These sketches and stories are the result of moods, daydreams, and experiences. The collection progresses from those intimate stories controlled by personal experience to the last two works which try to crystallize a mood or experience in a medium without the device of first person. "Grandpa," "Great-Grandpa," and "Weedgod" are sketches which describe the boundary between what things are and what things seem to be. "Aunt Mary," "Hospital," and "Eggy Cooter" are short stories presenting situations in which the reader can determine this boundary line himself.

The marriages depicted in Willa Cather's fiction are a crucial element of her works. Although she does not describe in detail the marital relationships between her characters, Cather does depict these marriages realistically, and they are also interrelated with the major themes of her fiction. The marriages in Cather's works are divided into three general classifications: the successful, the borderline, and the failure. The successful marriage is characterized by affection and friendship. In the borderline marriages the partners are mutually dissatisfied with their relationship, but they do not separate or divorce. The marital failures are complete breakdowns that result in irreparable wounds healed only by the complete withdrawal or death of one of the partners. A study of marriage in Cather's works reveals there are more successful marriages than failures.

This paper documents the decrease of short stories in three women's magazines from 1940 to 1970 and concludes that the decline results from readers turning to other sources for escape from housework. Chapter II describes patterns in plots, themes, characters, settings, and other elements of these stories. Chapter III shows the lack of influence which changes in writers, editors, and social and political developments in America have had on these short stories. The conclusion is reached that the magazine article is replacing magazine short stories.

This thesis examines existing theories of Spanish stress assignment in generative phonology and proposes an alternative theory that is more effective in predicting the surface representations of Spanish stress. Stress is characterized according to traditional textbook standards and examples are given (Chapter I). The current theoretical setting, especially the theories of James W. Harris, is then described (Chapter II). This writer's own theory, based upon an underlying distinction between tense and lax vowels, is delineated (Chapter III) and defended (Chapter IV). The new stress assignment rule--along with a rule of vowel laxing before a word boundary (#) and a rule of stress adjustment--shows stress in Spanish to be predictable and, therefore, not phonemic.

Existentialism and Darwinism provide a means of viewing the development of personal freedom in a young English gentleman, Charles Smithson. Guided by Sarah Woodruff, a social outcast, Charles approaches freedom through the existential conditions of terror, anguish, and despair; he encounters alienation, human finitude, and the loss of a relationship with God on the way. The realization of his trapped state is aided by the Darwinian analogy present in the novel: the monied leisure class to which Charles belongs is presented as the species approaching extinction because it fails to make the changes necessary to survive changed conditions. The novel's two endings combine existential and Darwinian elements to present to Charles the choice that can help him escape his trapped state and gain freedom.

This study emphasizes the private and public struggles of the common man as portrayed in two representative plays by Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman and The Price, and two by Thornton Wilder, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. These plays demonstrate man's struggle because of failures in responsibility toward self and family and because of his inability to fully appreciate life. Miller concentrates on the pathetic part of Man's nature, caused by a breakdown in human communication. Wilder, however, focuses on the resilient part which allows man to overcome natural disasters and moral transgressions. The timelessness of man's conflict explains the motivations of symbolic character types in these plays and reveals a marked applicability to all average citizens in American society.

This study demonstrates, through the detailed examination of a specific example of written Old English, that a very large proportion of the general vocabulary of Old English survives in some form in Late Modern English. The "Finnsburg Fragment" is parsed and translated and its lexicon glossed. After a brief discussion of several special semantic categories and the traditional categories of semantic change, the study enlarges upon the historical setting which influenced the loss, retention, shift, or stability of these two hundred Old English words. Appendices group the lexicon by parts of speech as well as by semantic history.

The protagonist of each of these stories has the same problem. Without really willing it, he finds himself involved with people whom he really does not like. These people have little regard for his individuality or for his welfare because they are so immersed in their own worlds that they cannot imagine anyone existing outside them. In both stories the protagonist realizes finally that he is being dragged into these worlds against his will. More importantly, both characters realize that passive resistance will not work, that they must resist actively if they are to retain personal dignity and their very identities. Sammy, in "A Cimmerian Holiday," rejects the Ashburns' world by walking away; Andy, in "Darkling I Listen," repudiates the various worlds of his acquaintances by withdrawing into the solitary world of books and music.