In this thesis, I will examine the poetry and prose of a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writer, Anna Letitia Barbauld. Through the early 1970s, literary scholarship on the Romantic period focused almost exclusively on male canonical writers such as Wordsworth and Keats. By focusing on the work of a popular and prolific female writer such as Barbauld, I hope to contribute to the debate on what is considered Romantic. My overall thesis is that despite the evidence of Barbauld's conventionally "feminine" poems as well as her own personal history, Barbauld was not a simple antifeminist or mere schoolmistress, but rather an important contributor to the debates in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century concerning feminine identity, and moreover, the feminine ideal. The first chapter discusses the Romantic era's timeline, explores Barbauld's interaction with her contemporaries, exposes the many obstacles to women writers of Barbauld's era, and reviews Barbauld's reception history. In the introduction, I will first discuss Barbauld's place in the Romantic century. If we think of Barbauld as an early Romantic (she began publishing in 1773 and most of her major literary contributions were made before 1800), a different account of Romanticism emerges. I will then give a brief biography of Barbauld, which will include her interaction with other Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, and conclude the introduction by discussing the past neglect of Barbauld and other Romantic women writers. In the second chapter, I move on to compare Barbauld with one of her more radical female contemporaries, Mary Wollstonecraft. Given that critics such as Marlon B. Ross and Mary Wollstonecraft labeled Barbauld as an antifeminist based upon poems such as "To a Ladywith some painted Flowers" and "The Rights of Woman," I think it is important to examine the considerable number of similarities between Wollstonecraft and Barbauld. In Barbauld's works "Fashion: A Vision" and "Epistle to William Wilberforce," her language and ideas sound remarkably similar to that of Wollstonecraft's. Both criticize their society's construction of marriage as well as the upper class women of their day, and both writers believe that women should be more concerned with improving their minds than with obsessing over fashion. Finally, in the third chapter I explore how Barbauld subtly undermined the belief system of her day by identifying women's exclusion from the masculine sphere, asserting the validity of desire, and affirming the power of the feminine consciousness. Barbauld's poems "Inscription for an Ice-House" and "The Mouse's Petition" also offer feminist critiques regarding the social order that persists in controlling women in eighteenth-century England. Moreover, in poems such as "A Summer Evening's Meditation," "Corsica," and "Washing-Day," Barbauld uses female consciousness as a distinct counterbalance to male consciousness. These three poems refute cultural stereotypes of women in their assigned domestic roles by showing the power of female subjectivity. I will conclude my paper by discussing the problem of the British Romantic literary canon. Mary Favret calls Barbauld and Felicia Hemans "newly canonized writers," but I doubt whether other literary critics would agree with her assessment. The problem of canonization and women writers is not easily resolved, given that women writers such as Barbauld are usually regarded as mere complements to the work of the six (male) established canonical writers. An examination of important female authors is important, therefore, in order to open up the debate on canonization and Romanticism. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Falls Semester, 2002. / Date of Defense: November 1, 2002. / Feminism, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Rights / Includes bibliographical references. / Eric Walker, Professor Directing Thesis; Helen Burke, Committee Member; James O'Rourke, Committee Member.

This study is an attempt to trace changing perceptions of masculinity as expressed by popular literature in the late twentieth century. In this thesis I argue that masculinity is a process and, as such, can be understood differently at different times. Employing Larry McMurty's Lonesome Dove (1985), Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996), and Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and A Man in Full (1998), I examine the ways in which these popular novels might be understood as expressing and mediating concerns surrounding masculinity at the time of their publication. By investigating these literary works, we might be able to more fully appreciate the fears and desires linked with a fluctuating hegemonic masculinity in America. Specifically within each text, I look at how the main male characters maintain and/or are denied separation from an encroaching and feminizing civilization and how these struggles for secession correspond to modern anxieties influencing hegemonic masculinity. Moreover, by studying literary works popularized under the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, we can observe how traditional perceptions of masculinity as stoic, tough, and hard-boiled (a la Reagan) have been largely destabilized and softer, more docile forms of masculinity (a la Clinton) have become increasingly accepted and even normalized. As a result of enhanced and prevalent modes of technology, jobs that require muscular strength have decreased significantly in the last century, and so it has become increasingly unnecessary for men to define themselves in terms of their strength or toughness. Each of the novels considered in this thesis wrestle with these concerns. Finally, I extrapolate from these twentieth century works into the twenty-first century in an attempt to gauge what anxieties have been resolved and what remains to be reconciled. Overall, this thesis is an attempt to enter into a critical conversation with gender theorists such as Michael Kimmel who have suggested there is at least as much to discover about the constructedness of masculinity as femininity. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2006. / Date of Defense: June 30, 2006. / Susan Bordo, Susan Faludi, Popular Culture, Gender Theory, Michael Kimmel, Lynn Segal / Includes bibliographical references. / Leigh Edwards, Professor Directing Thesis; Mark Cooper, Committee Member; Barry Faulk, Committee Member.

