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.

This collection of 31 original poems was written about the poet's experiences during a tour of duty as a serviceman in Japan, and reflect the observations of an uninitiated American who admires, but often misunderstands, the culture that he sees. Prevailing themes center around the simultaneous contrast and similarity between Japanese and American culture. Just as people from both countries are generally alike as members of the human race, they are considerably different in physical appearance, custom, language, and the like. Therefore, most poems demontrate the narrator's friendly relationships with his Japanese hosts, and the conflict, humor, frustration, and sadness which results from the cultural barriers. Other recurring motifs deal with the unique beauty of Japan's countryside, the monuments of Japan's traditional history, and the energy of Japan's modern industrial society. / All poems are free verse. Their content depends on narrative, as the author records observations and related his impressions to the reader. Although there are poems which originally appeared in Sun Dog and Florida Review, most of the manuscript consists of recently composed, unpublished poems. The poem "Takahashi's Temple" won first place in the Florida Poetry Contest, University Student's Division, 1983. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, Section: A, page: 1755. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1984.

"The Purloined Daughter" is a contemporary, first-person novel about artist Annie Lee Wheeler. It plays off Wilkie Collins's "novel of testimony," The Moonstone. In this instance, the testimony is by the same narrator at various times in her life, 1960-1981. / The novel is in four sections. In the first, "Deana's Last Stand," Annie's mother, Deana, who has had several miscarriages and a hysterectomy, becomes obsessed with Annie's health and opposes Annie's art talent. Annie copies scenes of Europe from magazines as an escape. This covers Annie's life from ages 10-14. / In Section II, "The Purloined Daughter," Annie, age 20, runs away from college in Arkansas. In Chicago, she rapidly assimilates into city life, and applies to art school. She meets two important friends: Kaye, who brought her to Chicago and gives her a place to live, and Frances, a women's studies professor. / In Section III, "Variable Feet," Annie collects advice, about what to do next in work, love and family relationships. Annie finally visits her family for the first time in seven years. At the wake of Frances's father, Annie decides to quit her good job as an illustrator and finally see Paris. / Section IV resumes two years later. Back in Chicago, Annie makes a tenuous professional life as a freelance artist and stumbles into a romance typical of the suspenseful gothics she likes to read. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-08, Section: A, page: 2812. / Major Professor: Sheila Taylor. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

Many critics have noted Flannery O'Connor's personal Catholicism and her literary Protestantism but have treated these two denominations as mutually exclusive religious beliefs, an irreconcilable paradox in her work. However, historically there is a sound theological basis for the relationship between Catholicism and Protestantism based on the fact that the Protestant reformers drew much of their theology from the thought of St. Augustine of Hippo, who also had a profound impact on Catholic doctrine. It is also St. Augustine who unites these two divergent religious systems in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor. / O'Connor's thinking, as reflected in her fiction and her non-fictional writings, is peculiarly Augustinian, not only in content, but also in form. Augustine's doctrines of sin and grace (including, the idea of pride as the first sin, the complete dependence of man on God for salvation, the absolute gratuitous and irresistible nature of grace, the direct confrontation between man and God outside the institution of the Church and the aggressive role of God in the salvation process) are characteristic of fundamentalist Protestant doctrine and of O'Connor's thinking and fiction as well. Furthermore, a second inheritance from Augustine is the confessional form of many of O'Connor's fictional works, so that not only what O'Connor says, but also, how she says it, is undeniably Augustinian. / According to John Fleming, there can be an unacknowledged, even unconscious, yet informing source for a work of literature which he calls the "supertext." This "supertext" for O'Connor's works is the thought of St. Augustine. The validity of the Augustinian "supertext" is further demonstrated by the fact that O'Connor knew Augustine's thought, not only indirectly through her inheritance of his ideas through the Catholic Church, but also directly. O'Connor had in her personal library, five books by or about Augustine, and a comparison of the annotations made in them to the beliefs demonstrated in her fiction confirms that the theology of O'Connor was Augustinian. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 44-03, Section: A, page: 0754. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1983.

The trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 brought world-wide attention to the Nazi concentration camps and led to countless discussions by historians and theologians. In addition to American and British novelists and playwrights, many poets were deeply affected by the Holocaust. Twenty years after World War II images of the camps began to appear in poems by writers who had no personal involvement. / The first literary response to the Holocaust was mainly autobiographical in accounts by camp inmates. Literary critics have discussed these memoirs and novels. Little attention, however, has been given to the impact of the Holocaust on American and British poetry. / Through a discussion of eighteen poets and the characteristics of American and British poetry since World War II, this essay attempts to demonstrate three points: First, images of the concentration camps are used metaphorically by a number of poets. Sylvia Plath and others express the interior life in these images. In addition, the Nazi leaders are treated as symbols. Denise Levertov and Michael Hamburger consider Eichmann and the meaning of evil. Second, the Holocaust constitutes a significant theme in recent poetry. Many poets devote several poems to it. Moreover, W. D. Snodgrass explores the fascist personality in a book of poems. Charles Reznikoff and William Heyen devote books to the terrible inhumanity of the camps. Finally, the Holocaust has altered our image of man, and its treatment is associated with the post-modern redefinition of the poet and his craft. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 44-03, Section: A, page: 0755. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1983.

