UCO - Graduate Theses

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https://hdl.handle.net/11244/324596

Established in 1954, the Jackson College of Graduate Studies provides access to graduate education for culturally-diverse students locally, nationally, and internationally, while supporting UCO’s mission of transformative learning through processes which maintain and enhance quality. Masters' theses are a culmination of these studies. Print copies of all masters' theses produced by UCO students are available in UCO's Archives and Special Collections.

Chambers Library is committed to accurately and respectfully describing materials relating to historically overlooked communities. Users encountering offensive or outdated terminology found on the library’s website, Central Search, SHAREOK, or elsewhere in the collection may submit a report to our metadata team. To learn more, visit the library’s Inclusive Metadata Initiative page.

Availability of Digitized Theses
Theses completed before December 2007 will gradually be made available in this collection. Chambers Library takes pride in its efforts to preserve the intellectual output of the university and has started a theses digitization project for any theses created before December 2007. UCO alumni interested in receiving a digital copy of their thesis created before 2008 may send an email to diwg@uco.edu. Please include the author name, year graduated, and degree information.

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Open Access
144
(2009) Caldwell, Dallas E.; Stein, Wayne; Carrell, Amy; McDonald, Linda; Rice, Allen C., 1958-
144 is a Fantasy Role-Playing Game (RPG) set in the world of Traespairnas. This world is filled with exotic peoples, mystical locations, and fearsome monsters. As a table-top RPG, the game is designed to be played with a group of friends with one person acting as the group’s Lore Master. Players will create their own heroes to take part in limitless adventures in this new world. Ten playable Races are available at the outset with several sub-sects diversifying choices even further. Many of the Races have strong mythological ties or present classic fantasy Races with a unique twist. While this volume does not present the entire population of the world, it gives a beginning look into the prominent Races along with their societal structures and cultural nuances. When creating a character, players will be able choose from three base Classes: Warrior, Specialist, and Mage. From this starting point, characters are strengthened by hundreds of Spells and Abilities. The specific nature of a character’s build is completely up to the player. They may spend Ability Points as they choose in order to make their character a distinctive and powerful hero. The game uses as its groundwork the Open Game License. Taking the basic core of using polyhedral dice as a mechanic, the game is grown into something altogether new and unique. Players will be able to immerse themselves in the world of the 144 as they adventure through political intrigue, fearsome dungeons, dark catacombs, epic battles, and one deadly encounter after another. Personality, motivation, and background are all up to the player as they use this book to create their ideal Warrior, most intriguing Specialist, or most powerful Mage. This work lays the foundation for many future works and has room for expansion within itself. Future editions will delve further into monstrous threat and the adjudicating of rules. As a separate work, 144 acts as a first glimpse into this Role-Playing Game and a bridge by which players can enter a new world.
Open Access
A false feminism : the objectification of women in Isabel Allende's The stories of Eva Luna.
(2012) Griggs, Elizabeth; Petete, Timothy; Brown, Deborah; Givan, Christopher
Isabel Allende is often praised for creating heroines that liberate themselves from oppression, often through their freedom of sexuality. In her collection of short stories, The Stories of Eva Luna, the female protagonists are intelligent, sensual, creative and resourceful, but far from being liberated, they are entrapped by this freedom. This is illustrated in Toad's Mouth, The Judge's Wife, and Simple Maria. An initial reading of these stories may support the idea that the protagonists in these three tales are liberated and living lives of their own choosing; however, a deeper analysis reveals that the women are not free but are, in fact, imprisoned. Hermelinda is the only women for hundreds of miles around and is extremely free with her sexuality. She makes a living charging for sexual exploits with any man who comes into her home and pays to play her games. As she manipulates the games to her advantage, she imagines that she has the power over her partners, home, her life and the men in her realm. Contrary to appearances, however, Hermalinda is disempowered by her sexual freedom. In The Judge's Wife, Casilda comes to the area as a mail order bride to bring prestige and power to the judge. Instead she appears to hold the power over him, and he changes so drastically that the entire town notices and is thankful to her for her influence over the judge. In the end, when the judge and his family are fleeing his rival, Nicolas Vidal, she uses her sexuality to save her family. Although it seems that sexual freedom is Casilda's salvation, it is actually her condemnation. In Simple Maria, Maria has an innocent mind as the result of a train accident when she was a young child. She is able to care for herself and her child, so she is self-sufficient but is treated by her family as if she is incompetent and sold off to an elderly, ailing man who dies shortly after their wedding. She finds that she loves sex and it is the only thing that brings her pleasure and spends all her time waiting for partners and in the sex act. She becomes a world renowned prostitute with men lining up to receive her services. She spends her entire life waiting without ever finding true love or happiness. While Maria gives the illusion that she happy in her life of meaningless encounters, she is disillusioned by the lack of happiness she has found in her sexual freedoms.--Abstract.
