house poem, to which Jonson added the metonymical use of architecture. In the Jonsonian country-house poem, the country estate, exemplified by Penshurst, is a microcosm of the ideal English social organization characterized by interdependence, simplicity, service, hospitality, and balance between the active and contemplative life. Those poems which depart from the Jonsonian ideal are characterized by disequilibrium between the active and contemplative life, resulting in the predominance of artifice, subordination of nature, and isolation of art from the community, as exemplified by Thomas Carew's "To Saxham" and Richard Lovelace's "Amyntor's Grove." Architectural features of the English country house are examined to explain the absence of the Jonsonian country-house poem in the eighteenth century. The building tradition praised by Jonson gradually gave way to aesthetic considerations fostered by the professional architect and Palladian architecture, architectural patronage by the middle class, and change in identity of the country …

This study analyzes the congruence between the objectives of secondary-level English methods courses in Texas universities and the objectives of the state-mandated high school curriculum (the essential elements) in language arts. A questionnaire was used to obtain information from 26 English methods instructors at 22 universities in Texas. The data obtained from these questionnaires reveal that these instructors strongly emphasize preparing prospective English teachers to teach the essential elements of composition. Other significant findings include: (1) the lack of emphasis in the English methods course on strategies for teaching the essential elements of language, when those elements are unrelated to composition, and (2) the lack of uniformity which characterizes the organization of the English methods course at major Texas universities.

Although Garrison Keillor is perhaps best known as the creator and host of Minnesota Public Radio's A Prairie Home Companion (1974-1987), the focus of this study is his literary career. Keillor's literary accomplishments include a successful career as a writer for The New Yorker and two best-selling books about the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, entitled Lake Wobegon Days (1985) and Leaving Home (1987). His literary style incorporates elements from several traditions in American literature--the precise, sophisticated "New Yorker style" practiced by writers such as E. B. White and James Thurber; the oral tradition prominent in the works of Mark Twain and the nineteenth-century literary comedians; and the satiric realism associated with the small-town literature of writers such as Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis.

Emily Dickinson's seclusion is explored in light of her family's strange entanglement with the Todds. Austin Dickinson's affair with Mabel Loomis Todd, and the effect on the lives of Susan Dickinson, Lavinia Dickinson, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, David Todd, and Millicent Todd Bingham, provide a steamy context for the posthumous publication of Emily Dickinson's poetry. The screenplay includes original music (inspired by the dashes and an old hymn) for two poems: "Wild Nightsl Wild Nights!" and "Better - than Music!" Also included are visualizations of many of Dickinson's images, including "circumference," "Eden," "the bee," and "immortality."