This thesis explores Marya Hornbacher's 1998 autobiographical work Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. As a complex and layered American autobiography, Wasted will be placed within three American traditions of autobiography, namely, the self as morality play, in which the writer deals with matters of good and evil, virtue and vice, next, the self-made man, which is related to the bildungsroman and ideas of "self culture," and finally, feminist confession, which does not seek an exoneration of sins but instead offers personal and societal truths. As a memoir of anorexia and bulimia, Wasted is discussed as a study of American girls and their bodies. Autobiography and the body are both means of communication, and are both treated as such in the third chapter. As a transgressive memoir, Wasted is discussed in Chapter 4 as part of a trend that alters and propels American feminism, not unlike the works of other feminist punk writers such as Kathy Acker and punk musicians such as Le Tigre and Slaeter-Kinney. The introduction addresses the neo-conservative movement, which includes Wendy Shalit's 1999 book: A Return To Modesty, in which she argues that embarrassment is required for a woman's safety; the loss of embarrassment, and subsequently modesty, is the cause of contemporary damages to women, such as eating disorders, promiscuity, drug use, and rape. She uses Wasted to propel her arguments, citing Hornbacher as a woman lacking in modesty and embarrassment, a condition which, according to Shalit, leaves her open to self-destructive behaviors and victimization by vii others. This argument is dangerous in its simplicity and in its desire to place blame. Shalit's function is enabled by our society's lust for public spectacle, such as daytime talk shows in which the stranger the guests and their issues, the higher the ratings of the show. This circuitry works together to reduce women such as Hornbacher to objects defined by their sex and gender, thus providing a shallow critique of surface sexuality. Instead, this thesis strives to analyze Wasted in its proper interpretive matrix; a more appropriate and useful analysis would be to examine how the book fits into established American forms of autobiography, how the book uses both the body and its genre to tell the story, and finally, to question how this memoir fits into and changes American feminism. Wasted is an American autobiography, it is a woman's autobiography (with all the potential negative and positive connotations that accompany that adjective) and it is a transgressive memoir, continuing through nonfiction a punk feminist agenda. The conclusion of this thesis examines the reasons why Wendy Shalit's interpretation of Wasted in A Return to Modesty is reductionistic and anti-feminist, and that her suggestion to rediscover the lost virtue of modesty simply works to place blame on the victim, which in this case blames Hornbacher for her anorexia. Instead, I maintain, this memoir needs to be analyzed as a complex American autobiography, transgressive in style and content, and as a text that works in conjunction with the current wave of American feminism. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2002. / Date of Defense: November 4, 2002. / Marya Hornbacher, Wasted, Autobiography, American, Feminism / Includes bibliographical references. / Barry Faulk, Professor Directing Thesis; Bonnie Braendlin, Committee Member; Karen Laughlin, Committee Member.

