Digital Commons Network^™

Springtide And Other Stories, Cora G. Saddler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The ebb and flow of returning to and leaving the people you love and the people who love you, echoed through the voices of mothers, daughters, and wives, and lovers. Springtide and Other Stories bring together six fabulist stories that tinker with what it means to remember and forget over entire lifetimes and single moments. The generational gift of hearing the secrets of the sea, stored in tiny, shore-swept seashells, is broken. A secluded wood that stores the memories of its people in the soil and in the bark of the trees begins to burn. An ordinary couple with peculiar …

Winter's Threads., Andrew Wesley Messer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

WINTER’S THREADS is a fiction novel set in a world of fantasy and wonder, largely inspired by the works of such auspicious and acclaimed writers as JRR Tolkien and Andrezj Sapkowski. The fantastical setting allows the reader to view a mystic world that deals with the humanity and beauty found in all things, utilizing pastoral imagery and humanistic language. The goals of this novel are to create an enticing world with magic and lore, as well as a compelling and relevant narrative that tackles themes of injustice, family, and duty. Challenging the racial essentialism that can often be present in …

Catfish Dinner & Other Malicious Morsels, Bonnie Klein

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Catfish Dinner & Other Malicious Morsels is a collection of short stories utilizing the combined elements of Fantasy, Southern, and Gothic Literature. The collection demonstrates the feasibility of combining the three different literary genres, each with its own strong identity and literary history, in a work that appeals to readers reaching the age of young adulthood. Named for the titular story, the collection features seven short stories of varying lengths depicting the cultural influence of food, community morals, storytelling, and nature in East Texas communities. Each story is told through third-person point of view of a different character. The stories …

Caelum, Alexandra Requena

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Caelum is a story about the hidden struggles of mental health told in an alternating chapter format that explores the journey of two characters: an angel, Tacenda, who seeks revenge on Mr. Mystical -an unloving God- and Dorian, a human, who is trying to find his place in life. The two

experience parallel situations where they explore their emotions and reactions to life while Mr. Mystical makes everything much more complicated. Tacenda, however, has other plans, and seeks Dorian for help defeating those who have turned against him, causing his demise. As the story progresses and alternates between Tacenda’s quest …

Hattie: A Twin Territories Matriarch, Madison P. Brown

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“Hattie: A Twin Territories Matriarch” is a creative novel of vignettes in the vein of historical fiction set at the turn of the 20th century in Oklahoma/Indian Territory exploring the complexities of love and betrayal through generations of one Muscogee family as they battle the legal and personal implications of white-settler encroachment. With societal criticisms and Indigenous methodologies, this thesis aims to explore land ownership, resource allocation, and the complex governance of Oklahoma tribal reservations. The research of this novel focuses on primary documents from National Archive probate records, Dawes Commission enrollments, newspapers, and a familial collection of photographs, letters, …

Cultural Trauma Fiction: Political Violence, Rampage Violence, And Structural Violence In Contemporary American Literature, Courtney Mullis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation identifies and proposes a new subgenre of American literature, Cultural Trauma Fiction, that has arisen since the late 20^th century in response to numerous large-scale traumatic events and their representation in the media. Cultural trauma occurs when a shocking, shared event fractures collective identity and initiates a discursive process to understand what took place, why it happened, and how the affected culture can heal. Cultural traumas differ from individual trauma because cultural traumas affect a culture, rather than an individual, and because they are mediated; many members of the culture experience the trauma of these events secondhand …

The Genuine Alacrity Of Things, Evelyn Hampton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“The Genuine Alacrity of Things” is a short story collection. Themes include personal identity, the Anthropocene, grief, family, and relationships. The story collection is introduced by a critical introduction.

