The Ends of Smaller Worlds is a collection of short stories set in Indiana. The preface is about the representation of the information age using elements of dirty realism and Gothic fiction.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute some knowledge of the vowel sounds in the speech of one part of East Texas, Gregg County. Although these sounds do not vary greatly from those heard in other parts of the South, the variations which do occur are of interest to the student of speech sounds, and for that reason the sounds studied are carefully recorded in this paper.

A creative dissertation consisting of two parts: a novel and a critical preface. The critical preface, titled “Novel without Falsehood” deals directly with David Shields’s Reality Hunger, touching on issues of reality as it pertains to truth, writing, fiction, and contemporary culture. The novel is entitled Down and Out and follows the fortunes of a small town in Arkansas before, during, and after its sole source of employment ceases to exist.

The thesis begins with an introductory chapter that explains the problems that short story theorists encounter when they try to define the short story genre. Part of the problem results from the lack of a definition of the short story in the Aristotelian sense. A looser, less traditional definition of literary genres helps solve some of the problem. Six short stories follow the introduction. "Billy and Me," "Queen of Hearts," "The Whiskey Man," and "Psychedelic Trash Cans" are representative of traditional short stories. "Mourning Coffee" and "Seven X Seven" might very well fit into other genres, but even these stories fit a loose definition of the short story genre.

This study was basically concerned with the effect of occupation on the folklore of the people of Graford, Texas. The people interviewed in that area of North Central Texas were divided into three major occupational groups: ranchers, farmers, and farmer-laborers. At least two members from each of the occupational groups were interviewed; and these interviews revealed that their folklore included folktales, superstitions-remedies, songs, and customs, The customs included household, recreation, school, and church customs. Each informant's folklore was recorded directly as it was related. Then the information was placed in the appropriate categories of folklore. Finally, an analysis of the folklore from the standpoint of the informants occupation was completed. The findings indicated that the various occupations did influence each informant's folklore.

The stories in this collection represent an increasingly transcultural world by exploring the intersection of cultures and identities in border spaces, particularly the Mexican-American border. Characters, regardless of ethnicity, experience the effects of migration and deportation in schools, hometowns, relationships, and elsewhere. The collection as a whole focuses on the issues and themes found in Mexican-American literature, such as loss, separation, and the search for identity.

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.

It is the purpose of this thesis to contribute a small part to the large picture of Texas dialect by describing the use of certain stressed sounds in one locality, Parker County, Texas, which lies in the General American speech division of the United States.

This paper is an analysis of the relationship between journalism and formal literary usage in America. It is the purpose of this study to define and illustrate characteristics of modern journalese and to make a comparison of standards of correct usage advocated by recent textbooks in English composition and journalism. Particular attention will be given to diction, structure and length of sentences, capitalization, abbreviation, and punctuation. The conclusion will be a brief evaluation of modern journalism, a succinct resume of its impact on modern language and literature, and a simple prediction of future tendencies in journalistic and literary language. And to give a better perspective to the analysis of journalism and American English, the paper begins with a description of the American linguistic heritage.

"The object of this thesis is neither to uphold the sacred cows of traditionalist grammar nor to forge a way for a liberal philology. It does, however, examine "the kind of English that most people use most of the time," that is, the idiom of the language, and specifically the phrases and expressions that compose idioms."--1.

For some time, teaching Standard English has been a problem of major proportion at Versia L. Williams Elementary School, Fort Worth, Texas. Even casual observation shows that pupils do not grasp much of the classroom English teaching, nor do they transfer that which they do learn to other school work or daily use. The instructional program in English at the Williams Elementary School, therefore, must be supplemented to the extent that the pupils may be given the kinds of experiences in the classroom that will ultimately result in their learning Standard English in a manner that will enable them to relate the "book talk" to their own idiolects, which according to Giddings (2) everyone has. They bring to school a well-established set of habits which they will continue to use in spite of the classroom instruction, because they hold on to the teaching of their first teachers--their mothers.

This thesis will deal with five points of emphasis--content, logic, organization, demon errors, and style. Not a complete manual for teaching freshman composition, this thesis will serve as a simplified guide. This thesis is written for the inexperienced teacher of freshman English who may need guidance, but it should also be of interest to the experienced teacher who wants to confirm his own practices or to find new approaches for teaching the college freshman how to write.

As a teacher of American literature in high school, I have become conscious of the importance of teaching students of that age level the lore and poetry of their native state. Poems of nature or local color in their own country will hold their interest when material from more distant points seems dull and uninteresting. Through my teaching I have become interested in the poetry of the Southwest and have enjoyed reading the poetry and knowing the poets through personal interview or correspondence.

The American Romantic writers laid a broad foundation for the historic and heroic Abraham Lincoln who has evolved as our national myth. The writers were attracted to Lincoln by his eloquent expression of the body of ideals and beliefs they shared with him, especially the ideal of individual liberty and the belief that achievement of the ideal would bring about an amelioration of the human condition. The time, place and conditions in which they lived enhanced the attraction, and Lincoln's able leadership during the Civil War strengthened their estimation of him. His martyrdom was the catalyst which enabled the Romantic writers to lay the foundation of the Lincoln myth which has made his name synonymous with individual freedom everywhere even today.