The poems in this thesis manuscript deal specifically and theoretically with the concept of finality, and echo influences as varied as Robert Haas, Harvey Shapiro, and Paul Auster. The poems investigate the many forms, structures, subjects, and styles of contemporary poetry, orienting themselves around four primary types of endings: relational, familial, personal, and external. Section I explores physical death as a primary focus until gradually shifting into examining the last, final moments of a relationship. The final two poems in this section deal with relationships with the end inherent in the very beginning: relationships with nowhere to go but down, given the obvious, flawed nature of the speaker. Section II continues this theme in a decidedly different stylistic approach: all the poems in this section are in sonnet form. This section examines endings located in one, singular moment, and also deals with the writer's reflection, years later, of certain moments of ending. This section asserts that endings occur at any time, both in moments we fail to grasp and in moments obvious to us. Section III examines endings in specific, physical locations, such as tree branches that lie dead on the ground, the unfortunate product of an ice storm; phantom limb syndrome; and "the flick of flint on a dead fire" ("Reunion"). The section also examines endings that occur, or might occur, within specific geographic places and spaces,, whether it be in Florida, Iraq, or Haiti. The final poem in the section, "I Remember," is five simple lines, each denoting an ending to the title, and each indicative of a different type of emotional end. Section IV addresses address endings of a familial nature, examining the disconnect between the speaker's practical experience in the world and his mother's religious conception of the world, and then spring-boarding into poems that examine the death of the speaker's father. The last poem, "Reflections on Turning Thirty," is a summation to the manuscript, asserting in the closing lines, "Love is the brick / breaking windows / of the heart." In order to best examine endings in their various forms, the writer incorporates a variety of styles and techniques. Many poems are written in couplet form; still others, as in Section II, are composed in sonnet form. Most of the poems are at least fourteen lines long, though some run much shorter – "I Remember" (five lines) – and others much longer – "The World as Word and Meaning" (forty-eight lines). All poems are written in free verse, however, and the writer was cognizant of free verse techniques at work: consonance and assonance, line enjambment, and internal rhyme schemes. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2010. / Date of Defense: March 29, 2010. / Death, Relationships, Family, Love, Endings / Includes bibliographical references. / James Kimbrell, Professor Directing Thesis; Erin Belieu, Committee Member; David Kirby, Committee Member; Robert Olen Butler, Committee Member.

In the 1970's, with the second-wave feminist movement, sexual violence became a forefront topic in feminist studies and it continues to trouble the boundaries between disciplinary studies. When I refer to rape, I consider it a criminal act, a violent sexual invasion on the body in connection to hegemonic discourse, resulting in sexual victimization. Looking at the cultural representation of rape in literature allows us to understand the cultural fears and fascinations with rape while respecting the victims of assault. Looking at novels beginning in the late 1930's and continuing to the present, I hope to deconstruct the hegemonic discourse surrounding rape. Through the corporeal acts of sexual violence, we can understand ways the writer socially constructs sexuality, race, and gender and ways fictional assault both is scripted by and scripts cultural / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2007. / Date of Defense: March 14, 2007. / Sexual Assault, Rape / Includes bibliographical references. / Dennis Moore, Professor Directing Thesis; Candace Ward, Committee Member; Leigh Edwards, Committee Member.

