Arts and Humanities Commons^™

H. L. Mencken As A Philogist, Roberta Teague Herrin

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines H. L. Mencken's attitudes toward language and the forces that shaped those attitudes. This study also traces the development of The American Language, assesses the influence of this work on language studies in America, and examines Mencken's place in the field of linguistics.

Three types of material are surveyed in this study: the body of H. L. Mencken's writing that reflects his attitudes toward language; the definitive secondary material which focuses on Mencken's interest in American English; and the background material necessary to establish a social, historical, political, and linguistic context for Mencken's ideas.

This study concludes …

The Grotesque In The Poetry Of William Wordsworth, Ernst Derwood Lee Jr.

Doctoral Dissertations

The function of the grotesque within William Wordsworth's most important poetry, that written between 1788 and 1805, has not been appreciated. Yet perceptions characterized by the juxtaposition of fearful, unattractive images with images of beauty and harmony appear throughout Wordsworth's youthful poetry and are focused and directed in the Lyrical Ballads volumes and in The Prelude (1805). The few scholars who have discussed the grotesque in Wordsworth's poetry either have not recognized the value of that mode to the development of Wordsworth's poetic idiom or have confused it with the sublime, and thus have misunderstood the nature and function of …

A Procedure For Initiating Process Control, Kim Ingrid Melton

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to develop a procedure to initiate process control. Traditional methods of process control do not allow testing until an initial group of samples (usually 20 or more) is drawn. In addition, the testing for control worth respect to the process average is dependent on evidence that the variability in the process is stable.

The procedures developed and studied here allow immediate testing on the process average without assuming that the process is in control with respect to variability. Through the use of a sequential testing procedure, data from a current sample is tested to …

The Fascination Of Knowledge: Imagistic Clues To The Labyrinth Of Ambiguity In Henry James's The Golden Bowl, Marijane R. Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

Henry James's last completed novel, The Golden Bowl (1904), has elicited a multitude of responses so polarized as to suggest some flaw or, at best, some irreducible ambiguity in the novel. An examination of over 1300 images in the novel led to their classification into seven main groups composed of several subgroups: (1) The Adventurous (discovers and the New World; the exotic; deserts; gardens and paradise); (2) The Sensuous (flowers; boats and water; light, dark, shadows, and veils; children, games and toys); (3) The Superficial (science and technology; the circus; acting, the stage); (4) The Fantastic (animals, hunting, prey; weapons, …

A Theoretical Framework For A Combined Social-Ethical Analysis, Michael Macdonald Burgess

Doctoral Dissertations

Current normative analyses and recommendations in medical ethics do not sufficiently analyze the social context of concrete ethical problems. This results in impractical or ineffective policy recommendations or case responses which reinforce the social context which created the ethical problem. A social analysis is possible which displays how the social context directs the communication and action of physicians and patients, and in turn reinforces and further establishes these influential social factors. Such a social analysis provides a means of integrating short-term case-responses with long-term institutional policy and structural change. The latter, on this analysis, is the more ethically "complete", and …