Beyond aesthetic preference, compositional approaches reflect a music composer’s interior and exterior environment, personality, social habits, philosophy, and religion. Presupposing this premise, specific correlations between stylistic-technical choices and personal values are …
Composer Maurice Ravel was deeply affected by his experience as a truck-driving soldier in World War I (WWI). For the rest of his life, he never fully came out of the shadow of losing his friends in combat and his beloved mother during the same years. This study examines the imp…
The purpose of the dissertation was to answer the following research question: To what extent do the selected sermons of John A. Broadus reflect Alexandre Vinet’s theory on homiletical style? The thesis statement of this dissertation is that Broadus’s sermons would reflect Alexa…
My dissertation, entitled “Prosaic Times: Time as Subject in Wordsworth, Richardson, Flaubert, and Melville,” examines literary works of realism—the artistic claim to represent life as it is—that do not necessarily depend upon the plotline of the story they tell but on the sense…
'Immediate Passage: The Narrative of Joel H. Brown' is an original work of fiction. The protagonist and narrator, Joel Brown, is preparing to set sail for a singlehanded circumnavigation. As he readies his boat and counts down the days until his departure, he reflects on his pre…
Reading a range of novels that appeared between the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, I argue that imperial history does not and cannot exhaust the literary object. Rather, the literary object encodes that history differently than other rhetorical forms — along diff…
The purpose of this dissertation was to understand Gardner C. Taylor’s practice of using figures of speech. The figures of speech are present in the classical contributors to preaching, such as Aristotle and Quintilian, but they are not present in contemporary homiletical textbo…
This study deals with Zulfikar Ghose's—an expatriate English language writer of Pakistani origin living in the USA—novels. In this study, I focus on, among other things, the writer's negotiation with style and socio-politically provocative subject matter. I study Ghose's novels …
This research demonstrates the importance of the African influence as a decisive element in the quest of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959) for a unique musical style. A concise biography is provided in chapter two, revealing, among other topics, Villa-Lobos’ chil…