Literature in English, North America Commons^™

O. Henry’S Use Of Stereotypes In His New York City Stories: An Example Of The Utilization Of Folklore In Literature, Martin Ostrofsky

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Stereotyping is a folkloristic process which permits people to reduce the complexities of the real world into simplified, abstract terms. O. Henry one of America’s most popular short story writers, made generous use of stereotypes in his stories. By examining O. Henry’s use of stereotypes, insight may be gained into the essential role which folklore often plays in creative literature. Stereotypes greatly influence the composition, function and reception of O. Henry’s work. O. Henry’s personal habits and circumstances demanded that he produce a prolific stream of short stories which would have the greatest popular appeal. Clever manipulation of stereotypes permitted …

Caroline Gordon: A Sense Of Place, Frances Perdue

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Place, as it transcends the immediate setting of a work, is an essential element of Caroline Gordon’s early novels. She looks to the past and to the region of her birth to focus on the traditional South. She shows her characters’ changing attitudes toward the Cavalier Myth, a view that promotes the value of the land, the patriarchal family, and an anachronistic code of honor. To them, the South is unique, and they resist all efforts to change this “given social order.” However, Gordon begins to recognize that change is inevitable. Thus, she reveals her characters’ succumbing to the rising …

Abused Children In Two Faulkner Novels, Teresa Moore

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

To William Faulkner, art must bolster man; it must somehow remind man of those truths toward which his race has struggled and must continue to struggle if life is to have meaning and significance. Faulkner's works meet this aim by dramatizing the conflict individuals face if they seek to wrench from life a morality that allows them placement within the larder human community.

Both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! require a re-examination in light of Faulkner's artistic aim. For at the center of both novels are children inescapably threatened by a corrupted moral tradition--a decayed antebellum southern …

The Three Bartlebys Of Melville’S Tale, Gail M. Kienitz

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

A study of any one of Herman Melville’s works is bound to be a fascinating and informative venture. Within the products of his prolific writing career are keen, precise, enlightening observations about nineteenth-century America. Religion, politics, business, literature, and philosophy are all within the realm of Melville’s careful consideration. Melville was a man who reacted to his world with intense curiosity and passion. Melville was also extremely introspective – searching, questioning, and examining himself with equal intensity.

“Bartleby the Scrivener” offers an interesting synthesis of Melville’s double vision. Within the confines of this tale are Melville’s reaction to his world …

Personality & Characterization In Cantos I-Xvii Of The Cantos Of Ezra Pound, Gary Hottinger

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Examining the modes of characterization and the types of personalities evident in the first seventeen cantos of The Cantos of Ezra Pound, one can perceive that Ezra Pound felt he was composing an epic which was to revitalize for the present the best minds of the past. Pound's method of revitalization has a close affinity Co the doctrine of effluences in Longinus on the Sublime, a classical work of literary criticism. The personalities Pound employs in The Cantos fall into three broad categories: gods (deific), legends (archetypal), and men (historical). By applying Pound's neo-Platonism to their organization, one …

Narrator Reliability In The Creative Autobiography: An Approach For The Solo Interpreter, Diane Schwalm

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study develops an approach to narrator reliability in the creative autobiography for the solo interpreter. The relationships between narrator reliability and firstperson point of view are given, and the need for an understanding of reliability to develop a performance stance is also stated. The defining characteristics of the creative autobiography are also included.

The analytical approach to narrator reliability is three-fold. The reliability of the narrator is examined in terms of mental locus, spatial locus, and temporal locus. The mental locus of the narrator is determined through his relationships with himself, the characters, the action, and the reader. The …

Three Of Faulkner's Aberrant Women, Ginny Powell

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Because human nature is so often irrational and passional, William Faulkner many times offers portraits of people who are the antithesis of rationality and morality. Thus, it is not surprising to observe Faulkner's extensive use of aberrant, or deviant, characters, especially aberrant women, since the author generally associates this group with the volatile, passional elements in life. These disturbingly abnormal women possess as a group certain characteristics that become a remarkably consistent pattern in the Faulknerian canon.

