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In 1923, the poet Kitahara Hakushū wrote an essay entitled “Dōyō shikan” 童謡私観 or “Philosophy of Dōyō.” In it, he described a perspective on children that valued their innately creative potential. Hakushū felt that this potential was something that every child had and that could be enriched and drawn out through dōyō 童謡 (children's songs.) Hakushū’s views in this sense challenged the prevailing attitudes in the Taishō period toward children and toward the function that children’s songs and poetry should serve. Despite Hakushū’s prominence as a poet, the “Dōyō shikan” has never been translated or closely analyzed in English. The analysis of the “Dōyō shikan” provides a lens through which to view Hakushū’s poetry for children. The principles that Hakushū described in this essay for writing dōyō can be seen both in Hakushū’s own work and the work of children who submitted poetry to Akai tori, a literary magazine for which Hakushū managed poetry. Those principles stressed the need for the poet to replicate the child’s voice, mind, and imagination for the purpose of writing dōyō that were creative, artistic, and meaningful to children.

Negli ultimi anni l’autore americano John Edward Williams (1922-1994) è stato riscoperto grazie all’incredibile successo del suo terzo romanzo, "Stoner" (1965), ripubblicato negli Stati Uniti nel 2006 e apparso in Europa tra il 2009 e il 2013. Per molto tempo Williams era stato uno scrittore poco considerato dal pubblico e dalla critica perché la sua prosa misurata ed elegante era in controtendenza rispetto alle forme dominanti nella letteratura americana della seconda metà del Novecento. Oggi egli è apprezzato soprattutto come maestro di stile, ma l’analisi dei suoi tre romanzi principali ("Butcher’s Crossing", "Stoner", "Augustus") rivela anche altri aspetti originali della sua opera. Innanzitutto, Williams sfida le rappresentazioni egemoniche dell’eroismo americano: i suoi protagonisti sono, infatti, caratterizzati dalla capacità di sopportazione, dalla pazienza e dal senso di responsabilità verso il loro lavoro. Inoltre, egli si distanzia dalle narrazioni trionfalistiche della storia statunitense: tracciando la parabola discente dell’impero americano dalla fine dell’Ottocento fino al secondo dopoguerra, i suoi romanzi mostrano come una nazione fondata sulla conquista, la distruzione e le disuguaglianze sociali sia destinata all’autodistruzione. Nel primo capitolo di questa tesi viene tratteggiata la carriera di Williams come romanziere, accademico, critico e poeta, esaminando le sue posizioni letterarie nel contesto culturale degli anni Sessanta e Settanta. I tre capitolo successivi sono invece dedicati a "Butcher’s Crossing" (1960), "Stoner" e "Augustus" (1972), analizzati in relazione ai loro sottogeneri (western, "academic novel" e romanzo storico) e ad alcuni temi che emergono nell’opera di Williams (la relazione tra l’uomo e la natura, l’eredità puritana, la raffigurazione dei personaggi femminili). / In recent years, the American author John Edward Williams (1922–1994) has been rediscovered, thanks to the incredible success of his third novel, "Stoner" (1965), which was republished in the United States in 2006 and appeared in Europe between 2009 and 2013. For a long time, Williams had been neglected as a writer because his restrained and elegant prose was antithetical to the dominant forms of late-twentieth-century American literature. Today he is considered a master of style, but an analysis of his three major novels ("Butcher’s Crossing", "Stoner", and "Augustus") reveals other original elements in his fiction. First, Williams challenges hegemonic representations of American heroism: his protagonists are characterized by endurance, patience, and a sense of responsibility to their jobs. Moreover, Williams distances himself from triumphalist narrations of American history: tracing the descending parable of the American empire from the end of the nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century, his novels show that a nation founded on violence, conquest, and social contradictions is bound to destroy itself. In the first chapter of this thesis, I trace Williams’s career as a novelist, academic, critic, and poet, examining his literary positions in the cultural context of the sixties and seventies. The study then proceeds by analyzing "Butcher’s Crossing" (1960), "Stoner", and "Augustus" (1972) in relation to their subgenres (Western, academic novel, and historical novel) and some themes that emerge in Williams’s writing (the relationship between man and nature, the American Puritan heritage, and the representation of female characters).

