A collection of verse and prose poetry.

A collection of five short stories and a one-act play.

Short story collection

Short stories, creative nonfiction, novel chapter

This thesis seeks to explore how Virginia Woolf depicts beauty in the literary scenes, characters, and language in her fictional works. In The Voyage Out (1915), Woolf writes, When one gave up seeing the beauty that clothed things, this was the skeleton beneath (12). In this passage, Woolf is defining one aspect of beauty. Beauty can disguise and is transient. This thesis explores beauty as a meditation on time, loss, and recovery of the past in memory and in vision (grounded in creative memory). All of these meditations are dependent on characters moments of being, or their awareness of being human. My findings are based on discussions of To the Lighthouse (1927), Jacobs Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and Between the Acts (1941).

The publication of "Edgar Allen Poe & the Juke-Box" modifies Elizabeth Bishops established oeuvre in ways that demonstrate the anxiety throughout her work regarding the concealment of sexual differencea concealment she often takes part in. As the poems reveal, by putting emphasis on particular kinds of clothing, Bishop emphasizes the necessarybut flawedmethods for that concealment. Black stockings, gloves, sailors hats, and other garments of traditional gender representation work as useful metaphors, symbolically engaging the construction of the literary image accepted in the academy which has produced the unified notion of Bishopness some critics still wish to uphold. When themes of gender and sexuality are most at crisis, articles of clothing such as stockings become important signs of what Bishop deemed necessary to put onboth figuratively and literallyin order to uphold the style and poise she continues to be celebrated for.

In this thesis I have two nonfiction chapters from a book on Laura Ingalls Wilder and two fiction stories.

The persecution of homosexuals by the Nazis under National Socialism during the Second World War has historically been ignored and almost completely erased. However, within the past two and a half decades a significant number of historical, academic, sociological, and literary inquiries and works have uncovered this once forgotten past. Because of these investigations, the anti-homosexual actions inflicted upon gay men by the Third Reich have the ability to impact the continual creation of a queer collective memory and consciousness. Unfortunately, many queers do not know the historic connotations and denotation of the pink trianglea symbol worn by homosexual males within the concentration campsnow so readily used by the queer community today as a representation of pride. By analyzing the history, testimonies, fictional account of gay persecution, and attempts of reestablishment in the usage of the pink triangle, this thesis seeks to establish the history of persecution of gay men as a solidifying piece of the queer collective consciousness. Such a collective consciousness will not only remember and commemorate those gay lives lost during the Holocaust, but it will also allow the queer community to have a viable political and social past and future that will allow such atrocities to occur never again.

The themes of suburbanization and placelessness arise in many of Yates novels, exposing the continuing pattern of conformity at any price which accompanied the rapidly-changing era of post-World War II America. As suburbanization began to take its toll on the American landscape, a new, increasingly placeless environment started to emerge; endless subdivisions of identical houses, commercial strip developments, shopping centers, and movie plazas sprang up, places which not only looked alike, but felt alike. A cultural shift accompanied this changing environment, one which embraced a new domestic ideal of the suburban family, an image constantly reinforced through the media of the time. Yates characters, while on the surface conforming to this ideal, imagine breaking free from their mundane lifestyles, harboring visions of untapped greatness within themselves. Ultimately, however, they lack the autonomy or strength of character needed to accomplish this break. Having existed for so long in an empty, shallow environment providing possibilities only for commonplace and mediocre experiences, they must cling desperately to safety and security at any price.

No abstract required, as it is a professional paper.