Contained within is a sample, consisting of the first twelve chapters, which portray the final days of the fictional Polian War. The events are a springboard for the rest of the novel, and indeed the series.

The Sandbox and Other Short Stories is a part of an anthology reflecting on conflicting military cultures, tribal identities, and transition struggles within an enduring war and postmodernism society.

This dissertation deploys queer theory and temporality to investigate the ways in which American authors were writing about identity at the turn of the twentieth century. I provide a more expansive use of queer theory, and argue that queerness moves beyond sexual and gender identity to have intersectional implications. This is articulated in the phrase "queer textual libido" which connects queer theory with affect and temporal theories. Queerness reveals itself on both narrative and rhetorical levels, and can be used productively to show the complex navigation between individual and national identity formation.

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.

Some Names for Empty Space is a collection of poems that considers how poetry and language operate to define human experience, reconciling the 'empty spaces' between the self and the abstracted variables of all things. The poems here often find their impetus in fatherhood and a parent's efforts to explain the world to a child.

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.

Oklahoma History is a collection of poetry that examines the speaker's relationship to and critique of her home state, Oklahoma. The poems navigate race and gender as they intersect with local histories, culture, and religion, which complicates and often contradicts what the speaker is taught through childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood. The creative portion is accompanied by a critical preface which looks at how the poems and other writings of Oklahoma poet Joy Harjo impact the author's writing.

This dissertation examines representations of the Pacific theater in World War II in ethnic American literature, with a focus on its rendition of US and Japanese racism and imperialism in the mid-twentieth century. Reading a range of African, Asian, Jewish, Mexican, and Native American literary writings, I investigate their modifications of the American master narrative that the Second World War was "good" and "necessary," a war fought against fascism and for democracy, justice, and freedom. Instead of such a simplistic and reductive view, ethnic American writers envision the Pacific theater as a race war between whites and persons of color and as a conflict between two imperialist nations, the United States and Japan. Ethnic Americans' racial double consciousness functions to resist an oversimplification of the Pacific theater. In these ethnic writers' work, American characters from diverse backgrounds create friendships with those of Asian nationalities, including Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, and Japanese. These texts are necessary because ethnic Americans' experiences are underrepresented in the traditional WWII narrative of Western masculinity, originated by Ernest Hemingway and completed by President Truman and Douglas MacArthur. As opposed to the typical white American literary and cinematic treatment of the war as fought in the land of …

Louisiana Saturday Nights is a collection of poetry and accompanying critical introduction written for the doctorate in Literature and Creative Writing.

Somehow Holier ruminates playfully on the problem of suffering and our responses to it. These poems take as their subjects theology, history, art, my wife's struggle with chronic migraines, and gardening. "Res Gestae Variorum," a crown of sonnets at the center of the book, recounts the lives of would-be Christian saints, like the third-century theologian Origen, whose penchant for suffering obstructed them on the path to holiness. In "Mater Misericordiae" I flip through a calendar filled with famous depictions of Mary while my wife consults with a doctor. These poems blend humor and pathos, striving at once to laugh in the face of pain and account for its awful cost. Throughout, I'm in conversation with the poets who've influenced my voice as a writer: Charles Wright, Phillip Larkin, and Seamus Heaney.

A collection of short stories exploring patterns that play out in people's lives and relationships.

A collection of poems and critical introduction.

This dissertation begins with a critical preface that examines the haunted present and its impact on writing for third and fourth generation Holocaust survivors. Then follows a collection of poetry and prose that examine themes of intergenerational trauma, experiences of the Shoah, grief, and chronic illness.

This work contains a series of essays examining childhood trauma through the lens and experience of the author.

An essay and short story collection about rebirth and being trans and neurodivergent. The essays and stories cover the entire length of my MA, but are mostly written before I came out as trans and edited after. The arc follows this discovery as well as the discovery of my writing following more experimental means including the twisting and playing with the braided essay, the introduction of essaying moves to fiction forms, and moving from what I thought was about death to what I realized I was writing all along about rebirth.

The early modern English masque is a hybrid form of entertainment that included music, dance, poetry, and visual spectacle, and for which there is no modern equivalent. This dissertation looks at four incarnations of the Elizabethan and Jacobean masque: the court masque, the masque embedded in the progress entertainment, the masque embedded in the commercial play, and the masque embedded in the commercial play performed at court. This study treats masques as a form of elite theatre (that is, theatre for, by, and about elite figures like monarchs and aristocrats) and follows them from the court to the countryside, through the commercial playhouse, and back again to the court in pursuit of a more nuanced picture of the hybridity and flexibility of early modern English performance culture.

Rein of Renegades is an introduction to the young adult contemporary fantasy novel of the same name. It is prefaced with an explication of various drafts written throughout adolescence. I am trying to reclaim things I've misplaced or dropped. Over the past few years, I've had much too many trinkets to carry. There went the melodramatic allegations from my teenage writing voice, cracked on a classroom floor. There went the ability to sit, stomach deep, so steadily grounded in another world, this escape blurred with the strawberry ice cream I dripped onto the campus concrete. Writing the ideal love becomes complicated, jaded, too realistic when the hands writing it are always reaching for someone who never reaches back at the right time

This dissertation examines the rise of the racialized apocalyptic genre from 1978 to 2019. The period chosen reflects the social shift of the American political right into a party that accepts white supremacy as a tenet. In the post-Civil Rights era, white Americans considered the issue of racism to be solved. With the historic Voting Rights Act and other major victories in the 1960s there was a moment when it seemed America may turn a corner. However, when Richard Nixon took office in 1969, he originated what would be a long process of positioning the American right against intellectualism, minorities, and progress. Nixon, and the development of the new southern strategy would reach decades into the future, utilizing coded language and pitting Americans against one another. Research examining the racialized elements of the American right from Nixon to contemporary times is well chronicled and vast.