Open Access
A view of the hallway : spectatorship and the trandsgender character
(2012) Lawson, Caitlin; Springer, John Parris, 1955-; Brodnax, Mary Margaret; Macey, J. David
This thesis aims to reevaluate theories of the spectatorial gaze in light of films that feature transgender characters. Such theories, in particular those of Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane, and Teresa de Lauretis, rely on strict sex and gender binaries to explain the pleasure that comes from watching films. However, transgender characters disrupt such binaries and allow for new ways of seeing. Using feminist theories of sex and gender, most notably Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, queer theory and feminist theories of spectatorship, this thesis explores the effects of the transgender character on film spectators by providing close readings of The Birdcage, Victor/Victoria, Transamerica, and Boys Don't Cry. The Birdcage explores the key tension between the reification and subversion of stereotypes inherent in drag performance, and Armand and Albert's gender performances allow for a spectatorial position that is individualized rather than determined by the sex and gender of the spectator. Although Victor/Victoria contains elements of gender transgression through its exposure of gender as a performance and its disruption of the spectatorial gaze, King and Victoria's relationship undermines the radical potential of the film by reinscribing Victoria as a vulnerable, submissive woman. By foregrounding the spectatorial gaze and reworking the Oedipal scenario, Transamerica ultimately argues that the borders of male/female, masculine/feminine, and mother/father are false dichotomies. Finally, although Lana's understanding of and relationship with/to Brandon's body fluctuates throughout the film, Boys Don't Cry ultimately preserves the complexity of the transgender body through Lana's gaze. Such findings call for further investigation of the effect of atypically-gendered characters on film spectatorship.
Open Access
Aemilia Lanyer's threads in the tapestry of dialectical devotion.
(2010) Alger, Jean; Lewis, Gladys S., 1933-; Macey, J. David; Rice, Allen C., 1958-
Disparate and dialectical dialogues characterize sixteenth-century British cultural, religious, and political ideologies. Christian ideology, in its various forms and interpretations, was most commonly cited as support for various political and cultural debates, particularly the querelle des femmes, the formal controversy regarding women's equality. Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, when read in its entirety including the dedicatory and closing poems, enters the formal controversy and establishes spiritual and political equality for women, while working within existing Christian ideology and adhering to biblical source texts. Lanyer weaves a coherent woman-centered theology by creating a tapestry from the disparate dialogical threads of patriarchal ideology and medieval mystical tradition, framed by the conventions of British sonnets and Courtly Love.
Open Access
Anything dead coming back to life hurts: Beloved, Bastard out of Carolina, and Gods in Alabama as contemporary female Gothic
(2011) Paruolo, Melissa; Mayfield, Sandra; Bolf-Beliveau, Laura; Petete, Timothy
The contemporary Female Gothic is characterized by the highlighting of the monstrosities of patriarchal ideology's failures in order to point to a more positive space created by the agency of the female heroine and her community. Toni Morrison's Beloved, Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina, and Joshilyn Jackson's gods in Alabama contain the Gothic characteristics of supernatural and real monsters, of social realism, and of ruptured narrative, but use these tropes as a background to be overcome by the personal agency and community power of the feminine heroine. First the protagonists must rename themselves by accepting the responsibility of self-definition and ownership; they must create an identity for themselves, as the protagonists Sethe, Bone, and Arlene do, that is not defined by others or by their traumatic pasts. Secondly, these heroines must find the strength to narrate their own stories. This story must include the trauma of the past, must speak the unspeakable, and then must move beyond victimhood into the possibility of a future where the heroine is free to make her own choices, to write her own story. The narrative structure of each text reflects the uneven journey experienced by each heroine in her struggle for the ability to narrate her story. Finally, each protagonist must escape from the confines of the Gothic home, which may be a literal house but which also includes the intrusions of a grotesque culture into the family home, and must find a new home through connection with a female community that gives each heroine the power to live as her true self. Although no feminist utopia is promised by their endings, each novel uses the female heroine's painful triumph over the Gothic threats to her physical and psychological well-being to point to a more positive space beyond victimhood for the growth of the woman's true self.
