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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Bluegrass, Bildung, And Blueprints: The Little Shepherd Of Kingdom Come As An Appalachian Bildungsroman, Leona Shoemaker
Bluegrass, Bildung, And Blueprints: The Little Shepherd Of Kingdom Come As An Appalachian Bildungsroman, Leona Shoemaker
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come takes as its backdrop the American Civil War, as the author, John Fox, Jr., champions Kentucky's social development during the Progressive Era. Although often criticized for capitalizing on his propagation of regional stereotypes, I argue that the structure of The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come is much more problematic than that. Recognizing the Bildungsroman as a vehicle for cultural and social critique in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century writing, this project offers an in-depth literary analysis of John Fox, Jr.'s novel, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, in which I contend the story itself is, …
In Double Exile: A Memoir, Deborah Beckwin
In Double Exile: A Memoir, Deborah Beckwin
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
In Double Exile: A Memoir examines the life of a family of Ghanaian immigrants and their journeys of acculturation, and the impact of the father's spiraling mental health issues on his family. Through the eyes of their daughter, this thesis briefly explores their lives on the right side of the Atlantic, as medical professionals, and then focuses on the life of their daughter born in America on the left side of the Atlantic. As novelist Georges Simenon has said, "I am at home everywhere, and nowhere. I am never a stranger and I never quite belong." This memoir explores this …
Stories I Told Myself: A Memoir, Brian Crimmins
Stories I Told Myself: A Memoir, Brian Crimmins
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Stories I Told Myself: A Memoir explores the experience of growing up gay in the 1980s. It is one boy's journey toward self-acceptance set against the conservative backdrop of a rural community on California's central coast. The story illuminates the hunger for a life different than the one being lived, and the ever-present sense of being different exacerbated by bullying and unrequited love. It is a narrative of evolving identity, and includes cultural insights and societal context of the time period. The author poses a fundamental question, "How did I make it out of the 80's alive?" and he explores …
Woman Of Dust: An Exodus, Lacey Schultz
Woman Of Dust: An Exodus, Lacey Schultz
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Woman of Dust: An Exodus is a collection of themed non-fiction experiences and stories with themes, characters, and ideas that coincide deliberately and verge on the cohesiveness of memoir. The overarching themes of this collection are womanhood and coming of age. The stories examine the ways in which childhood crushes, current relationships, parenting, religion, and pets influence the growth of a child into an adult, in this case, a girl into a woman. They take individual moments, conversations, conventions, and thoughts and explore how they shaped the woman who now writes them. Stories range in content from how the standards …
Please Don't Interrupt Me While I'M Ignoring You, Sherard Harrington
Please Don't Interrupt Me While I'M Ignoring You, Sherard Harrington
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
A collection of short stories and personal essays, Please Don’t Interrupt Me While I’m Ignoring You weaves a lamé of humor and private desperation on the page. An actor in one story craves career gratification, while a United Nations coordinator in another finds herself attracted to a nervous NGO. A housewife attempts to convince her husband to commit an infidelity, while an architect finds that his new pet companion isn’t helping him to get over his ex-girlfriend. Having a difficult time relating, these characters often find themselves stuck in a miscommunication loop, and their journey to get what they want …
Mild To Moderately Severe, J D. Valencia
Mild To Moderately Severe, J D. Valencia
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Mild to Moderately Severe is an episodic memoir of a boy coming of age as a latch-key kid, living with a working single mother and partly raising himself, as a hearing impaired and depressed young adult, learning to navigate the culture with a strategy of faking it, as a nomad with seven mailing addresses before turning ten. It is an examination of accidental and cultivated loneliness, a narrative of a boy and later a man who is too adept at adapting to different environments, a reflection on relationships and popularity and a need for attention and love that clashes with …
Half-Virgin, Alexander Gregory Pollack
Half-Virgin, Alexander Gregory Pollack
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Half-Virgin. (Under the direction of Jocelyn Bartkevicius) Half-Virgin is a cross-genre collection of essays, short stories, and poems about the humor, pain, and occasional glory of journeying into adulthood but not quite getting there. The works in this collection seek to create a definition of a term, “half-virgin,” that I coined in the process of writing this thesis. Among the possibilities explored are: an individual who embarks upon sexual activity for the first time and does not achieve orgasm; an individual who has reached orgasm through consensual sexual activity, but has remained uncertain about what he or she is doing; …
Crashing Against The Wood, Jessica Ryan
Crashing Against The Wood, Jessica Ryan
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
In this collection of short stories, the characters struggle to recover equilibrium in their lives that have been turned upside down. They struggle against one another, against change, and against the loss of loved ones. No matter what bonds hold the characters together, the underlying tension of change and reaction permeates their relationships and threatens what they know to be true. A theme of discontent runs in these stories. Something beneath the surface is not right, and the characters struggle to climb out of the mess their lives have become. Some of them have been stifled, like the narrator in …