Part-Time., Anthony Mark Piedmonte

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a creative writing project in prose covering the first 70 pages of a novel manuscript titled Part-time. Part-time will center around a 25-year-old medical school dropout starting a new job at a neighborhood golf clubhouse and gym. This coming-of-age narrative follows Danny as he struggles with his sexual identity, student debt, and job outlook after returning to the privileged community he grew up in. This sample will introduce the major characters, the clubhouse setting, and the forming relationship dynamics. By the end of these pages, readers will gain insight into how the part-time employees of the Longwood …

Rhetoric And Philosophy Of Communication In Jorge Luis Borges' Metaphysical Obsession With Time, Aurora M. Pinto

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project begins with the assumption that through storytelling we humans make sense of the world around us. Language and communication are powerful in defining who we are and allowing individuals to “become a self” (Taylor The Language 318). Drawing from Schrag, I argue that rhetoric is inextricably linked to discourse but is also situated beyond its classical persuasive function. Rhetoric evokes a response from the other, based on reflection and deliberation. Since that other might be a reader of texts of fiction, there is a rhetorical connection to interpretation that situates literature as an exemplar of communicative engagement.

This …

The Sick Ones., Christian Loriel Lucas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis consists of a collection of linked short stories, connected at the intersections of medicine, public health, race, gender, and socioeconomics. The Sick Ones was completed during a time of social unrest and the emergence of the Covid-19 virus. Inspired by medicine’s history of exploiting sick, poor, and racialized bodies, The Sick Ones explores the treatment of illness and societal woes in a near-speculative future. Each story is plot-driven, but complimented by a protagonist who keeps the narrative grounded, as they attempt to survive unprecedented circumstances. Some of the protagonists are complicit in their own medical exploitations, while others …

My Haunted Home: A Collection Of Short Stories, Victoria E. Hood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“My Haunted Home” is a collection of short stories that explores the way in which hauntings and memory find themselves implanted in the everyday lives of those who live without people in their families. These stories work through grief in the form of haunting and explore how hauntings can be embodied through people and places. These stories work to bend genre tropes of horror and surrealist fiction in hopes to find a merging of haunting and memory. The narrators of these stories are ever changing, although there is overlap in voice throughout some of these stories. Part two of “My …

This To Which We've Come., Holly Tabor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection of works explores the linkages between moments, the connective thread that accumulates over time to create for each of us a unique present. The title, “This to Which We’ve Come,” attempts to convey that each moment is a point of arrival colored by the smallest of temporal fibers, our most interior histories that stretch and bend and fold back onto themselves when the present forces us into action, or inaction. Through these characters and their stories, I attempt to examine that moment of arrival. A secondary thread explored in this collection is the idea that humans are still …

A Fiction Of Fragmented Falsehoods: Curriculum Of Unwanted Roads Traveled, Katherine Wyatt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is an inquiry centered on lived ‘otherness’ in different social experiences. Fiction and illustrations are both creative outlets that provide opportunities of curriculum growth by offering the viewer realistic portrayals dealing with truth and factors that make us fundamentally human. “Fiction elicits an interpretation of the world by being itself a worldlike object for interpretation” (Dillard, 1988, p. 155). This study uses fiction and illustrations as vehicles of communication to provide an awareness regarding social issues in everyday lived experiences, exposing the reader to the social, cultural and historical realities persistently impeding the shared constructs of human experiences. Structuring …

The Backs Of Leaves, Shelby L. Colburn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a novella that explores themes of emotional abuse, grief, toxic masculinity, sexuality, and gay violence. The author deploys a frame narrative that encompasses short stories that are tied by a narrator in the novella. The narrator’s stories create a continuity between “real,” realistic, and surrealist fictions. These explorations of fiction create a conversation between the frame narrator’s “real” life and that of her stories. As the novella’s plot progresses, the frame narrator’s sanity deteriorates, which allows her to become increasingly grotesque. The grotesque situates how macabre the frame plot is, creating a connective tissue between the “real” …

Trinity Part One : Food Of The Gods., Thomas Edward Olges

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A novel of supernatural horror, Trinity begins in the wake of a catastrophe. A young woman, divinely pregnant, has lost both her life and her son in the process of delivery. Three people dear to her—her fiancé, her brother, and a close friend—have found themselves irreparably altered by the experience. Their bodies changed and reality warping around them, the three set off across the country in an attempt to prevent other incursions of the miraculous into our reality. This thesis includes the novel’s introductory scene and its first principle section, “Food of the Gods.”