Open Access
Ariadne's threads of identity : foreshadowing of social and individual identity theories in John Dos Passos' U.S.A.
(2009) Morris, Dustin; Israel, Deborah; Hollrah, Matt; Lewis, Gladys S., 1933-
The eminent biologist E.O. Wilson theorizes a unity of knowledge for all fields of study. Claiming that all knowledge springs from a basis in physics and continues to chemistry, biology, social sciences, and into humanities and even religion, Wilson then assumes that all knowledge can be connected. Many of these associations begin with people containing an understanding of two or more fields of study or even maintaining a general curiosity about life. American Modernist John Dos Passos is one artist who writes in a period full of new ideas and theories such as Existentialism and psychology. Centered on the mimetic ability for the author to capture concerns that define the human condition in order to bring forth some unknown truth, John Dos Passos writes a picture of America in his trilogy U.S.A. One basic struggle each of his twelve characters has is the challenge to define themselves. In this struggle we see the foreshadowing of future psychological studies: the beginnings of identity theory. What I shall demonstrate is that through the work of John Dos Passos, connections can be made between the U.S.A. characters of Mac, J. Ward Moorehouse, Eveline Hutchins, and March French and contemporary social identity theories. His writings precede very recent discoveries in the field of identity and allow links to be formed between the fields of humanities and the social sciences. By examining different theorists such as George McCall, Peter Burke, Michael Hogg, and Kay Reid, we see that Dos Passos writes about a society that constantly questions the development of self and identity. Due to his unique style, the development of identity, whether individual or social, is a natural product of the style.
Open Access
Blood on white picket fences: the American dream in George A. Romero's living dead nightmare
(2010) Mallard, Marcus J.; Springer, John Parris, 1955-; Hayes, Kevin; Hollrah, Matt
George A. Romero has been called the "Father of the Modern Zombie Movie." His 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead, sparked an entirely new sub-genre of horror cinema. Along with this new medium of fright came a new way to interpret America. The Dead series brings in aspects of the American Dream including racial tensions, home ownership, and consumerism and how survivors must cope with the new menace and each other within an apocalyptic scenario. Each film offers a glimpse into the extra-filmic culture surrounding the films' release allowing the audience to interpret the socio-historical subtext. Romero's films demonstrate the inability for human cooperation to occur within a disaster scenario, and that this spells as the ultimate end for the status quo. As for the living dead, the shambling masses are the mirror of the human society that is on its knees, operating on an instinctual mode of mass consumption. As the films progress, the living dead become self-aware and move to protect their own society they have taken from the survivors. The American Dream, the fallen society followed, only turned humanity into the living dead, and those that kept with the American Dream after the beginning of the contagion were not capable of surviving within such a hostile environment.
Open Access
Blood, bone : poems.
(2016) Eden Long, Katelyn S.; Givan, Christopher; Petete, Timothy; Squires, Constance
A creative thesis of deep image and narrative medical poetry influenced by the photography of Eudora Welty, family, and personal experience. A collection exploring the human experience through the lens of medicine, specifically the roles and experiences of the caregiver and the patient, and the lens of photography, specifically the narrative inherent in the photo.
Open Access
Boot party.