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.

A survey of language in a certain area is designed primarily to present a living language as it is actually spoken; thus, a morphological study of language is designed to determine the most widely-used syntactical and grammatical forms and to record these forms in a statistical manner. These findings are to be interpreted in the light of similar studies, not with the purpose of establishing the cultural level of the language in the area surveyed, but to present all the possible variations, and, in some cases, to draw a comparison as a matter of record between the forms found to be commonly used in every-day speech and the standard usage as given by leading linguistic authorities.

This thesis introduces the study of inmate marginalia as a method for understanding inmates’ uses of texts in prison libraries and for understanding the motivations for these uses. Marginalia are the notes, drawings, underlining, and other markings left by readers in the texts with which they interact. I use the examples of the Talmudic projects to set a precedent for the integration of marginal discourses into the central discourse of society. Next, I discuss the arguments surrounding the use of texts in prison libraries, including an outline for an ideal study of inmate marginalia. Finally, I discuss the findings of my on-site research at four prison libraries in Washington State. After scanning evidence of marginalia from forty-eight texts, a relatively small sample, I divided the marginalia by gender of facility, genre of text, address of the marginalia, and type of marginalia and found statistically significant correlations (p < 0.05) between gender and genre, gender and address, gender and type, and genre and type. However, while these correlations are statistically weak and require further investigation, the statistically significant correlations indicate the potential for integrating inmate marginalia studies into the scholarly discussions regarding inmates’ interactions with texts in prison.

The aim of this thesis is to present a comprehensive view--a survey--of plays by William Shakespeare that have been produced for the New York stage from 1935 through 1955 in order to ascertain not only the quantity of Shakespearean drama that has been presented during this twenty-one-year period, but also to appraise the quality of the productions as seen by the critics. A related aim of this study will be the analysis of the televised Shakespearean plays by presenting the works and their merits through the eyes of the critics of that medium.

This dissertation explores a history of the grotesque and its meaning in art and literature along with those of its related term, the arabesque, since their co-existence, specifically in literature, is later treated by a well-known nineteenth-century American writer in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque- Theories or views of the grotesque (used in literature), both in Europe and America, belong to twelve theorists of different eras, ranging from the sixteenth century to the present period, especially Modernism (approximately from 1910 to 1945)--Rabelais, Hegel, Scott, Wright, Hugo, Symonds, Ruskin, Santayana, Kayser, Bakhtin, (William Van) O'Connor, and Spiegel. My study examines the grotesque in American literature, as treated by both nineteenth-century writers--Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, and, significantly, by modernist writers--Anderson, West, and Steinbeck in Northern (or non-Southern) literature; Faulkner, McCullers, and (Flannery) O'Connor in Southern literature. I survey several novels and short stories of these American writers for their grotesqueries in characterization and episodes. The grotesque, as treated by these earlier American writers is often despised, feared, or mistrusted by other characters, but is the opposite in modernist fiction.

This dissertation is an examination of the interiority of American authorship from 1815–1866, an era of political, social, and economic instability in the United States. Without a well-defined historical narrative or an established literary lineage, writers drew upon death and the American landscape as tropes of unity and identification in an effort to define the nation and its literary future. Instead of representing nationalism or collectivism, however, the authors in this study drew on landscapes and death to mediate the crises of authorial displacement through what I term "xenotopia," strange places wherein a venerated American landscape has been disrupted or defamiliarized and inscribed with death or mourning. As opposed to the idealized settings of utopia or the environmental degradation of dystopia, which reflect the positive or negative social currents of a writer's milieu, xenotopia record the contingencies and potential problems that have not yet played out in a nation in the process of self-definition. Beyond this, however, xenotopia register as an assertion of agency and literary definition, a way to record each writer's individual and psychological experience of authorship while answering the call for a new definition of American literature in an indeterminate and undefined space.

Poems contains fifty-two poems and an afterword that explains some of the ideas that prompted the poems as well as some information about the poetic techniques and allusions. Their primary purpose is to communicate the experiences of a woman living in a patriarchal society, which contemporary American society certainly is. The poems expose how a young woman fits into such a society as a human being and an artist . They stress the need for women writers to play ever-increasing roles in society.

This study is a survey of plays of Negro authorship in America from 1858 to 1970. It is intended to give a historical view of the Negro effort in the drama and show general trends during the twentieth century. The paper is arranged chronologically, beginning with the first play by a Negro author in 1858 and continuing through the 1960's. Synopses of plays are offered, but very little historical or sociological information is given and little literary criticism is added.

Engine Running: Essays is a collection of creative nonfiction that explores, in parts, a persona's distancing from home and self against the backdrop of an increasingly fractured family doing the same. Through a variety of forms, the essays seek to balance themes like loss, self-discovery, and manhood in reflections on the role of childhood memory, the early revelations and experimentation of sexuality, and the carving-out of personal identity in West Texas.