This project consists of a union between sci-fi, magic, and realism. Using magic in the same contexts of realism is to make a legend come to life in our modern world. All three stories deal with difficult situations: the struggle of creation and insecurities, the struggle of suicide and overcoming traumatic experiences, the struggle of disabilities and disadvantages and turning it into strength. These topics are introduced through characters who find themselves coming up with solutions through fantastical means as outlets for their pain. In "She Who Fell in Love with the Sky and Sea," an artist and an unlikely mythical muse come together to create the best art the world has ever seen, yet the art becomes unclaimable to the artist at the twisted eyes of her muse. In "Death Date," death has visited Sola through a psychic prediction arriving with perfect timing. She is given one year to live. Struggling with a traumatic past, her death date encourages Sola to live out the rest of her days and stop her original plans. The Switch explores the conditions of living in dystopian lands with a neighboring land that is a utopia. This novel explores the life of Sain as …

Her Terrible Splendor is a poetry collection that transports the Greek witch-goddess Circe from her mythical island of Aeaea to modern-day East Texas, where I was raised. By locating Circe in the Piney Woods, I heighten the strangeness that I identify with that setting and open up new contexts for considering Circe as a woman, as an enchanter, and as figure of retelling and revision. Circe appears in an array of roles—friend, lover, mentor, alter-ego, muse—as the poems view her through different lenses, including ekphrastic responses to visual art, rewritings of myths, and "portrait" poems that cast people from the human speaker's life as the goddess herself. A powerful mythic woman who works alone and creates a haven for strange creatures and lost humans, Circe offers a way for the manuscript to consider the complex, multifaceted process of coming of age as a woman, self-making as myth-making.

Hameline, Cassia Leigh. "Stay for the Heron: Essays." Doctor of Philosophy (English), May 2023, 146 pp., works cited, 27 titles. Stay for the Heron: Essays is an essay collection that explores truth, perception, and loss as it follows the writer's movement across landscapes that speak to a past she had, for so long, tried to run from. The essays in this collection seek to understand how we can write about difficult topics like abandonment, infidelity, and acts of self-destruction: do we get close to them? do we create distance? at what range are we able to relive the moments that caused us pain, or anger, or passion, or love and present them in written form for others to see? The collection challenges the narrative nonfiction form in preference for a more fluid, lyric, and hybrid genre that more accurately presents the material—at times fuzzy, difficult, confusing—at hand. Through its literary experimentations, such as fragmentation, lyricism, shifting points of view, and photography, the works here deconstruct what we consider "traditional" in the Essay genre and, instead, supports a shift towards a more contemporary tradition. The essays in Stay for the Heron explore the persona's geographical movement, paying close attention to the …

Chicana decolonial feminism asks us to re envision a world that allows for various forms of beings, creating identities based on political coalitions, having an active compassion that translates into direct action that seeks to dismantle binaries that reinscribe colonialism. Chicana decolonial feminist thought actively seeks to dismantle sexism, to dismantle racism, to focus on personal experience as theory, to focus on the body as knowledge, reconceptualize knowledge, envision new ways of being, and writing that is accessible to all. I use two concepts active compassion and interconnectedness of being that are central to chicana decolonial feminism. Chicana feminist texts and newspaper articles from the 1970s are analyzed to demonstrate how chicana decolonial feminism is seen in these texts.

Scholars today deem Robinson Crusoe the first British novel. Defoe's construction of Crusoe as the atypical British traveler asserts his collective subjectivity within the framework of intimate personal experiences, accentuating his individualism. Yet, as scholars of Orientalism and Transatlantic theory can attest, calling Robinson Crusoe the first novel provides problematic methodologies that arise from affiliating the novel form to a structure associated the British colonialism and fashioning a "superior" British subject. In this essay, I work to emphasize the hybridity present within the novel, utilize historical context to provide a voice to marginalized Indigenous Americans to show how the format relies upon a relationship between collectivism and individualism, assert Indigenous voices matter in the novel, and analyze the relationship of a new collectivism that arises from narratives that cross into American spaces.

Mexican Goodbye is a collection of poetry that interrogates the dichotomy of a family fractured in conjunction with a speaker's coming of age. The collection reckons with divorce and the subsequent dissolution of the speaker's Mexican American family. Individual poems deal with sisterhood, daughterhood, Chicanismo, grief, the intergenerational impact of the immigrant experience, and inherited trauma. The titular poem illustrates the typical Mexican goodbye, a Latine despedida which can last hours, extended by continued chisme and prolonged conversation. It is this cultural phenomenon that the collection endeavors to encapsulate by lingering in narrative, listing childhood experiences, and allowing the speaker to yearn to return and remain in the past. Ultimately, the speaker desires to linger in the farewell.