(2011) O'Neal, Erik; Macey, J. David; Hochenauer, Kurt; Warren, Clifton
Boot Party is a fictional screenplay consisting of essentially three acts which concerns an adolescent punk rocker in 1986 Denton, Texas called Jonah. Jonah leaves home following a violent confrontation with his stepfather and is taken in by a Dallas skinhead gang. He becomes infatuated with a skinhead girl, Victoria, the dilettante daughter of an English diplomat and finds himself drawn into the violent camaraderie of the group. After stabbing a member of a rival gang, fearing prosecution, Jonah, Victoria, and three companions, leave Dallas for Chicago. On the run from the law and pursued by a racist killer, Jonah follows Victoria deep into the realm of the original American skinhead cult, where in his adolescent quest for identity he encounters violence and personal betrayal. Boot Party explores the world of a particular subculture, or youth cult, as it is experienced by Jonah in 1986, but shares themes and situations found in films such as The Outsiders, Quadrophenia, Over The Edge, Suburbia, This is England, and Wassup Rockers. These films, which are fictional treatments of real-life subcultures, represent what I think is a specific genre in which adolescent protagonists, finding themselves completely incompatible with parents, other authority figures, and same-age peers are drawn to youth cults. With members unwilling or unable to conform to the mainstream culture, the youth cult, whether it consists of greasers, mods, skinheads or punks, functions as a substitute family for the protagonist. Ultimately this family proves so lacking in mature leadership, authority, and resources that it cannot sustain itself and is eventually subdued by authorities or destroyed from within. The protagonist is sometimes left disenchanted and still unable or unwilling to fully reconcile with the mainstream. Boot Party and other films of this 'youth-in-revolt' genre present audiences with opportunities to explore life outside the mainstream and possibly foster an understanding for those who inhabit that world in real life. In this way I hope audiences can draw from their own adolescent experience when considering Boot Party and make that connection with Jonah and the other characters.
Open Access
Christian culture and Germanic tradition in Old English literature : a syncretic approach to reconciling faith and culture.
(2011) Crawford, Kyle R.; Macey, J. David; Lewis, Gladys S., 1933-; Stein, Wayne
Many conservative or 'traditional' Christians today contend that some modern churches, in an effort to engage with contemporary culture, adapt the values and practices of the secular world to too great a degree in order to seem relevant to contemporary audiences. We do, however, live in a particular place and time, one defined by a multitude of interlocking cultural contexts, and a degree of application or contextualization of Christian scripture, theology, and worship style may be inevitable to promote a greater understanding or awareness of faith. This thesis proposes that this debate constitutes a particularly significant point of intersection between Old English literature and today's culture. Many Old English texts engage Anglo-Saxon culture by combining a Germanic heroic vernacular tradition with the Christian tradition. This thesis analyzes the strategies by which Old English authors engage in syncretism, and it discusses its implications for and effects on Anglo-Saxon readers. Special attention is paid to the ways in which Anglo-Saxon writers voice, integrate, and fuse their religious ideas with the specific culture around them in order to demonstrate that the syncretic practices of the first English Christians, in a culture still filled with pre-Christian beliefs, practices, and images, anticipate (and might in fact have something to contribute to) the responses, equally syncretic but expressed using different materials, of contemporary Christian authors to an increasingly post-Christian cultural milieu.
Open Access
Claiming knowledge : challenges of gender and class in the composition classroom.
(2008) Thomas, L. M.; Macey, J. David; Hochenauer, Kurt; Stein, Wayne
Since English composition classes are rich in reading, language, dialogue, and writing, they offer the perfect venue in which to provide women and members of disadvantaged classes the opportunity to have their voices acknowledged.
Open Access
Communion concepts : confession, conversion, and redemption in The sun also rises, The grapes of wrath, and The poisonwood Bible.
(2010) Merrill, A. B.; Lewis, Gladys S., 1933-; Israel, Deborah; Stein, Wayne
The elements and themes of Protestant communion are evident in The Sun Also Rises (1926), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and The Poisonwood Bible (1998). The elements of wine and bread are ubiquitous in these novels and illuminate the spiritual hunger and renewal the characters experience. Along with the physical aspects of communion, the characters of Jake Barnes, Tom Joad, and Orleanna Price participate in and personify the process of communion through confession, conversion, and redemption. The rhetorical and stylistic structures of the novels allude to the rhetoric and style of the Bible. In doing so, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Barbara Kingsolver shape Biblical themes, in the form of communion, to treat the wounds of personal and social turmoil.
Open Access
Confessions of a Band Shirt Vigilante.
(2012) Fadum, Michael Torg; Givan, Christopher; Hedge Coke, Allison Adelle; Hollrah, Matt
The work is divided into six sections, which represent the emotion or motivation behind the speaker's obstacles in society. These obstacles may become reminders of the triumphs and failures of a young man's experience, trying to incorporate the wisdom that his older compatriots offer him. The writer's poetic influences lie heavily with the American Modernists. Some poets become characters or subjects within poems. The idea of creating a world within a poem stems from the rejection of tradition posed by the Modernists. Some of these created worlds hold Romantic ideals of grandeur, but most are simple alternatives to an alienating society. A piece like Don't Feed the Sea Lions, suggests that there are negative consequences to creating your own poetic world. It's easy to get lost or to bring abstract ideas to reality. For example, the lion tamer oversteps his bounds by feeding fish and puts others' safety at risk, though the character is based on a historical man, who operated in this manner in the Florida Keys. Some poems offer a safe vehicle to explore alternate realities and fantasies. Other poems seek to explore the damage society does to people, creatures or works of art. In Dead Burmese, the reader confronts the speaker's realization that a dead snake on the side of the road holds insights into the American public's acceptance of raising exotic pets and then releasing them into a foreign ecosystem.--Abstract.
Open Access
Constructing contemporary ethnic American identities by reconceptualizing ancient narratives.
(2014) Seagraves, Meredith R.; Petete, Timothy; Bolf-Beliveau, Laura; Macey, J. David
For many ethnic Americans, forming a cultural identity is a complicated and arduous endeavor. Entrenched in an environment in which mainstream ideologies leave ethnic practices and histories vulnerable to marginalization, accessing a clear picture of cultural origin is nearly impossible for groups that have undergone significant acculturation. As cultures clash, individuals find themselves suspended in a disorienting network of oppositional value systems. People positioned within this disorienting space often seek a firm cultural grounding. Barraged by a number of expectations from both their ethnic and the mainstream culture, minorities often experience a deep sense of displacement. Seeking to recover cultural roots in an effort to make sense of hybridized, ethnic identity becomes a negotiation process that many writers have recounted through autobiography. Zora Neale Hurston's Research, Leslie Marmon Silko's Yellow Woman, and Maxine Hong Kingston's White Tigers each conveys its author's process of drafting her own cultural orientation. Disenfranchised by their culturally hybridized communities, Hurston, an African American, Silko, an American Indian, and Kingston, a Chinese American, each uses the narrative process to reshape and re-envision her ethnic history. By modernizing, revising, and adopting ancient subjectivities, each writer positions herself within an ancient narrative framework. This novel recombination of historical myth, narrative, and performance empowers these women writers to construct their own cultural representations in a tenuous social climate.
Open Access
Constructing Mr. Darcy : tradition, gender, and silent spaces in Jane Austen's Pride and prejudice.
(2008) Hamilton, Sylvia N.; Lewis, Gladys S.,; Hochenauer, Kurt; Israel, Deborah
The reality of Jane Austen's characters in Pride and Prejudice is socially constructed; their goals and actions become a typification of society's institutions and conventions. Examining Austen's pivotal characters, with a particular focus on Fitzwilliam Darcy, reveals that each is a product of a socio-cultural determinism as they reflect social institutions and represent cultural conventions. Gender categorizes social interactions in everyday life. As individuals act out gendered prescripts and expectations, they create gendered systems of dominance and power. These learned patterns of gender norms and roles are carried out in everyday life with "masculine" and "feminine" perpetuated as divergent and oppositional. Austen's Mr. Darcy is the product of the social construction of gender. Darcy's actions and self-representation reflect a historicity and ideology that is founded on gendered power relations. His is the ideology of patriarchy which guarantees the hegemonic position of men and the oppression of women. Language establishes and maintains the connection between personal identity and gender identity that produces the problem of masculine/feminine duality. In an effort to recast the prevailing masculine rhetorical structures that have defined language and society, Austen creates, in Pride and Prejudice, a model of feminine writing that deconstructs the repressive structures of thinking that invent gender inequality. Jane Austen offers us a new manner of masculinity in the "transformation" of Fitzwilliam Darcy and a feminist's recasting of relations between genders.
Open Access
De(con)structive time : visual style and temporal simultaneity in the works of Gaspar Noe?ü.