The study entails an extensive analysis of Eudora Welty's use of myth in The Golden Apples. Particular attention is given those mythic allusions which appear in the poetry and prose of William Butler Yeats and which influenced Welty's usage of them. Focus is directed toward narrative style, setting, characterization, symbolism, and theme. The method by which Welty incorporates myth into each of these literary components involves a definitive pattern of usage as well as strict limitations regarding the existence of myth in her work. While Welty uses mythic allusion to augment and enhance the ideas presented in The Golden Apples, she simultaneously preserves what she calls "the native element" in each story. The balance she creates between mythical and native elements exists in each of the literary components and is crucial to the controlling theme, which is fully developed in the final chapter of The Golden Apples. Conclusions drawn within the study rely heavily upon the author's interview with Welty. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 46-01, Section: A, page: 0151. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.

This study demonstrates the importance of character development and writing style in eight science fiction novels: Ursula K. LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Beginning Place, and Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, Nova, and Dhalgren. It uses as an embarkation point a chapter length review of critical studies of character development in fiction, beginning with the paradigmatic theoretical rift between Henry James and H. G. Wells. Then the second chapter examines the methodology of close critical analysis of individual passages. The remaining nine chapters cover the eight novels separately, with one chapter left to summarize the study's conclusions. / The dissertation concludes that science fiction has, within the past twenty years, begun producing novels in which the development of character and the prominence of the struggling individual as established in fiction by such writers as Henry James, Anton Chekhov and James Joyce, play a far more important role than has been the case traditionally. Traditional science fiction, as discussed by critics like Donald Wollheim, downplays character development and attention to linguistic sophistication. Generally, this study finds that, while several of these novels have weaknesses in character development or language, particularly The Beginning Place, Babel-17, and Nova, all are "well wrought" novels which deserve the close attention of readers and critics to both the stylistic technique and the human characters. Throughout the study, numerous examples of linguistic technique--word choice, sentence structure and length, dialogue, descriptive technique--are included for close and lengthy examination, in order to establish the usefulness of the author's style to the achievement of the novel's apparent purpose, its revelation of character and its achievement of meaning. This close examination of examples is the principal tool employed by this study in order to substantiate the claims made about language and character development in these novels. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-10, Section: A, page: 3131. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1984.

For many years, the Negro as theme has been appreciated by both black and white novelists; thus, numerous scholarly studies have been published on blacks in American literature. However, an area that has received only a limited amount of critical treatment is Afro-American drama, though blacks have been writing plays as early as 1848 with William Wells Brown's The Escape, or A Leap for Freedom. / Black male dramatists, such as Langston Hughes, Ossie Davis, James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones (Baraka), and Ed Bullins, have been recognized in anthologies and critical studies but, apart from Lorraine Hansberry, seldom has a black female dramatist been given serious critical treatment. / This study examines the images of black men and black women in plays since the 1950's by Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Sonia Sanchez, Barbara Molette, Martie Charles, and Ntozake Shange. Five images of black men recur in plays by these black women: the black revolutionist, the black youth in search of his manhood, the black assimilationist, the absent black patriarch, and the black man as insensitive beast. / Whereas the images of black men, in the main, were negative, the images of black women in the selected plays of black women were nearly all positive, such as the evolving black woman, the black matriarch, and the black woman as upholder of racial pride. The black woman as destroyer of racial pride or the female black assimilationist is the only negative image of black womanhood. / This study not only examines the images of blacks which appear, but it also delves into the reasons for the appearance of these images in plays by black women. A socio-psychological approach, this study examines the visions of black women playwrights. / This study demonstrates that black women dramatists have different perspectives than black male dramatists have. Whereas many black male dramatists suggest through their images that black women's happiness or completeness hinges upon guidance from strong black men, the visions of black female dramatists included in this study suggest that many black women are forced to become self-sufficient because the black men who come into their lives will not or can not provide financial and emotional stability for them. Thus, this study grew out of a need to demonstrate that the works of black women dramatists contain valuable insights about black life and that their visions, though they may be different from black male dramatists and white authors who write about blacks, deserve to be examined. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-07, Section: A, page: 3104. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1980.