This study will deal with such existential elements in Stevens' poetry. The poetry will be treated in three main divisions: the early period of Harmonium (1923); the middle period of The Man With the Blue Guitar (1936), Ideas of Order (1937), and Parts of a World (1942); and the late period of Transport to Summer (1947) and Auroras of Autumn (1950). Two introductory chapters will precede the actual study of the poetry; one is a chapter on existentialism as it is expounded by Sartre and Camus, and the other is a description of the existential bias in Stevens' mind, in terms of the ideas of Sartre and Camus. A brief conclusion will summarize the discoveries made about Stevens as an existential poet.

In T. S. Eliot's The Idea of a Christian Society, the poet questions the nature of our society's foundations; he believes that Western culture is moving dangerously closer to the liberal and secular and that this shift could be disastrous. Instead, Eliot suggests that we return to what is at the very roots of Western tradition: Christianity. To facilitate this change in direction, Eliot stresses the importance of an educational system which takes a Christian perspective. Also important in his thinking is a Community of Christians, who would act as leaders, and the Christian community (encompassing most of the population), which would restore unity to what has become a depersonalized existence. The philosophical validity of Christianity is integral to Eliot's scheme, and is explained well by author C. S. Lewis. Historian Christopher Dawson outlines the intertwining of religion and culture and the debt Western civilization owes the Christian faith. Eliot's poem The Waste Land is a picture of a society whose barrenness is ironic in light of the promise of life which surrounds it. Both the individuals and their society are blind to their own spiritual deaths. Also echoing Eliot's ideas concerning a Christian society, The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party are plays of rejuvenation, in which a sacrificial death--whether literal or figurative--brings new life, both to the individual characters and their broken relationships. As allegories of the family of man, Eliot uses the families in these plays to illustrate the change that could turn a waste land into a promised land.

The purpose of this thesis is to study the original background and influences of the Little Colonel Series, their wide popularity, and the criticisms made by friends and critics. In my research work it soon became evident that Mrs. Johnston's own life and observations played too great a part in her books to be omitted; so two full chapters of her life have preceded the study of the series.

Both folklorists and literary critics have been drawn to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s body of work because of his distinctive style and incorporation of folk motifs. Such motif-spotting presents no challenge in Hawthorne’s juvenile literature like his retellings from Greek mythology in Wonder Book for Girls and Boys; however, contemporary folklore redirects the focus of this scholarship to “how particular literary uses of folklore fit into a larger, more fundamental concept of what folklore is and how and what folklore communicates” (de Caro & Jordan 2015:15). Hawthorne’s work interacts with other forms of cultural expression in the nineteenth century such as dominant cultural narratives and artwork to transform the classical narratives in Wonder Book for Girls and Boys into narratives that reflect customs in conversational discourse and childrearing practice.

The frontier has long been an important part of mythic American ideology as a space with untapped resources offering the potential for social mobility. This thesis looks at writing representing the three types of frontiers identified by Lucy Lockwood Hazard to demonstrate how this boundary between the “civilized” and “savage” actually reveals the instability and inaccessibility of the American Dream. Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail is one of the quintessential narratives about the geographical frontier; while deeply racist and sexist, it manifests doubts about the rhetoric of inhumanity attributed to indigenous populations. The industrial frontier’s creation of exploitative factory structures that were then translated into domestic spaces is illustrated by William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The canonical novel speaks to the inability of the poor to achieve social mobility and the reemergence of social hubs as the space of opportunity. Finally, Jade Chang’s 2016 debut novel, The Wangs vs. the World, works to completely reframe the frontier genre by positing characters of color as protagonists, resisting their typical location on the “savage” side of the frontier binary. Chang uses the concept of the spiritual frontier to foreground the difficulties minorities face in order to be accepted into white society. The instabilities manifested by each of these frontiers ultimately point to the ways in which the American Dream has historically been an escapist impossibility and inflicted violence on women, lower classes, and people of color.

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In this study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, I combine the linguistic and literary theories of renowned scholar Mikhail Bakhtin to create a new lens through which to consider Wallace’s thematic project. Combining Bakhtin’s linguistic theories of dialogic conflict and heteroglossia with his literary theories on the grotesque provides an integrated stylistic methodology that illustrates the connections between Wallace’s use of imagery and style. In view of his use of both grotesque liminal imagery and dialogized heteroglossia, Wallace’s seemingly obsessive use of language is recast as a manifestation of grotesque embodiment that reflects the postmodern mileau in which he writes. I propose that Wallace crafts a series of grotesque stylistic devices that shape his words to match his theme. I propose two particular grotesque stylistic devices: narrative bleed in which the seemingly neutral narrative voice begins to reflect particular character discourses and character-to-character voice bleed in which dialogic conflict between characters is dramatically rendered within the novel.

In this article I explore the work of Lorine Niedecker, a poet not conventionally associated with disability studies, in order to flesh out an account of the function of visual disability in midcentury poetics and praxis. To do this I read Niedecker’s formative sequence “For Paul,” the late long poem “Wintergreen Ridge,” and other poems, through deformative practices in the belief that such an engagement shows how Niedecker’s hybrid objectivist praxis can be integrated with critical models of disability studies. Such an integration is then bodied forth in what I’m calling a “nystagmic poetics.” In such a poetics, the physical eye unseats ableist models of untroubled optical agency, such as those found in imagist and objectivist poetry, and extends the relevance of its revised understanding of visual modality to all bodies. Thus nystagmic poetics responds to the call to substantially address the fact of disability and to consider whether a more fully imagined poetics of partial sight is a productive critical lens for thinking about literature.

Many poets write about the earth or even about God using the language of nature. And many poets and contemporary authors concern themselves with the state of the environment. However, the poetry of Wendell Berry, James Still, Li-Young Lee, Mary Oliver, and Charles Wright seems to engage different kinds of questions about how humans creatively respond to the earth. Collectively, their responses seem influenced by their connections with Christianity rather than any specific ecological agenda. In all of their poetry lies a sensibility about how humans should interact with the earth. All five of the poets seem to acknowledge humanity’s place on the earth as important without elevating humanity as the most important organism on the earth. Their work presupposes the existence of God or creator and because of this, engages the questions of being human in light of that Creator rather than as creators of their own environment or as the architecture of imagination. Their work offers an important insight into how we might live in harmony with all environments—agricultural, rural, wild or urban. Their work also suggests a connection between the Christian concept of worship, and a way of living that takes responsibility for human actions within creation. Their poetry recognizes the earth’s value as well as God’s presence and results in praise of both the beauty of creation and Creator.

A collection of fiction, nonfiction, and prose poetry that explores imagination through different shapes in form, content, and genre. Includes award winning nonfiction, “The Storekeeper,” and award winning fiction, “The Fantôme of Fatma.”