"Distance" and Other Stories is a collection of four short stories and a novella that explore the themes of isolation and personal revelation. The dissertation opens with a preface which describes my background as a writer and the forces that shape my work, including science fiction, technology and the internet, cultural marginalization, and Joseph Campbell's hero's motif.

It is the purpose of this paper to illustrate from the novels themselves that Defoe's protagonists are essentially isolated individuals and that this isolation is the result of the circumstances of their births, the nature of their professions, their spiritually isolating religious beliefs, and their attitudes toward their fellow men.

This collection of short stories takes its name from various islands historically believed to exist and at one time or other located on maps, sometimes remaining on them for centuries, but later removed after they were proved to be illusory. Reports of these islands usually came from sailors as they explored new realms, mistaking actual islands for imaginary ones or by geographical error. Illusions can persist unchallenged for ages. A similar yet modern illusion is the persistence of vision, a phenomenon by which an afterimage, say, on a screen, is thought to persist on the retina for approximately one twenty-fifth of a second. The characters in these stories live their isolated lives as after-image phantoms on islands that either never existed or no longer exist.

This thesis investigates the interrelationship between the two dominant themes, isolation and human ephemerality found in two of Virginia Woolf's books, To the lighthouse and The Waves.

Lucky Creature is a collection of poems that considers particular aspects of being human, specifically love, death, isolation, and the nature of knowledge. A primary concern is the body, explored as a vehicle for shame. The role of imagination as a means of escape is also paramount, leading always toward an act of transformation as a chance at immortality in an entropic universe where everything has a shelf life.

This study is the latest in a series done at Ball State Univeristy on the Angell Papers, the entire collection of personal papers and other materials which Sir Norman Angell presented to the school in 1961. The present study focuses on Angell's activities from July 1940 through December 1945 when Angell was in the United States--unofficially representing the British government--to promote Anglo-American friendship and cooperation.When war broke out in 1939, the British government, principally the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Information, immediately recognized the need to promote pro-British sentiments in the United States. But they also recognized the desirability of keeping a "low profile" in deference to American sensitivities and suspicions about the alleged role of British propaganda in the United States entry into World War I. Angell, and other private British citizens with established contacts and reputations in the United States, were thus chosen to conduct a campaign of unofficial propaganda in America. As a tireless lecturer and writer, Angell used every means at his disposal to communicate his basic message: Britain's historic role in preserving United States security.Initially, that message consisted of an unrelenting assault on the isolationist/non-interventionist position. After Pearl Harbor, it increasingly focused on cementing for the postwar era the level of war-enforced Anglo-American cooperation by interpreting to Americans those features of English life most likely to be sources of misunderstandings and resentments: feudal remnants in the political and social structures, the Empire, and Labourite Socialism. Finally, as the war moved into its latter phases, Angell increasingly recognized those of the political Left as constituting a greater threat to postwar Anglo-American cooperation--which he regarded as the sine qua non of an effective collective security system and future peace--than did those of the nationalistisolationist Right. He became especially concerned about the Left's desire to promote socio-economic revolutionary change in the midst of war, even at the expense of maintaining essential wartime unity or postwar stability. He was equally concerned about the Left's attitude toward the USSR, fearing the reappearance of an appeasement policy which would as surely result in still another war as that of the 1930s had.The nature of historical evidence does not permit a conclusive evaluation of Angell's impact on Americans' thinking. But it might be justly said that, operating from a private station, Angell did as much as any one man could to advance the cause of international understanding and peace.

"The Theme of Isolation in Selected Short Fiction of Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty" examines certain prototypical natures of isolation as recurrent and underlying themes in selected short fiction of Chopin, Porter, and Welty. Despite the differing backgrounds of the three Southern women writers, and despite the variety of issues they treat, the theme of isolation permeates most of their short fiction. I categorize and analyze their short stories by the nature and the treatment of the varieties of isolation. The analysis and comparison of their short stories from this particular perspective enables readers to link the three writers and to acknowledge their artistic talent and grasp of human psychology and situations.