Faulkner's aberrant women invariably have at least one trait in common: they become destructive forces that bring about the ruin of others and …

Conscience & Determinism: Mark Twain's Attempt To Resolve The Problem Of Man's Sense Of Moral Responsibility In A Deterministic World, R. Kathleen Raisor

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Beneath the placid surface of books such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, there are the seeds of a darker, yet more profound Twain than a cursory reading yields. From a point beginning about 1876 until his death in 1910, there is in Twain's major works a progressively darker, more intensely pessimistic view of the human condition, for Twain increasingly saw man as circumscribed and imprisoned by mechanistic determinism. This study provides a chronological examination of Twain's attempt to resolve the problem of man's sense of moral responsibility in a deterministic world. The development …

Hawthorne's Hester & Zenobia: Possible Reflections Of Nineteenth Century Feminism & The Writings Of Margaret Fuller, Carolyn Raiser

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The thesis focuses upon the possible influences of Margaret Fuller upon Nathaniel Hawthorne's creation of Hester in The Scarlet Letter and Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance. It suggests that Hester and Zenobia are feminists who may owe much of their characterization as developed through their feminist arguments to Margaret Fuller, a nineteenth century feminist and acquaintance of Hawthorne's. Hawthorne and Fuller are placed in historical context within the feminist movement of the nineteenth century by examining some of the leading feminists and their concerns regarding women's rights. Margaret Fuller's writings and ideas are examined, along with her relationship to Hawthorne. …

An Analysis Of The Themes Of Guilt And Atonement In The Writings Of Tennessee Williams, James Curry

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The themes of guilt and atonement have been analyzed in selected writings of Tennessee Williams. Research concerning these two themes has been developed simultaneously with Williams’s concept of the universe and man. Many of Williams’s characters seek a form of atonement or purification for their guilt which has arisen due to their “incompleteness and unnatural desires.” Williams’s basic concept concerning the universe is that it is fragmented, a universe not completed by its Creator. Consequently, Williams envisions man and his nature to be likewise incomplete. It is this incompletion in man which causes him to have “unnatural desires,” labeled as …

Individuality & Art: The Search For Fulfillment In Willa Cather's Heroines, Nancy Moore

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Willa Cather believed very firmly in two things: individuality and art. The purpose of this study is to show Cather's intense dedication to the pursuit of individual artistic achievement as depicted by the heroines of seven Cather novels: O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), My Antonia (1918), A Lost Lady (1923), My Mortal Enemy (1926), Lucy Gayheart (1935), and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). Cather was concerned about whether or not woman as artist could succeed or be forever bound by sexual limitation. She devoted her life to the worship of art and the belief that …

Work And The Family: Themes In The Plays Of Arthur Miller, Sue Parsons

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The study is divided into four parts, the first three having to do with the family and the last with work. The first section outlines the relationships of family members, including their attitudes toward themselves, toward each other, and toward society. The next two have to do with “Responsibility” as viewed by the family, and the need for “Stability” within the home and outside it. The final section examines the jobs held by Miller’s characters, their attitudes toward those jobs, and the extent to which an occupation helps to influence the characters and their familial relationships. A close discussion of …

Doubt And Faith In Tennyson's Poetry, Martha Wright

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Alfred Tennyson, the nineteenth century poetic giant of Victorian England, who served as poet laureate for forty-two years, is best known for his elegy, In Memoriam, The Idylls of the King, and such short poems as "Ulysses," "The Lotos Eaters," "Flower in the Crannied Wall," and "Crossing the Bar." But few readers of his poetry are aware of the frequent use of the words "doubt" and "faith" in these poems, as well as in a number of his other poems. A realization of the extensive use of these words presented the challenge for a study to determine how frequently these …

A Great Debate In Poetic Theory: Brooks, Wheelwright, Crane & Olson, Janice Carrell

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Elder Olson has said that at the Biblical Tower of Babel the people did not begin to talk nonsense but only what seemed like nonsense. This paper concerns an intellectual tower where important debates are held, but unfortunately the language is not a universal one; therefor, because all too often terms have evolved without adequate definition, disagreement occurs where reconciliation appears impossible.

The very title of this thesis could be misleading to the reader if he considers debate in its formal sense. What is here intended is the controversy in the efforts of respected scholars to understand and establish the …

The Existential Elements In The Poetry Of Wallace Stevens, Patsy Satterly

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study will deal with such existential elements in Stevens' poetry. The poetry will be treated in three main divisions: the early period of Harmonium (1923); the middle period of The Man With the Blue Guitar (1936), Ideas of Order (1937), and Parts of a World (1942); and the late period of Transport to Summer (1947) and Auroras of Autumn (1950). Two introductory chapters will precede the actual study of the poetry; one is a chapter on existentialism as it is expounded by Sartre and Camus, and the other is a description of the existential bias in Stevens' mind, in …

William Faulkner As Sociologist: An Adventure In The Sociology Of Literature, Katherine Stuart

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

My basic problem will be not to prove that Faulkner is, was, a sociologist or to suggest that his works be required reading in courses in sociological theory, but rather, to show in what sense and what areas his and the role of sociologist overlap. A. thorough reading of the major Faulkner novels, a sorting-out and. probing of his passages relevant to the field of sociology seems the most productive way to begin tackling the problem. First the effort will be made to grasp his ideas in context, then to extricate and analyze them out of context. The relationship of …

The Implications Of The Holy Trinity & Its Antithesis In Billy Budd, Nancy Locke

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

There have been a number of books and articles written about the theological underpinnings of the novel Billy Budd by Herman Melville and about the symbolic characters which he created. Several critics have brought some of this material together, but no one has really attempted to correlate the basic studies. This thesis will not only endeavor to do this, but it will add, as well, a personal interpretation of the theological content of the work.

Some Paradoxical Elements In The Fiction Of Carson Mccullers, Rona Bozarth

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Since the death of Carson McCullers in 1967, there has been no revival of interest in her work, and there has been little critical study done in regard to it. All of McCullers' stories have Southern settings, and most are set in her native Georgia. She uses folk materials (as do Faulkner, Welty and Warren), but the limitations which these impose are transcended, and the fiction becomes an "examination of universal moral circumstances."¹ McCullers does not exploit local color, which, as Robert Penn Warren has noted, is often "incomplete and unphilosophical."² Rather than treating locale for its own …

The Poetry Of Thomas Merton, Nancy Nelson

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

There is a need, then, for a study of Merton's poetry as a whole--a study based not on the poetry as a result of his poetic theory but on the poetry primarily as poetry, and which would include his last three volumes. This paper, therefore, will be a survey of representative samplings from each volume of Merton's poetry, and will take into account the differences and similarities between his early and later periods. It will attempt to discover and illustrate the most significant aspects of the development of Merton's philosophy and poetics, as revealed by the poetry itself and by …

To Hell For A Heavenly Cause: The Re-Emergence Of The Harrowing Of Hell Motif In Twentieth Century Literature, Margaret Shepherd

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

To define the scope of this study, therefore, Harrowing of Hell imagery will be thought of as those symbols peculiar to the pseudo-biblical story, with redemptive activity and triumph as distinguishing criteria. The hero is a Christ figure who has already achieved a degree of self-mastery. His descent into hell represents an act of redemption for others, with victory as the outcome. This delimitation, it will be seen, is not impossibly restrictive. A survey of contemporary literature indicates that Wasserman's use of the descent motif with redemptive implications is far from an isolated instance. Edward Albee in The Zoo Story …

Themes Of Decay In The Novels Of John Updike, Renae Eaden

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Although Updike has been recognized as one of the few contemporary writers worthy of serious consideration, critics and reviewers are not in accord about the acclaim that he has received. They cannot agree that Updike has anything worthwhile to say about the fundamental questions basic to contemporary fiction. Updike has been accused of dealing in sentimentalities and trivialities, while touching only slightly problems important to the human condition. Most critics agree that his style is excellent, but some feel that Updike is using this particular skill to cover up the shallowness of his thought. However, throughout Updike's novels major themes …

A Comparative Study Of Existential Attitudes In John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers And Norman Mailer’S The Naked And The Dead, Vernon Knuckles Jr.

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This thesis is devoted primarily to examining existential factors present in Three Soldiers and The Naked and the Dead, but it is evident that naturalism and Marxism make their presence known in both novels. Three Soldiers and The Naked and the Dead suggest through their existential overtones that indeed existentialism is a vital force which is clearly exerting itself in twentieth-century literature.

This study supports the viewpoint of a growing number of modern authors’ works which have concentrated on the individual’s struggle to find meaning and fulfillment in a complex world – a world of nuclear devices, campus unrest, …

Folk Elements In The Fiction Of James Still, Edith Walker

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study attempts to complement earlier studies of Still’s literary art such as that of Dean Cadle and Katherine Craf by pointing out the integral use of folk elements in his fiction. The methodology combined field studies with investigation of the works of folklorists and historians and novelists whose writings center around the same general region as do those of Still

For the purposes of this study “folk elements” will denote the orally transmitted traditions of the common people of a particular region. In this case, the “folk” are a rural people who have remained relatively stable for several generations …

Courtly Love Elements In The Child Ballads: A Study In Origins, Fannie Lewis

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The traditional ballad, the genre of the above poetry, has been a subject of much controversy and speculation, especially regarding its origin. The problem of origin is not likely to be solved unless much more evidence is found. Among the many theories are communal authorship, and individual poet; humble and oral origin, and sophisticated and literary origin. Studies of linguistics, of ballad refrain, and of carole continue the attempt to discover ballad genesis. However, a very different approach perhaps can be used to determine the origin of some ballads, particularly the romantic ballads; that approach is to use the courtly …

Edgar Allan Poe's Criticism Of The Novel, James Gage

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Edgar Allan Poe wrote forty-three critical reviews of novels during the period 1_835 to 1848 that he was associated with the various literary journals in the East. And, although his best known critical works concern themselves with the tale and with poetry, his statements regarding the novel are of sufficient quantity to merit scholarly research. Yet investigation of the major bibliographic sources reveals this to be not at all the case. Thus, this thesis snail endeavor to place some substance in the void of scholarship concerning Poe's criticism lf the novel with the hope that this substance might provide ample …

Hawthorne's Theory Of Art: A Reflection Of His Theory, Linda Thomas

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

In order to attempt an analysis of the success of the symbol and the method of achievement, it is necessary to understand the major intentions of Hawthorne's art and his concept of the symbol; the second chapter explains these theories and with this knowledge, the symbols selected were evaluated.

Religious Meaning In T.S. Eliot's Plays, Paula Helm

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Critics of Eliot often deal with his religious themes, but not with sympathy. In general, it seems that they are not at ease with Eliot's religious views; so the tendency has been not to give them a careful, objective treatment. The purpose of my study of the plays is to attempt such an unbiased examination, to keep in view precisely what Eliot dues say and the religious meanings that are clearly implied. Whether Eliot's ideas as they stand may be compatible or incompatible with the current thought climate is not, after all, the most important thing. He is a serious …

Primary Concerns In The Poetry Of Robert Frost, La Verne Murphy

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The purpose of this study is to classify the poems' themes and to reveal frequency patterns, thereby disclosing Frost's heaviest interests. The study is limited to an analysis of the poems contained in the Complete Poems, which includes most of his poetry. The Masque of Reason and The Masque of Mercy, appearing at the end of the Complete Poems, are not included in the study because they are allegorical poem-plays of the Job and Jonah stories respectively. While the study is confined primarily to an interpretation of the poems themselves, important critical studies relating to the themes are …

Moral And Spiritual Values In A High School Anthology Of Literature, Terrence Eugene Kelsay

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

For some years now the need for the emphasis of moral and spiritual values in our public schools has been recognized by the Kentucky Department of Education. The department has given encouragement to numerous research projects and summer workshops held for the purpose of finding an answer to the problem of emphasizing moral and spiritual values in public education. The concern for this need has informally become known as the “Kentucky Movement.”

This study was not undertaken with the thought of introducing new programs in our high schools. The teaching of moral and spiritual values should be done through the …

The Mcguffey Readers, Louise Lively

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The textbook, an important factor in public school education, is nowhere so wonderfully developed as in the United States. It occupies a more important position in our educational system than it does in the systems of many foreign countries. In fact, most of the teaching in our schools today revolves around the textbook - the cause of much criticism by many writers. They deplore the fact that both our teachers and pupils are dependent on textbooks.