Short Stories., Karley Miller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My creative thesis consists of a number of short stories. Each individual story stands alone, though all pieces in the project are doubtless connected by setting and syntax. Perhaps due to my own lack of imagination the stories take place, at least to some extent, in a small town. Though this may not be made explicit in every story, it can be deduced. Small town life, and particularly small town folk, are of interest to me; they are also what I know best. For example, Tom of “Neighbors” is a man living in a small town. The old man next …

Don't Go Unless You Mean It : A Novel With Critical Afterword : Heteronormative Masculine Performance In Contemporary Fictions Of The Rural American South., Nathan N. Gower

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of a full-length novel for an adult audience as well as a substantial critical afterword to elucidate and complicate germane thematic concerns of the creative artifact. The novel, leaning on the rich traditions and many genre conventions of fictions of the American south, tells the story of an unlikely underground coal miner in Blue Banks, a fictional southern town set in the caverns and rolling hills of the western Kentucky coal fields. The narrative follows its fish-out-of-water protagonist, Cody Culver, a fledgling academic who thought he had escaped his fate as a third-generation coal miner when he …

"The Sudden Thrill Of That Change": Framing George Eliot's Social Vision, Cyrus Seaberry Frost

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although scholarly commentary of the last decade has engaged more intensively than ever with the content of George Eliot's ideas concerning nineteenth-century British culture, the devices and techniques Eliot employs in the transmission of those ideas remain less explored. Consequently, room exists for a study as attentive to the formal characteristics of Eliot's messages as recent scholars have been to the content of those messages. This dissertation seeks to elucidate the ways in which specific formal techniques that characterize Eliot's fictional work evince her engagement with the thinking of social theorists, particularly Ludwig Feuerbach. The project contends that Eliot internalizes …

Approaches To The Land, Joseph Linscott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Approaches to the Land is a collection of interrelated stories centered on a small Maine mill town. These stories have several recurrent narrators who are in many phases of moving – some come while others leave, etc. These stories have an immense interest in the identification of loss and hope, and this in turn plays heavily on the identities of the characters embodying the stories. As a whole, these stories capture the only way this author knew how to document his hometown.

The Lightbringer: A Novel, Brett L. Butler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Lightbringer is about a collision of two worlds: the world of a contemporary South Florida town and the magical world of Zariel, bringing with it the universal threat of the Terra. Childhood friends, Breck and Tom, are thrown into the middle of an ancient conflict between the Terra—a collection of alien races that have been transformed by darkness—and the forces of good. After an encounter with a magical pool of golden water, the boys must learn to use their new abilities to protect against the growing Terranox army. In the midst of their struggle, however, a mysterious companion—the Lightbringer, …

Master Buddha & The Jolly Golly Fun Time Gang., Todd Edward Evans

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is the first two chapters of a novel. The novel parodies the capitalist and consumerist United States of the 21st Century in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Donald Barthelme.

This Sleep Of Reason., Brit Thompson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This creative thesis encompasses two features: 1) a critical component that contextualizes and supports the second component, 2) a short Southern Gothic novella. Critical analyses of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction and discourse about the genre illustrate where inspiration was drawn, and how the project’s creative component contributes to this genre. The project explores anxieties of displacement, isolation, and a stuck-in-the-past-temporality, as shown through the vessel of characters’ houses. The novella is decentralized in form and point-of-view—fragmentary excerpts of technological communications are utilized to illustrate how the protagonist’s problems are literally always on hand. The project argues that because the south remains …