Gender roles are a tool used by society to set acceptable boundaries and ideals upon the sexes, and during the early part of the twentieth century in America those gender boundaries began to blur. As a result of the 19th Amendment, men must have felt their decreasing importance because women were no longer solely dependent upon them, and gender roles shifted as woman began to occupy territory that was traditionally held by men. The “New Woman" entered the workforce, and refused to accept traditional female gender conventions. In response to the “New Woman," Theodore Roosevelt and other leading males sought to reinforce the ideal of the male as the protector and provider. As woman took on characteristics commonly associated with men, men now had to grapple with a changing gender identity that often left them confused and frustrated. Willa Sibert Cather's life reflects the fluctuating gender conventions of early twentieth century America as she struggled to define her gender identity. In her youth, Cather chopped her hair and dressed like a boy. She also spent time dissecting frogs and called herself “William Cather, M.D." Cather's cross-dressing reveals her unconventional core and her desire to define herself regardless of societal expectations. Cather also had many close relationships with woman, and these close relationships have led many scholars to label her a lesbian. Cather, however, left us a mystery surrounding her gender preference because she never openly called herself a lesbian. Cather's supposed lesbianism is useful because it reveals the ambiguity of her personality. Cather is paradox because she sought for self-definition, but she also suffered from an identity crisis. By using the shifting nature of gender roles in the America during the early decades of the twentieth century and Cather's confused and unconventional life as a backdrop, I would argue that My Ántonia (1918), The Professor's House (1925), and “Neighbor Rosicky (1932)" reveal the consequences of gender roles. Cather's novels and short story should be analyzed for her interest in exploring male reaction to prescribed gender roles which, ultimately, reveals Cather's attitude towards the existence of gender conventions. Cather advocated for a more fluid and balance way of defining male and female roles. Cather's novel My Ántonia and The Professor's House reveal the consequences of gender roles because both Jim and Professor St. Peter are frustrated, fearful, unsatisfied, ambiguous, and unhappy with the roles that they have been playing. In sharp contrast to these two novels is Cather's delightful short story entitled “Neighbor Rosicky." In this short story Cather presents a protagonist who is whole and balanced. “Neighbor Rosicky" is Cather's statement regarding the importance and beauty of self-definition. Ultimately, her literature can be viewed as a rejection of both male and female gender qualities which demonstrates that Cather and her fiction cannot be reduced to an identity agenda.

Fairy tales are adapted to fit the needs of each generation, reflecting the unique challenges of that society. In the 1980s and 1990s of the United States, issues of what constituted a family circulated as divorce increased and fatherhood was debated. At this time, Disney released two animated films featuring a father and daughter: The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. Both films are adaptations of fairy tales, and they incorporate changes that specifically reflect concerns of the United States in the late-twentieth century. In the original narrative of "The Little Mermaid" the heroine is primarily raised by her grandmother and wants an immortal soul more than the love of the prince. The tale ends with her death and expectation that after 300 years of service, she can obtain an immortal soul. Disney changes the story, however, by removing the grandmother and placing Triton at the head of the family. His overbearing nature pushes Ariel away as she struggles to gain her independence and win Eric's love. Before the story concludes, Triton, Ariel, and Eric work together to defeat the sea witch and achieve the film's happy ending--the creation of a traditional family. The fairy tale of "Beauty and the Beast" begins with a father who is educated, respected, and wealthy before hardship strikes. Beauty's request for a rose is what starts the adventure as she must learn to love the Beast to save him from an enchanted curse. Disney's alterations to the narrative make Maurice an ineffectual father whose inadequacies bring Belle to the Beast's castle, and the modified curse on the Beast makes both him and Belle need to fall in love, founding their relationship on equality. The tale concludes with the jubilant hope that the couple will form a family together. Both animated features proved popular with the public, suggesting that the films' resolutions are considered desirable endings. The films can then be interpreted as expressing the hope that from the single-parent homes of the late-twentieth century, a new generation of stronger nuclear families can arise if these homes base their relationships on unified efforts and equal partnerships.

