Memories of Troy in Middle English Verse: A Study of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," "Troilus and Criseyde," and the "Troy Book"

This thesis explores the influence of the legend of Troy on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and Lydgate's Troy Book. This study seeks to understand why medieval English Christians held the pagan myth of Troy in such high regard beyond the common postcolonial critique of Trojan ancestry as a justification for political power. I begin by demonstrating how Vergil's Aeneid presents a new heroic ideal much closer to Christian virtue than Homeric values, Aeneas submitting his will to fate and earning his piety through suffering. I then turn to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, assessing how Gawain is not only descended from Aeneas but how the major events of his quest echo Aeneas' journey, especially in both heroes' submission of their wills to fate. Next, I reveal how Chaucer's Troilus enacts a platonic ascent from a state of ignorance to a state of truth, but as Troilus' name is also linked to the city of Troy itself, the fate of Troilus becomes the fate of Troy. In this way, Chaucer dramatizes the spiritual ascent of his Trojan ancestors in that they move from sin to salvation as a culture. Finally, I investigate how Lydgate …
Date: December 2023
Creator: Johnson, Frazier Alexander
System: The UNT Digital Library

"Mexican Goodbye"

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.
Date: May 2023
Creator: Hernandez, Xaviera
System: The UNT Digital Library
The Colonial Subject in the Early British Novel: Revisiting Colonial Captivity in "Robinson Crusoe" (open access)

The Colonial Subject in the Early British Novel: Revisiting Colonial Captivity in "Robinson Crusoe"

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.
Date: May 2023
Creator: Kunasek, Caleb John
System: The UNT Digital Library
"Death Date" (open access)

"Death Date"

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 …
Date: May 2023
Creator: Perez, Andrea C.
System: The UNT Digital Library

Beyond the Hold: The Evolution of the Ship in African American Literature

In the wake of a disturbing decades-long trend in both print and visual media—the appropriation of Black history and culture—another trend is observed in works of African American fiction: the reclamation of the appropriated imagery, in both neo-slave narratives and works of Afrofuturism. The image focused on specifically in this paper is that of the ship, which I argue serves at least two identifiable functions in Black fiction: first, to address the historical treatment of Africans and their American descendants, and secondly, to demonstrate Black progress and potential. Through an exploration of three works of African American fiction, works that take their Black protagonists beyond the ship's dreadful hold, the reader can see the important themes being channeled: Charles Johnson's Middle Passage sets a course on how to arrive at true freedom, enacting a process of Black liberation that begins with learning how to survive "in the wake," a concept derived Christina Sharpe's work In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts demonstrates not only the effects of "the hold," but how the hold itself has evolved from its origins on the slave ship; as new holds are constructed and demanded by society, rebellion is …
Date: August 2022
Creator: Najera, Joel Luis
System: The UNT Digital Library
"Rein of Renegades" (open access)

"Rein of Renegades"

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
Date: May 2022
Creator: Ulery, Sarah
System: The UNT Digital Library

"if i am a phoenix..."

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.
Date: May 2022
Creator: Huff, Jasmyn
System: The UNT Digital Library

"Before This Memory Will Make Sense": Essays

This work contains a series of essays examining childhood trauma through the lens and experience of the author.
Date: May 2022
Creator: Brandt, John, Jr.
System: The UNT Digital Library

"Patterns": Stories

A collection of short stories exploring patterns that play out in people's lives and relationships.
Date: May 2022
Creator: Glenn, Brittany Rose
System: The UNT Digital Library

Nature Study

A collection of poetry concerned with loss and the act of creation.
Date: December 2021
Creator: Abercrombie, Benjamin
System: The UNT Digital Library

Exploitation, Justification and Overcoming through Voice: Exploring American Slavery and the Slave Narrative in "The Handmaid's Tale"

To what extent does Margaret Atwood draw from American slavery to write The Handmaid's Tale? How does Offred's narrative compare with traditional slave narratives, and to what effect? This thesis explores intersectionality (or lack thereof) in The Handmaid's Tale and compares Offred's narrative to traditional slave narratives to find answers to why Atwood chose to draw from American slavery to write her novel in the first place. Offred's narrative is compared to three traditional slave narratives written/orated by three women, Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, and Mary Prince, to demonstrate how enslavement dehumanizes Offred in similar or different ways to these three women, and to reveal how the enslavement of and violence committed against the female slave body ultimately deforms even the most intimate human relationships in both Gilead and in historical American slavery. I discuss other tactics used to maintain control of the slaves both in Gilead and in historical American slavery, with particular emphasis on the development of justifications for enslavement in both societies. Violence against the body is not enough in Gilead, so Gilead implements religious rhetoric and controls knowledge to maintain its control of the Handmaids. Despite being used to control, religion also becomes a source of …
Date: August 2021
Creator: Brown, Kaitlyn
System: The UNT Digital Library
Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games Trilogy: How Society of Spectacle Bred the Mockingjay (open access)

Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games Trilogy: How Society of Spectacle Bred the Mockingjay

Using spectacle to alienate people from each other and life, President Snow's Panem from Collins' Hunger Games trilogy is Guy Debord's Society of Spectacle. As Debord predicts, the spectacle of the Annual Hunger Games causes a degradation of life for citizens in the Districts and the Capitol, leading to a society where nobody truly lives and citizens accept the narrative that President Snow and his regime promote about the Games. Using Luis Althusser to understand how President Snow links his power to that of the Games, we understand how the dictator brainwashed his citizens into compliance through his narrative, and also, how this narrative is constantly delivered through the various ISAs and SAs in Panem to degrade life into false unity and false consciousness, socially coercing citizens to fall in line with the narrative around spectacle. Katniss Everdeen is unique as she is too authentic to use her celebrity status in promotion of the Games; instead, she accidentally performs Debord's true critiques, sparking a rebellion through love. Katniss' acts of love translate into true critiques of the spectacle that is Panem and the Games, and because Snow has spent decades brainwashing his populace into a blind acceptance of celebrity and …
Date: August 2021
Creator: Trotter, Olivia Royce
System: The UNT Digital Library

Engine Running: Essays

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.
Date: May 2021
Creator: Mason, Chesley Cade
System: The UNT Digital Library
"The Sandbox" and Other Short Stories (open access)

"The Sandbox" and Other Short Stories

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.
Date: May 2021
Creator: Ramirez, Jose Martin
System: The UNT Digital Library

Collected Stories

A collection of short fiction stories that fixate on the role of the strange and the imagined.
Date: May 2020
Creator: Flannery, Brendan Conor
System: The UNT Digital Library

Mortal Ghosts

Collection of poems.
Date: May 2020
Creator: Vesely, Garrett
System: The UNT Digital Library
A Century of Ash (open access)

A Century of Ash

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.
Date: May 2020
Creator: Kusch, Zachary
System: The UNT Digital Library

"Running from My Youth": Essays

Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community
Running From My Youth: Essays is a collection of nonfiction essays that explore important moments and experiences from the narrator's youth, and how he has addressed and remembered them in the years since. Some of the essays explore the narrator's time as a distance-runner, while others explore the awkwardness and discomfort onset by religion and nudity.
Date: December 2019
Creator: Jernigan, Hunter Jason Alexander
System: The UNT Digital Library

"Driving Lessons" and Other Stories

Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community
A study through short stories of the emotional effects on close family relationships before and after a traumatic death.
Date: December 2019
Creator: Allen, Laura Spencer
System: The UNT Digital Library
"A Very Fine Piece of Writing": Parnell and the Joycean Text, 1905-1922 (open access)

"A Very Fine Piece of Writing": Parnell and the Joycean Text, 1905-1922

Charles Stewart Parnell was James Joyce's most significant political influence to a degree that has yet to be fully acknowledged or explored. This thesis proposes a "theory of Parnell" in Joyce's works up to the end of Ulysses, arguing that close attention to Parnell's evolution points to a significant shift in the evolution of Joyce's literary forms. In Joyce's juvenilia, political writings, and early fiction, Parnell always appears with a heroic, even Messianic, cast, which the most significant moments in the fiction pair with a strict adherence to dramatic forms. However, significant moments in both "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man lay the groundwork for stylistic and representative transformations in Ulysses. In that novel, the myth of Parnell is deflated, even as Joyce appropriates its most essential qualities in the development of his panoply of styles. Episodes from "Telemachus" to "Wandering Rocks" critically examine the myth of Parnell even as they link it with the constraints of dramatic forms. Later episodes, most notably "Cyclops," "Circe," and "Eumaeus" attempt to make use of elements of "Parnellite" style, training a community of readers in acts of collective imagination that keep the Parnellite …
Date: May 2019
Creator: Smith, Benjamin J.
System: The UNT Digital Library
"Life Holders" (open access)

"Life Holders"

Life Holders is a collection of personal essays reflecting on my interactions with others concerning my military service.
Date: May 2019
Creator: Irvin, William Ross
System: The UNT Digital Library

Animals Alive and Dead

Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community
Collection of poems.
Date: May 2019
Creator: Tieger, Leah
System: The UNT Digital Library

Flotsam: Men in Isolation

Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community
An interrogation of male behavior in isolated masculine spaces through short stories, an essay, and chapters from a novel-in-progress.
Date: May 2019
Creator: Smith, Morgan Inigo
System: The UNT Digital Library
Homeland/Split (open access)

Homeland/Split

A collection of creative non-fiction essays that document the life of an Indian American immigrant.
Date: December 2018
Creator: Wagle, Jaya
System: The UNT Digital Library