"If baseball is a narrative, an epic of exile and return, a vast, communal poem about separation, loss, and the hope for reunion—if baseball is a Romance Epic—it is finally told by the audience." These words come from A. Bartlett Giamatti's essay "Baseball as Narrative," and they are the inspiration behind my short story collection, Rounding Third. Baseball's audience is its fans; these are the people who live and breathe in my stories. Baseball's literary tradition is rich with tales of players and coaches, those who are directly involved with the game. Those who play it and make it a career, especially at the professional level, are a staggering minority in comparison to those who love and cherish the sport from the bleachers, from televisions, from the glossy pages of magazines and collectible cards sold in shiny, metallic packages. This collection gives an ownership, urgency, and voice to the fans. Giamatti, in the same essay, also writes, "In baseball, everyone wants to arrive at the same place where they start." I began thinking about how this quote connected to the one mentioned earlier. The key lies in the phrase "separation, loss, and the hope for reunion." Every journey has a starting point. In baseball, and in my stories about this beautiful game, the characters recognize their separation and distance from that starting point. Like Giamatti says, they "want" to get back; there are no guarantees. And even if they do, they arrive changed, people reformed by dealing with the challenges of life and the challenges of loving people, people going through their own changes. So while my narratives parallel the structure of the game by having characters on a base path, attempting to reach an either familiar or unfamiliar "home," they also thrive on it as subject matter. And it is really this structuring that inspires the title. "Rounding third and headed for home" is a common baseball phrase. It means that a player has reached a certain point in his offensive journey on the field and is coming into the final stretch where he will face at least one definite obstacle in the catcher. I feel like my central characters are all "rounding third." I feel like the emphasis is on the journey, the striving to get to another point. These characters may or may not make it home, and perhaps the home they reach is not the one they anticipated, but it is the movement, the "the rounding," that is important. Baseball is definitely one point of cohesiveness for this collection. But this collection is more than a group of five baseball stories; it is more than five baseball fan stories. Again I go back to Giamatti's phrase: "separation, loss, and the hope for reunion." This phrase is a thematic staple for Rounding Third. If someone had told me six months ago that I had to work with the theme of "baseball as a means for dealing with separation and loss," I would have said, quite assuredly, that those were confines too narrow for more than a single short story. I would have been wrong. As I started to work with this theme, I realized that it was rich with possibilities for creation, originality, and stories that simultaneously inspire hope and break my heart. My intention for this thesis is to produce a collection of baseball stories that are unlike any baseball stories being published. I can tell you why I want to write baseball stories . . . because no one is writing the baseball stories I really want to read. I've read about countless walk-off homeruns and no-hitters and eccentric rookies and has-beens making comebacks in the twilight of their careers. What I haven't read is a collection of stories that gives fans an intimate ownership of baseball, an ownership that is critical and valuable. This game is so much more than a game, and I have been obsessed with proving this through my stories. Sports are always under fire for scandals, spoiled millionaire athletes, drugs, failed role models, corrupt business measures . . . but for all that and everything else, there is a purity of sport. To me, it is the tangible enactment of the human spirit. For me, baseball is a staging of the American dream of simultaneously being a valued member of a community and an individual who sets out and achieves personal success and differentiation. It is complex and exact and gorgeous, which is what I always try to have my stories be. So, while Rounding Third is a collection I've written about baseball, I also hope it is a collection where I have written baseball. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2005. / Date of Defense: June 10, 2005. / Short Story, Baseball / Includes bibliographical references. / Sheila Ortiz Taylor, Professor Directing Thesis; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member; Julianna Baggott, Committee Member.

Through a Blanchovian reading, this study situates Samuel Beckett's major novels as writings either grappling with problems toward or at the limits of experience. Beckett posits in 1936 the necessity for a "literature of the unword," a literature that for Maurice Blanchot is aligned to the liminal experience of the il y a—i.e., of Being in general, Being without beings. Heidegger points the way toward this "outside" as approachable through language, as that which language dissimulates through signification. However, in opposition to the Heideggerian experience of a cornucopiate enownment of beings between man and Being, Blanchot privileges the Levinasian experience of the il y a—of horror, dread, and exile coupled with witless fascination—which becomes for Blanchot, as well as for Beckett, a "human, all-too-human" ontological quest(ion): What does human consciousness (the writer's) and writing metamorphose into at the threshold of this "outside"? For Beckett, in approaching the undistinguished "there is," a consciousness remains, but barely, the subject-less writer ill seeing a world that is no longer a world, ill hearing a voice that cannot be heard, ill saying thoughts that cannot be thought. In terms of "the man who writes [who] is [. . .] no longer Samuel Beckett but the necessity which has displaced him" (Blanchot "Where Now? Who Now?"), the writer becomes merely the recorder of a streaming, demented, but acutely "analytical" language marking the perverse inhuman-human juncture of the eternal repetition of nothing. This study proposes that beginning with Watt, after Murphy's meditation upon the paradox of experiencing nothingness while simultaneously acknowledging it (playfully mirrored by the "omniscient" narrator's access to Murphy's hermetically enclosed mind), Beckett parodies Blanchot's situation of the writer: in Watt's cartooning of the schizoid nature of the dispossessed writer/witness; in Molloy's proffering a writerly, inhuman ideal and a human history toward that ideal; in Malone Dies' bringing to an end the "author"; and in The Unnamable's obtaining, although (and necessarily) failingly, the primal scene of a subject-less writer/writing, a "scene" of voiceless voices and "endgames" that resonates through Beckett's later novels, Texts for Nothing, How It Is and the Nohow On trilogy. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2003. / Date of Defense: April 7, 2003. / Limits of Experience, Possibilities of a / Includes bibliographical references. / S. E. Gontarski, Professor Directing Dissertation; William Cloonan, Outside Committee Member; Fred L. Standley, Committee Member; Karen Laughlin, Committee Member.