The project consists of three parts: a summary of the research, a collection of sixteen oral histories of Latter-day Saint Electronic Media and Public Relations professionals who contributed to the development and growth of media in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a one-hour documentary film, Pioneers in Mormon Media, which gives a brief history of the development of modern mass communications and its use by the Church. This qualitative study investigates who has been involved in Church media, what projects have been accomplished and provides some explanation as to why the Church uses media. The oral histories which are in DVD format are available in Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. The library has also made them available online at http://byugle.lib.byu.edu. Transcriptions of the oral histories are located in the appendix. The documentary film is available through BYU Broadcasting and the Harold B. Lee Library.

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This thesis examines the ways in which the Celtic aesthetic emerges in case studies of four writers from the last century: Brian O'Nolan (under the pseudonyms Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen), David Jones, George Mackay Brown, and John McGahern. It considers a wide selection of their writing across literary genres, including the novel, the short story, the essay, and poetry, but privileges prose and fiction. This study undertakes a formal analysis of these texts using a conceptual, thematic, and critically biographical approach. The archival methodology informing such an approach brings new scholarship into focus that either aligns these authors for the first time or reevaluates their relationships. O'Nolan, Jones, Brown, and McGahern are united here because they put forward their own theories of the Celtic aesthetic and modernized these differing representational strategies when they applied them in their fictional practices. My analysis of each writer begins with a definition of the "Celtic Aesthetic" then draws out how the Celtic is represented in his literary work, showing what we gain from reading the work within a modernist Celtic aesthetic. O'Nolan proposes a Celtic realism within a modernist understanding of the unity between form and content. He writes within a collaborative framework, retrieving modes of thought and literary effects from medieval Irish sources and scholarly texts. He and his peers were concerned with making an Irish-Celtic contribution to modern literature. David Jones develops a visual aesthetic in an Anglo-Welsh context, arguing that the Celtic enhances the potential for metamorphosis through a combination of contraries. Jones establishes a connection between the First World War and ancient Welsh tradition to symbolically pattern the experience of fighting in the trenches. George Mackay Brown shares this idea about Celtic metamorphosis and war. He claims the Celtic is a decorative aesthetic, one that is bound up with Roman Catholic theology and his understanding of Eucharistic anamnesis. Writing almost exclusively about the Orkney islands, Brown portrays the Celtic as an aspect of the Orkney's archipelagic modernism, informed by his own Scottish Gaelic linguistic heritage but also connected by sea to Wales and Ireland. John McGahern implies his theory about Celtic style in his discussions of Gaelic linguistic inheritance and the effect this produces on his English writing. McGahern also shares Brown's mysticism and O'Nolan's practice of depicting eternity in the West of Ireland. There are thus three converging lines of inquiry that will frame this project: first, how does this minor strain in modernist literature animate this set of literary works? Second, how do those characteristics inform our understanding of what the term "Celtic" means in a twentieth-century context and for contemporary readers? And third, what does this contribute to the current field of modernist studies? The Celtic for these writers is transnational, hybrid, decorative, and the means through which their questions about violence and despoliation could find expression in twentieth-century literature.

This thesis is a quantitative analysis of women working for pay aged sixteen and older in five mid-size Texas cities from 1900 to 1940. It examines wage-earning women primarily in terms of race, age, marital status, and occupation at each census year and how those key factors changed over time. This study investigates what, if any, trends occurred in the types of occupations open to women and the roles of race, age, and marital status in women working for pay in the first forty years of the 20th century.

This study seeks to explore the role of peasant women in resistance to the antireligious campaigns during collectivization and analyze how the interplay of the state and resistors formed a new culture of religion in the countryside. I argue that while the state’s succeeded in controlling most of the public sphere, peasant women, engaging in subversive activities and exploiting the state’s ideology, succeeded in preserving a strong peasant adherence to religion prior to World War II. It was peasant women’s determination and adaptation that thwarted the party’s goal of nation-wide atheism.