Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 40-09, Section: A, page: 5058. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1979.

William Styron's most recent novel, Sophie's Choice published in 1979, provides a unique addition to the literature of the Holocaust. The story of Sophie Zawistowska, a Polish Catholic who spent twenty months at Auschwitz, is the novel's core. Just as important, however, is the story of Stingo, the young Southern writer who is working on his first novel during the time that Sophie gradually reveals her story to him. Stingo's encounter with the historical tragedy of the twentieth century is crucial to his coming of age. / As Stingo moves from innocence to experience in the New York of 1947, he evaluates the art of the novel, describes the writing process, and surrounds Sophie's story with the names of more than 150 authors and titles as well as numerous literary allusions. Most of the authors are only named, but among the few who receive more attention are the three Southerners: Faulkner, Wolfe, and Warren. It is important that Stingo is a Southerner influenced not only by his Southern literary heritage but also by the South's historical tragedy, slavery. / Sophie's Choice contains twelve passages quoted from literature. In addition to the Psalms of David, John's Revelation, and the French writers Malraux and Rainer Maria Rilke, the authors quoted include the Americans Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, and Thomas Wolfe as well as the Britains Sir Thomas Browne, Matthew Arnold, and William Butler Yeats. Throughout the narrative, Styron has carefully chosen words of other writers to intertwine Stingo's movement from innocence to experience with Sophie's headlong journey toward death. / The use of music in Sophie's Choice also underscores the fusion of the two stories. More than four hundred allusions to music occur in the novel. While music is used most often to develop the character of Sophie, Stingo also reveals more about himself through his response to music. Through music Stingo expresses the range and depth of emotions he experiences as he writes his first novel and confronts the evil of Auschwitz. / Four appendices contain all literary allusions; references to Faulkner, Wolfe, and Warren; references to Stingo's development as a writer; and all musical allusions. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-03, Section: A, page: 0799. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.

This book of poems is the second collection by the Georgia poet whose first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1980), won the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. It collects 32 new poems which originally appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, and others. / All of the poems in this book depend heavily on narrative and sense of place. For the most part, they draw on the poet's experiences in Georgia and Florida. The poems about hunting and fishing represent a development of the poet's interest in the "reptile brain," a theme which he explored in his first book. Other narratives, such as the suburban poems, represent entirely new directions. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-06, Section: A, page: 1970. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.

Blix has been viewed by most critics as an anomaly in the otherwise uniform canon of Frank Norris' novels. Because its light, optimistic tone is so unlike that of Norris' better known, naturalistic works, critics have designated Blix as nothing more than a popular turn-of-the-century romance. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to show that Norris himself took the novel much more seriously than most critics have, and that Blix may be most accurately described as Norris' first attempt to synthesize romance and realism in a novel, a technique which later won praise in The Octopus and The Pit. / Chapter One reveals the shaping influences upon the novel of the three literary movements--naturalism, realism, and romance--which most affected Norris throughout his career. This chapter concludes that the eclectic nature of Blix is owing to Norris' experimenting with different kinds of writing in an attempt to develop his ideal combination, what we might today term "romantic realism." Chapter Two goes on to examine the main plot of Blix as an example of this kind of writing, and to show how Norris contrasted seemingly extraneous episodes in the novel with the main plot in order to voice his own aesthetics about good versus bad art. / In keeping with his conviction that real life is romantic by nature, Norris effectively used his own experiences as the basis for much of the main plot of Blix. Therefore, Chapter Three examines the novel as Norris' autobiographical account of his apprenticeship on The Wave and his courtship of the woman he was to marry. This chapter reveals the author of Blix to be a purposeful writer who cared deeply about this novel, and Chapter Four reinforces the fact that he did so. This chapter examines the extensive revisions Norris made of the serialization of Blix before it was published as a book. Chapter Five provides a listing of the textual variants between The Puritan serialization and the first edition of Blix. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-02, Section: A, page: 0446. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.

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.