Consider the Flowers of the Field is a novel-in-progress about four daughters who are raised in deep-hollow Appalachia. When their parents finish rehab and prison stints, they start their own church and force the girls to participate in the ministry. The story follows the girls into adulthood and examines the ways each is affected by history, environment, birth order, memory, secrets, and religion. One daughter renounces her parents and God and spends her life in academia and social work, one takes up the preaching mantle, one is the promiscuous, drug-addled antithesis of what her parents stand for, and one daughter is born after her parents start their new life so she has no concept of how things used to be. Consider the Flowers of the Field asks, “How do we transcend, embrace, or reject the dogma of our youth?” / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University / Problem. The problem is to organize a pattern of instruction for the study of the novel. A heightened subjective response to the novel is a personal experience, but it can spring only from an objective understanding of the novel's form and content [TRUNCATED]

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In Into Memory, memory is no longer something which resides in the past. Instead, it is a substance which can be extracted and consumed like a hallucinogenic drug, immersing consumers in a vivid and immediate past whose physical effects linger long after the images of that memory disappear. For Paul Mendez, these memories offer an escape from a present defined by grief, while former professional football prospect Calvin Long seeks to reconnect with a past too long stained by regret. For law school student Kara Douglas, selling erotic memories is simply a business transaction—that is until she considers removing the parts of her past that stand in the way of the future she desires. Set in the rolling hills of contemporary Tallahassee, Into Memory explores the relationships that we maintain, for better or worse, with our pasts and what we will do to avoid, restore, or change them. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This thesis examines hybrid novels – novels in which graphic devices like photographs, drawings and experimental typography are integrated into the written text. Within hybrid novels, word and image combine to create a text that is neither purely written, nor purely visual. Although not new, hybrid novels are increasingly appearing in commercial publishing, and increasingly recognised as an insufficiently explained phenomenon by both literary critics and academics. Book reviews and essays show that readers and critics accustomed to conventional novels can find hybrid novels perplexing. They ask: What are these images? What are they doing in novels? How does one ‘read’ them? These questions point to the need for new approaches to the analysis and critique of hybrid texts, approaches that account for the interplay between words and images. This thesis proposes that Visual Communication Designers – those versed in both the verbal and the visual – offer useful analytical tools and critique for the study of hybrid texts. So the research asks: How could a designer’s particular knowledge of wordimage interplay explain the function of graphic devices in hybrid novels? A preliminary study of fifteen hybrid novels develops: criteria for identifying hybrid novels; a typology of graphic devices in hybrid novels – photographs, illustrative elements, unconventional typesetting, ephemera and diagrams; and a set of analytical tools to critique the effectiveness of the graphic devices in hybrid novels. Then, a primary study uses the analytical tools to critique the graphic devices in three exemplar hybrid novels: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts and Dave Egger’s You Shall Know Our Velocity. This thesis is practice-led in that an issue identified through my design practice led to the research, and analytical and critical tools derived from practice are applied as research methods. The research also draws upon a theoretical framework from the emergent field of Visual Studies, where scholars call for the interdisciplinary study of hybrid texts in a critically acute and widely accessible way. Finally, this thesis is itself a hybrid text; a combination of graphic devices and writing form parts of the argument.

Victorian women were not merely the symbols of nation nineteenth-century imagery would suggest in an era marked by the images of Queen Victoria and the symbolic representation of Britannia. They also were producers, maintainers, and even protectors of England at a time when imperial anxiety and xenophobic fears called the definition of Englishness into question. Dress, particularly fashionable dress, often was viewed as a feminine weakness in Victorian England. At the same time women were chastised for their attentions to the details of their clothing, they also were instructed to offer a pretty and neat presentation publicly and privately. Novels by George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray, and H. G. Wells and manners and conduct texts by such authors as Sarah Stickney Ellis, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Margaret Oliphant demonstrate how Victorian women used fashion and dress to redefine and manipulate the socially accepted understanding of traditional English womanhood and to communicate national ideologies and concerns without violating or transgressing completely the more passive construction of Victorian femininity. By declaring their nationality through the public display that is fashion—dress designated by its appeal to a sophisticated, cultured, and perhaps continental society— these fictional and non-fictional women legitimized the demand for female access to social and cultural spheres as well as to the political sphere. Through an examination of the material culture of Victorian England—personal letters about the role of specific dress in Suffragette demonstrations, or the Indian shawl, for example—alongside an examination of the literary texts of the period, “Dressing for England” argues that the novels of the nineteenth century and that century’s ephemera reveal its social concerns, its political crises, and the fabric of its everyday domesticity at the same time they reveal the active and intimate participation of Victorian women in the establishment and maintenance of nation.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University of Pennsylvania. / Includes bibliographical references.

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