This collection, entitled Where the Cottonwoods Grow, is built around the theme of family. Whether it is a good one or bad one, every person has a family of some form. In these stories I explore the familial role through such questions as: How and why do we struggle under and perpetuate the deeds of our ancestors? Must the children always pay for the sins of the father? What impact do class and geography have on the family unit? Can sibling relationships fill the void left by broken parental relationships, and on the flip side, can a child learn love from parents who themselves have difficulty loving each other? While each of the stories will deal with the general theme of family in different ways, as a whole they come together to show the human progression through family life—beginning with the child who is trying to understand the dynamics of the adult family members and her place within them, to the teenagers challenging parental authority in their journey towards adulthood, to the young adult who finds she still has much to learn about mature adult relationships and her own parents, to finally the married couple who find themselves questioning everything about each other and the family they have formed. The Show in the Gray Oldsmobile is told in the first person voice of Sarah, a twelve-year-old girl who is sheltered and coddled by her overprotective mother because of her perceived physical weakness—a kidney transplant. Sarah's platonic relationship with her brother, Martin, who has shared in her physical trauma, contrasts their strict and conservative parents who seem incapable of modeling healthy family relationships. In Burnt Holes in a Blanket, the reader sees through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old into the disruption and bitterness alcohol abuse can sew within a family, especially when it afflicts that family's lone remaining patriarch. In Best Daughter, a seventeen-year-old is forced to live with the mother she has never known after the death of her beloved father and to deal with the mixed emotions she has for both her parents. In One Step Ahead of the Dark, a twenty-something college student is at a crossroads in her relationships with her live-in boyfriend, Charlie, and with her parents, especially with her overbearing mother. She is forced to see the value in her boyfriend through her parents' eyes, especially as the dynamic between her and her mother is brought to a new level. Where the Cottonwoods Grow is an examination of a husband-wife relationship over nearly twenty years. Time, children, and unfulfilled promises chip away at their relationship. While it is written in third person, the only story in the collection that is, the narrative focuses on the wife, Mary Jane, who questions the last two decades of her life. Her doubts hinge on one fundamental question—should she have married this man who has failed to give her the life she longs for? The title, which also serves as the title of the collection, represents an idealized home and family setting that may never be possible, or at least not as the various characters in these stories expect it to be. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2006. / Date of Defense: March 24, 2006. / Fiction / Includes bibliographical references. / Ned Stuckey-French, Professor Directing Thesis; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member; Barry Faulk, Committee Member.

This thesis is a collection of women's voices and the stories they have to tell. Though not all of them are told directly by the women themselves, their voices are at the center. Many of the stories in this collection take place in or are connected to my hometown, Paris, Texas. Though I have not lived there for some time, Paris, Texas has come to have a tremendous influence on the landscape of my imagination, as has Florida, where I currently reside. Paris, Texas is rich in beauty and charm, but most of all angst— at least for me. I spent the majority of my time there trying to figure out who I was only to discover that leaving there would be the one thing that has shaped me the most. The stories here deal primarily with this obsession with identity: searching, discovering, and asserting it. But as I hope these stories may show, and as I have learned, we are not stagnant creatures and our identity is a continual process rather than a fixed goal. My thesis is a collection of women coming to terms with this process. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2003. / Date of Defense: September 17, 2003. / Texas, Paris / Includes bibliographical references. / Robert Olen Butler, Professor Directing Thesis; Janet Burroway, Committee Member; Sheila Ortiz-Taylor, Committee Member.

This collection of poems, The Lone Ranger Dines Again, is divided into three sections: "Million Dollar Wallpaper," a series of miscellaneous poems ranging in topic from a Colombian drug lord to instructions for playing baseball like a girl; "Six Gun's Legacy," a series of poems centered on childhood; and "The Return of the Convict," a series of poems concerning adulthood in its clumsy infancy. The titles of these sections are derived from episodes of The Lone Ranger television program. The goal of The Lone Ranger Dines Again is to mix pop culture, personal experience, and wry observation of everyday life into a frothy, rhythmic, and accessible concoction / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2005. / Date of Defense: February 25, 2005. / Poetry / Includes bibliographical references. / David Kirby, Professor Directing Thesis; James Kimbrell, Committee Member; Erin Belieu, Committee Member.