This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 31 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the reader pragmatics of fiction; (2) readers' choices versus critics' choices in children's literature; (3) nonverbal communication in selected works of Western literature; (4) the ideology of literacy in nineteenth-century American prose; (5) critical process and the reading of poems; (6) Bible values in secular literature; (7) male and female protagonists in selected adolescent novels published in 1982; (8) teaching short fiction; (9) procedures for revealing children's aesthetic responses to a select sampling of children's literature; (10) how directed and nondirected discussions affected tenth grade students' responses to short stories; (11) field orientation as a predictor of reader response to literature; (12) L. S. Vygotsky's theory of reader response; (13) bibliotherapy, the use of the decision tree model, and the teacher of English; (14) moral development and children's literature; and (15) teachers as characters in literature. (FL)