John Graves's creative non-fiction has earned him respect in Texas letters as a seminal writer but scarce critical commentary of his work outside the region. Ecological criticism examines how language, culture and the land interact, providing a context in which to discuss Graves in relation to the southwestern literary tradition of J. Frank Dobie, Walter P. Webb, and Roy Bedichek, to southern pastoral in the Virgilian mode, and to American nature writing. Graves's rhetorical strategies, including his appropriation of form, his non-polemical voice, his experimentation with narrative persona, and his utilization of traditional tropes of metaphor, metonymy, and irony, establish him as a conservative and Romantic writer of place concerned with the friction between traditional agrarian values and the demands of late-twentieth-century urban/technological existence. Sequentially, Graves's three main booksGoodbye to a River (1960), Hard Scrabble (1974), and From a Limestone Ledge (1980)represent a movement from the pastoral mode of the outward journey and return to the more domestic world of georgic, from the mode of leisure and contemplation to the demands and rewards of hard work and ownership. As such they represent not only progression or maturation in the arc of the narrator's life but a desire to reconcile ideological poles first examined so long ago in Virgil: leisure and work, freedom and responsibility, rural and urban values.

This thesis consists of a preface and three original short stories. The preface explores the idea that narrative designthe shape or structureof a story may become a literary motif in its own right. The three stories included are creative nonfiction and each employs a distinct modular design. The themes of the stories revolve around personal identity and values; families and marriage; and creative empowerment.

Sea Stories is a collection of creative nonfiction essays centered around the growth of a young woman through her experiences with water and ships. The pieces trace the origins of the narrator's tie to water from a childhood involving boating with her dad to sailing a brigantine across the Pacific Ocean and then a six-year career as an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard. The narrator's relationship with her father, predominantly viewed through their shared intimacy with water, is a base theme for the whole collection. Other themes explored in individual essays include reckoning expectations with reality, explorations of the self in and against a group, gender dynamics in military service, and the influence of fiction on life. Sea Stories shows that what we think we know, what we may have only imagined, and on the water, that self-constructed reality can be a dangerous thing.

The creative nonfiction essays and poetry in this collection explore family survival during the hardest of times--when the desire to give up is at its greatest--as told from the perspective of a woman who is a daughter, sister, wife, mother, and grandmother. These are not stories of defeat. Nor are they merely explorations of death and dying. They are cleebrations of living, of surviving, of loving and being loved against all odds.

Given Rebecca West's fame during her lifetime, the amount of significant and successful writing she created, and the importance and relevance of the topics she took up, remarkably little has been done to examine her intellectual legacy. Writing in most genres, West has created a body of work that illuminates, to a large degree, the social, artistic, moral, and political evolution of the twentieth century. West, believing in the unity of human experience, explored such topics as Saint Augustine, Yugoslavian history, treason in World War II, and apartheid in South Africa with the purpose of finding what specific actions or events meant in the light of the whole of human experience. The two major archival sources for Rebecca West materials are located at the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library, Special Collections, and at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Many of her works have been recently reprinted and those not easily available are found in the British Library or in the archival depositories noted above. Interviews with persons who knew West were also an important source of information. This dissertation explores chronologically West's numerous works of nonfiction, and uses her fiction where it is appropriate to place into context social, historical, or biographical topics. The manner in which she took up the topics of feminism, art, religion, nationalism, war, history, treason, spying, and apartheid demonstrate the wide-ranging mind of an intellectual historian and social critic. Though her eclecticism makes her a difficult subject, the diversity of her mind and her talent in expressing her thoughts, allow her work to symbolize and illuminate twentieth century intellectual history. Known for her elegant fiction, and forceful personal style, West should also be known as a thinker and social critic. What is common to her eclectic opera is that she forcefully propounded ideas, shook loose staid preconceptions, and recommended new ways of perceiving politics, religion, art, culture, law, and morality.

Scholars and literary enthusiasts have struggled for decades to account for editor Maxwell Perkins’s unparalleled success in facilitating the careers of many of the early twentieth century’s most enduring and profitable writers, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. This study seeks to penetrate that mystery by dissecting Perkins’s editorial practice and examining how he navigated the competing tensions between commercial success and aesthetic integrity in various circumstances. At play in the construction of his literary legacy are prevailing perceptions of authorship, complex interpersonal relationships, and the inherent battle between art and commerce. Focusing on his day-to-day activities, it is apparent that Perkins was guided by a unique editorial double vision—the propensity to appreciate the aesthetic experience while retaining the critical detachment necessary to appraise a literary work from a commercial standpoint—when solving the paradoxical dilemmas inherent in modern publishing.

Comprised of four essays, this collection of creative nonfiction focuses on facets of daily life and culture in Germany. The author recounts her experiences as she and her family assimilate into a foreign culture and adapt to using its language. The first essay tells of the family’s unexpected but rewarding sojourn in Germany after losing everything to Hurricane Katrina. The subsequent essays display a broader range of experiences and cultural observations upon the family’s return to Germany four years later. These include a narrative of the family’s move to a small town in central Germany, an interview with a local asparagus farmer and an account of the author’s children’s efforts to learn German.

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Diary of a Gay Bride is a memoir about an artist planning her multi-cultural gay wedding in hopes her dying mother will be able to attend.