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Watermark: A Short-Story Cycle With An Introduction To The Genre And Scholarship Including A Close Reading Of The Text, Wanda Elizabeth Huber

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Watermark, a short story cycle, as defined by Forest Ingram, Susan Garland Mann, and James Nagel, consists of twenty-five individually complete and interrelated stories and vignettes. Along with common characters and settings, the individual stories within Watermark resonate with themes of violence, love, cyclical behavior, amputated potential, self-denial, poverty, and imagination as escape. Through a process that Ingram calls recurrent patterns of development, these themes, amplified through repeated intertextual imagery, shape a larger narrative that conveys the developing artistic potential of Liz, one of many recurring characters. