Among American novelists, Anais Nin was the first to penetrate so thoroughly into woman's "hidden worlds," to expose her protective personas, to dramatize her atrophied senses and decayed will, to uncover the experiences that fester in her unconscious, and to reveal the impulses in the unconscious that can inspire woman. This dissertation studies the coherence that exists within Nin's theory of the poetic novel, her depiction of woman's neurosis, and her psychology of woman's transformation. / In particular, this study analyzes four characters--Stella, Djuna, Sabina, and Lillian--and the multi-faceted personas projected by each woman. In many instances, a persona is a clear manifestation of an archetype that consciously or unconsciously influences the character's behavior. The novels examined in the dissertation are Winter of Artifice, Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur. / Of the various archetypes projected through Stella, Djuna, Sabina, and Lillian, only four forms have positive effects on their psyches. First, the Child archetype embodies curiosity, receptivity, and playfulness--qualities that are essential to creativity and change. Second, the Seductress archetype fosters sensuality and sensuousness within woman and represents a vital means of relating to people, art, and nature. Third, the Moon Goddess archetype suggests that sexual intercourse can be a catalyst for the journey toward self-knowledge. This archetype urges woman to make her actions true to her inner principles and not to permit the ego to become the primary maker of decisions. Additionally, it has the power to make woman become aware of her creative potential and of the essential nature of freedom. Finally, the Wise Woman archetype encourages woman to become reflective and perceptive. It teaches her to make dreams exist in external reality and to transfigure particular events into universal dimensions. / Nin's extensive use of archetypal forms helps not only to explain the popular and critical interest in her work but also to understand better her ideas on woman's growth out of neurosis. The study concludes that certain archetypes, some of which society would not condone, possess great potential for benefitting woman's psychological growth. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-05, Section: A, page: 1546. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.

The Dragon's Pearl is alternate world fantasy focusing on the search for identity and obligatory duty. Kasandra, the Shamamic priestess, serves a simple island's people with help from Geoys, the silver dragon, whose pearl acts as a filter for the negative and evil. Kasandra's powers are fading as she approaches the time to turn the temple over to her daughter. Contrary to usual, she has had twins who have not yet learned to handle their powers, in spite of the fact the day of transition is close. The dragon's third 1,000 year cycle is also drawing to an end. Kasandra has realized the world is being threatened by a black shadow creature from the bowels of the earth, making the loss of her and the dragon's powers and the need to transfer the priestesshood to the young more critical. / Kasandra learns of a third daughter the elder wife thought was a curse and thus abandoned in the hills. Believing the Shamamic powers to be split among the three girls, Kasandra sends her mother and daughters in search of the third child, hoping their reunion will allow the girls to wield their powers and defeat the encroaching darkness. / The two daughters mature as they face the larger world and death, and the third child journeys from a free-spirited life towards her true family and destiny. The girls' eventual meeting is bittersweet; their reunion with Kasandra fraught with danger as they fight against the consuming darkness. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-03, Section: A, page: 0931. / Major Professor: Sheila O. Taylor. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1993.

This study offers a fresh examination of Norris' endeavors as an Academic artist, anatomical draughtsman, and illustrator. Chapter 1 presents an overview of how the perception of Norris vis-a-vis the visual arts has been developed by commentators over the past nine decades. / Chapter 2 assembles and analyzes available examples of Norris' own art work, the surviving evidence which prompted previous commentators evaluations, for the sake of determining the accuracy of their interpretations. / Chapter 3 describes the method and theory of late nineteenth-century French Academic art in order to establish the character of Norris' training and consequent values of his judgment. / Chapter 4 demonstrates how Norris' training in Academic theory and practice, and his years of experience as a draughtsman, played a crucial role when he fashioned the story of a young artist's unsuccessful struggle to become a Paris salon painter in the novel Vandover and the Brute. The precepts and techniques of his fiction grew out of those at the center of the French-inspired art world of his time. To understand their artistic milieu is to grasp not only the themes and characteristics of Vandover but the essential characteristics of the whole of his canon. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-09, Section: A, page: 2836. / Major Professor: Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.

Despite being the first African-American fiction writer to achieve a national reputation--including generous praise from W. D. Howells and other important critics of his day--Charles Chesnutt occupies a curiously ambiguous position in the canon of black literature. His relative place is, oddly enough, probably higher in the canon of American literature than it is in African-American literature. One reason for this anomaly may be that the sophisticated use of narrative techniques in his short fiction shielded Chesnutt's own views from the reader, a literary stance that does not lend itself to the sort of unambiguous political readings that so often characterize the "rediscovery" of black texts in the last thirty years. / Chesnutt's virtuosity in creating a rich diversity of voices in his short fiction allows him to explore the parameters of identity for both blacks and whites at the turn of the century in a comprehensive and complex fashion. No writer of his time can speak so convincingly for such a wide variety of people: His works articulate the lives of slaves in the antebellum South, of poor whites during Reconstruction, and of rich mulattoes in the industrial North, to name only a few. Taken collectively, in fact, his canon of short fiction might be the most accomplished performance of what in today's parlance would be called multiculturalism. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-08, Section: A, page: 2389. / Major Professor: Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.

This novel dissertation deals with a young girl, Rayann Wood, on the verge of adolescence, growing up in rural north Florida in the mid 1960s. She must face a violent family life--an abusive father and a manic depressive (possibly schizophrenic) mother, and a racist culture, in which she, too is part of a minority culture as she is part Seminole Indian. / She forms a friendship with the only girl her age in the area, Cookie Johnson, who happens to be black, and lives with her "aunt" Miss Mamie, who also works as the maid in the white girl's household. Cookie's mother has run away and her father is in prison for manslaughter. / Cookie dreams of running away to Chicago and becoming a singer while Rayann dreams of killing her father. She gets visions from her great grandmother Polly who lives on the Brighton Reservation in south Florida. / The girls must hide their forbidden friendship. Together they recreate themselves by their friendship. They share a "hideout" that they build in the woods between their two houses. / They make a friendship by playing games, dreaming of futures, arguing about race and culture clashes, singing and dancing together, and occasionally horseback riding in the woods. Even as they are becoming closer friends, the backdrop against which their friendship exists is a violent southern apartheid which, in part, will separate them, because they accidentally set the Wood kitchen on fire. / The story, told in short lyrical vignettes, uses magical realism similar to minority writers such as Cristina Garcia (Dreaming in Cuban), Sandra Cisneros' (The House on Mango Street), N. Scott Momaday's (The Ancient Child), and others. / It carries also with it the southern traditions of "the land," insanity, corruption, family, racism, cultural oppression, the idea of woman. It is written in a "dialect" which includes idiosyncratic vocabulary, expressions and syntax. / The novel reflects my research in graduate studies, and my heritage. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-08, Section: A, page: 2394. / Major Professor: Sheila Ortiz Taylor. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.

Playing against the low genres of soap opera and pornography, this postmodern farce takes place in a generic corporate office with two tiers of characters: executive and clerical staff. The executives are generally seeking more power and perks in the company (a room with a view), while the clerical workers are more involved in daily survival and personal rites of passage. / The novel is told in the third person from multiple points of view which are subverted on occasion by an obtrusive narrative perspective. World views clash in a dialogic heteroglossia as characters fight for space, voice and hegemony. The major players are Olga, Administrative Assistant to the Vice President of Finance (Mr. D), Diane from Documentation, the first female "executive hire," and Larry LaRue, the Vice President of Marketing. These are the characters dangled in front of the reader as potential vehicles for identification, while those presented as other through flat caricature are often recuperated with a flip toward empathy-generating personalities. / A plot that seeks to connect the diverse characters concerns Mr. D's plan to implement Interactive Distributed Processing in order to regain power and control over the clerical staff. Another plot evolves around Enormous Norma's feminist agenda. Executive secretary to the Chairman of the Board, Norma harbors a vast hatred of mankind and gradually organizes the women into a self-help group under the auspices of the Goddess. / Olga is the one character who does not participate in the company shenanigans, executive or clerical. Her values, desires and agendas do not coincide with those of the other players. At first mostly isolated, Olga gradually begins to interact with others, primarily through her accentuated sense of touch. Her mission is revealed in a carnivalesque final chapter. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-11, Section: A, page: 3913. / Co-Directors: Janet G. Burroway; Ralph M. Berry. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

The study is an interpretation of the tradition of walking in the American experience. American walkers are viewed from five different historical and cultural perspectives: wilderness walkers, New England saunterers, long-distance walkers, urban walkers, and trail hikers. The initial settlers and early colonists often found walking the most practical, economical, and expedient means of travel. Most of the travel westward whether for exploration or for migration entailed a great deal of walking. / As road systems and modern modes of transportation improved, walking was no longer necessary, but a new breed of walkers emerged who consciously and voluntarily preferred walking to other forms of locomotion. New England saunterers--such as Thoreau, Emerson, and Hawthorne--took daily walks in the spirit of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land. During their walks they explored the external landscape as well as their own thoughts and feelings. In contrast to the saunterers were long-distance walkers. The tradition of long-distance walking extends from the early 1800s to the present. The literature of distance walkers gives panoramic interpretations of American culture. At the turn of the century, walking was a popular pastime and sport for middle-class urbanites. It was perceived as an ideal form of exercise and an excellent way to retain health. At the turn of the century there was also a desire by middle-class Americans to participate in nature-oriented activities. Nature trails were blazed and urbanites readily took to hiking. Hiking and backpacking remain as popular forms of walking. / In conclusion, walking is an ongoing tradition among Americans. Though there are contemporary saunterers and long-distance walkers, walking has assumed a number of different forms in the latter half of this century. Today there are walks for various causes such as protest and peace marches. Finally, the special relationship that American walkers have had with nature remains central to the ongoing tradition of walking in this country. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 44-12, Section: A, page: 3729. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1983.

Set on the imaginary West Indian island of Molyneux in the 1960s, Wade Inn is a short novel about Ian, Annie, and their mother Miriam Hopwood, who, after nine months of waiting for Freddy Hopwood, father and husband, to return from a day sailing trip, attempt to resolve in their own minds and among themselves Freddy's disappearance. The novel takes place on the day and night of June 13th, the official celebration of the Queen of England's Birthday. / Since the time of Freddy's disappearance, Miriam has moved her family into the Wade Inn, a small hotel located in the capital city of Bayard. But on this day, Miriam decides she will move her family to her boyfriend, Neville Trant's house. Annie plots her escape from the island with a sailor/adventurer, while Ian is seduced by the American Peace Corps volunteer who tutors him in Spanish. The novel focuses on the three characters' attempts to escape what they perceive to be their own reality, only to discover that reality is what they make of it. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-03, Section: A, page: 0931. / Major Professor: Jerome Stern. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1993.

Original poems focusing on the contradictions, accommodations, and restrictions characteristic of the human condition are grouped into five sections. The first section presents several, often narrative, portraits of children and young adults whose lives have been damaged by early experience. Poems in the second section also use narrative techniques to deal primarily with individuals who for varying reasons have failed to achieve conventional success or happiness, but who nonetheless demonstrate some tenacity or brightness of spirit. The next two sections focus in a more personal way on responses to grief, loneliness, frustration, despair, and the growing awareness of age and mortality. In the final section, poems explore selected moments in which perceptions of continuity, joy, or triumph (albeit tenuous and mixed) dominate. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, Section: A, page: 1751. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1984.

A comprehensive critical study of the works of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was conducted, utilizing the Rawlings Collection at the University of Florida for primary sources and Rawlings' own romantic-realistic approach to her work as a critical framework. On the romantic side Rawlings shows a consistent use of the Florida Cracker folk culture and of woodsman-farmer protagonists in the tradition of Natty Bumppo. She responds to nature poetically and holds the basic romantic belief that nature can heal a troubled spirit. Also her consistent theme is the belief that an affinity with nature is essential to human happiness. Rawlings also has a romantic love of the past that is most evident in The Yearling with her use of old hunting tales. On the realistic side Rawlings is known for her use of numerous accurate details drawn from her own experiences and associations with Florida Crackers. She believed that her years as a journalist had prepared her to tell her stories with a diligent attention to facts. Rawlings also shows a realistic viewpoint toward nature. Although she saw it poetically and responded emotionally to its beauty, she also recognized the malevolent side of nature and its ability to harm man. She knew that life was a struggle for the Florida Crackers and thus shows a stoic attitude in those characters, who persevere in the face of hardships. / Although the dualism of romantic realism is present in all of Rawlings' works, two of her novels (Golden Apples and The Sojourner) show more romance than realism. In both books, characters and settings are drawn mainly from Rawlings' imagination rather than from real people and places. Her last novel labors under the additional constraints of having the only setting outside of Florida and an inaccurate time frame. Despite her lack of success with these novels, Rawlings achieved a balance between romanticism and realism in South Moon Under, The Yearling, and Cross Creek. These novels show both a romantic response to her subject matter and a realistic portrayal of it. These books also show Rawlings at her best. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, Section: A, page: 1754. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1984.