Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Land Owners And Law Givers: Relations Between Yeomen And Planters In The South Carolina Back Country During The Early Republic, 1790-1830, Kevin Caldwell Grubbs

Master's Theses

The society that fought the Civil War in the 1860s was slowly created through years of class conflict and cooperation between planters and yeoman farmers. The South Carolina backcountry developed during the decades of the Early Republic, reacting to the formative events of the nation during that time, such as the Second Great Awakening, the market revolution, and the War of 1812. The difficulties of these events necessitated new approaches to life in South Carolina. Over time, the new society spread from the eastern seaboard states across the South, forming the regional southern society.

Because A Fire, A Lover's Quarrel: Poems, Clifton Clyde Ward

Master's Theses

This thesis comprises poems written and/or revised over the past two years. They mark the development of my aesthetic and writing ability thus far and are representative of the training and practice incited by my own efforts and those of my professors during my enrollment in the Master of Arts degree in English, Creative Writing emphasis. The majority of these poems are written in an open form, and all of them fall under three general categories: autobiographical, absurdist, or formal.

Haunted To Death: Subverting Genre And Reader Expectations In Lewis Carroll's Phantasmagoria, Elissa Anne Graeser

Master's Theses

This study of Lewis Carroll’s Phantasmagoria argues that the poem failed to achieve critical and popular success due to unmet reader expectations. The poem is a haunted house or ghost story and in many ways follows the familiar formula of the Victorian ghost story. However, Carroll’s political and generic satire alters various aspects of the anticipated structure, thereby creating a work that fails to satisfy readers on multiple levels. The failure of a work by a successful author writing within a popular genre is particularly significant for what it shows us about the relationship between genre, consumerism, and literary criticism.

The Queer Gothic Hero's Journey In Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Kyle Leon Ethridge

Master's Theses

This study of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray argues that the novel participates in a Gothic subversion of the archetypal hero’s journey. The novel employs Gothic devices to supplant heroic narremes. As the novel progresses, both Dorian (as a type of hero-character) and the narrative repeatedly deny or subvert the normative idea of heroism later reified in Joseph Campbell’s archetypal theory. While Campbell’s hero attempts to secure and universalize a heterosocial story, Wilde’s hero is recuperated through a reconfiguring of normative failure as queer success. What is ostensibly a failure of the normative hero to achieve his quest …

The Effects Of The Nat Turner Slave Revolt On The Health And Welfare Of 19th-Century Slaves In Southeastern Virginia, Jeffrey Clifford Auerbach

Master's Theses

The Nat Turner Slave Revolt stands as a major turning point in the history of American slavery and represents a fundamental shift in the master slave relationship. This event shattered the previous paternalistic view and caused a fundamental reorganization of slave life. Included in this reorganization was a shift in the subsistence practice, moving away from morenutritious food grown by the slaves themselves to poor quality rations provided by the masters. This change in subsistence practices dealt a serious blow to the nutritional health of those living in the area surrounding the revolt.

By examining stature recorded in the County …

[Blip] And Other Noises, Jennifer Jacob Brown

Master's Theses

[Blip] and Other Noises is a collection of short stories that explores the illusory nature of identity, time, space, and our experience of reality. Its principal characters include a sea captain, an Elvis fanatic, a space alien, and some very confused children. Its principal settings include small town Mississippi, the Gulf of Mexico, the Indiana wilderness, and uncharted (by humans) outer space. This collection is accompanied by a critical introduction.

Nine Exits: A Collection Of Short Stories, Tracie Renée Dawson

Master's Theses

Nine Exits is a collection of fiction and nonfiction written over the span of two years in workshops provided by the Center for Writers.

Stories, Garrett Alden Ashley

Master's Theses

These short stories represent different genres, forms, ideals, and times. This collection contains the weird, the scientific, the fantastical, and settings that are real. The problems faced by the characters are a product of each story's genre, but the willingness of its characters to overcome change remains the same. In one story, a man wants to get rid of his mechanical daughter because she reminds him of his wife. In another, a man takes care of his brother who has returned from the dead as a pig. In others, a man believes his wife is trying to kill him, a …

Collected Short Stories, Arthur Ross Walton

Master's Theses

In this collection of short fiction, I draw upon the experience of growing up in a small southern town and my work as a researcher with the Center for Oral History to reach beyond the stereotypes and create a more accurate portrayal of life in Mississippi.

There are two central themes touched on in these stories. The first I call “Occupational Obsolescence” and delves into the tensions created when a person’s (or community’s) livelihood is taken away for reasons beyond their control. The second, “The Outsider Within,” considers the question of how a person can be a resident of a …