An Unnamed God., Luke Cash Mansfield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This creative thesis is the story of a man returning home at the behest of a friend who is undergoing great difficulties in her life. While Docent Americana ostensibly travels home to help his friend, he is also trying to cope with challenges in his own life. He suffers from bipolar disorder and although he is receiving treatment for it the stresses of the experience trigger a manic episode that threatens his personal stability and his relationships with those around him. An Unnamed God is set in western Kentucky, affording a glimpse at the slow decay of rural communities as …

Lightning Flowers, Nickalus Rupert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lightning Flowers traces the psychological collapse of Waylan Dranger, an East Texas construction worker / folk artist. Waylan suffers from hallucinatory encounters with Reeve, his missing brother. Reeve often blames Waylan for his disappearance and implied death. Waylan also worries that Sam, his live-in girlfriend, will leave him before he can resolve his own increasingly erratic behavior. Largely, Lightning Flowers is preoccupied with the consequences of nostalgic thinking. Among others, the novel grapples with the following questions: What defines contemporary notions of "brotherhood"? To what extent does one's survival necessitate self-delusion? How do social stigmas inform our experience of mental …

Road Stories, Louis Mindar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Road Stories is a collection of three novellas that explore the pull, allure, sanctuary, serendipity, and adventure of life on the open road. The novellas examine how for some, the road holds the promise of a new day, an improved life, a better opportunity, or a deeper love; while for others, it is nothing more than an assortment of jumbled blue lines on a map. In Tierra del Fuego, a man takes to the road to figure out how to deal with the grief and sense of betrayal he feels following the death of his wife. Lake of the Falls …

Friday Is A Planet: Stories, Allison Pinkerton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Friday is a Planet: Stories is a collection of short fiction that explores the ways loss can alter family bonds. Characters in these stories have lost daughters, sisters, mothers, and friends. Some characters go to extreme lengths to return to their loved ones—one woman hallucinates, another time travels. Others deal with the loss in more conventional ways, through support groups and the emotional outlet of community theatre. What ties these stories together is a sense of post-loss confusion and mystery. The characters are unsure how to move forward, or if they should try. The men and women in these stories …

Sunset View, Danielle Armstrong

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sunset View is a linked collection of short fiction that explores the dynamics of dysfunctional families. Characters in this collection have been affected by the neglect, absence, or death of their family members and friends. They search for recognition and love as they try to find their place in life. Some turn to animals or fleeting relationships to fill this void. Others attempt suicide or simply disappear. The characters are in denial, unsure how to deal with grief, and often make decisions that alienate them from the friends and family they do have. Set in northeast Tennessee and named after …

Black Skies And Gray Matter, Jacquelyn Bennett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Black Skies and Gray Matter is a collection of stories thematically centered on characters that are lonely or lost in the world. These stories explore the characters' personalities through their interactions with others (strangers, family, friends, and spouses) and the difficulties they face being misunderstood. Their journeys are ones of trying to find happiness and their place in society (or rejecting it). As they face alienation, they must endure the trials of everyday life (some more extreme than others) and, at the same time, search for kindred spirits, a sense of belonging. Some stay true to themselves while others conform …

Lonely Monsters, Patricia Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lonely Monsters is a full-length feature screenplay that explores the ways in which a classic damsel narrative may be reconsidered. It offers ideas on how death and girlhood may find symmetry. The characters within Lonely Monsters deal with loss, identity of the self versus the world's ideas on self-identity, place, gender, and class. Utilizing the elements of a fairy tale, the narrative seeks to complicate the roles of gender in a cautionary tale. Set in the fictional Florida town of Puerto Palmera, an economic divide between the Estates and the Glades makes for a ripe, troublesome environment for a foul …

Ascending Mango Hill, Lorri Camueiras

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ascending Mango Hill is a collection of work that represents me. The intention is to connect with readers by depicting protagonists who are unable to fit in, a theme most readers can relate to. Many times the protagonist must find the courage to confront a situation rather than remain quiet. The collection is separated into two sections: The Essays and The Short Stories. The essays detail my own experiences at being an outsider while exploring the topics of family and personal growth. In the stories, characters must overcome unresolved childhood issues, recognize unhealthy relationships, and decide when to set off …