(2013) Collins, Brian W.; Springer, John Parris, 1955-; Brodnax, Mary Margaret; Hayes, Kevin
Despite the popularity of director Gaspar Noe?ü's films, little critical attention has been give to the overall style or common themes within his work as a whole, which also includes short films and music videos. Instead most examinations focus on the controversial issues of explicit representations of sex and violence within his feature films. By examining a cross-section of some of Noe?ü's lesser know works such as his music videos and short films, one can find within them representations of his dominant visual style including kinetic camera movements and quickly-paced editing existing alongside extremely long static takes. Such a contrasting visual style suggests Noe?ü's preoccupation with time, and an examination of his two latest feature films, Irr?îversible and Enter the Void, reveal Noe?ü's unique filmic approach to representations of time. Within Irre?üversible, Noe?ü creates the effect of temporal simultaneity--of past, present, and future existing at once--through an intricately structured plot that engages and employs the spectator's memory more intensely than the typical narrative film. In Enter the Void this same concurrence of time is achieved through the subjective point-of-view shots of its protagonist, Oscar. The extended pov sequences position both Oscar and the spectator within the same perspectives in which to view his past, present, in a simultaneous fashion. Noe?ü's preoccupation with creating the effect of immediacy within his films as well as his heavy use of CGI effects places the director squarely within an ever-growing tendency with mainstream films to create a more virtual experience for the spectator. From 3-D movies, high frame rates, surround sound, IMAX experiences, and digital "realism," such attempts at manufactured authenticity coupled with explicit representations of violence introduces new concerns within the debate of the correlation between popular media and violence within society.
Open Access
Deconstructing the domestic sphere : the American sentimental novel as feminist metafiction.
(2018) Hull, Abbey; Huber, Kate; Bolf-Beliveau, Laura; Petete, Timothy
Since the late twentieth century, sentimental literature has seen a resurgence in literary study, with many nineteenth-century American women writers receiving critical attention for the first time. However, this attention is often focused on how these sentimental texts can be read through a modern theoretical lens, denying these texts the opportunity to be read for their own literary or sentimental value. To address this absence, I use a feminist metafictional lens to study these works within their own genre construction as cultural artifacts. In feminist metafiction, critics often question the social construction of reality and fiction to show the conflict that occurs when women are expected to fill specific gender roles, such as those established within the woman's sphere. Through analyzing Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing (1859), Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859), Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), I argue that these feminist metafiction and sentimental novels aim to expose socially constructed genders roles for what they really are--fiction in real life--to effect change.
Open Access
Drag me down
(2021) Pixler, Patricia; Pixler, Patricia; Hollrah, Matthew; Hollrah, Matthew; Squires, Constance; Petete, Timothy; Squires, Constance; Petete, Timothy
This thesis is a creative project titled Drag Me Down. Though labeled a poetry collection, the project is a hybrid of multiple genres. The bulk of the collection consists of prose poetry that follows a narrative of two romantic relationships beginning and ending, as well as a protagonist attempting to reclaim her self-esteem and confidence both internally as a woman and externally within a relationship. The rise and fall actions of these power struggles lead to the collection being divided into a three-arc narrative akin to a novel. Each arc is set off with microfictions and short stories that harken to the tradition of memoir writing. Along with each arc, a theme follows the protagonist's struggles, echoing the poetic heritage found within the prose poetry. Through the undefined quality of the collection's structure as well as the power struggles, Drag Me Down displays a familiarity in its subject matter that immerses the reader in something they nearly could have experienced themselves.
Open Access
E.D.E.N. Southworth : a little learning is a dangerous thing.
(2012) Neal, Rose Ann; Washington, Pam; Hayes, Kevin; Petete, Timothy
Open Access
Early English religious literature : the development of the genres of poetry, narrative, and homily.
(2009) Welch, Mary T.; Lewis, Gladys S., 1933-; Macey, J. David; Rice, Allen C., 1958-
This thesis contends that during the medieval period, as Anglo-Saxon literature developed under, at first, the influence of Germanic oral traditions and later, the authority of continental (and particularly Latin) literary forms, the homily or sermon was the genre that achieved the most complex and comprehensive synthesis of these traditions prior to 1066, which in turn assured its survival as a living vernacular form following the Norman Conquest. During the course of this thesis, samples of poetry, narrative, and homily will be examined, illuminating the style, literary techniques, and treatment of content, progressing through the centuries and revealing the overall development of each genre. A final comparison of development in each genre will show the Old English homily to have made the most progress during the Old English period toward the modern understanding of the genre.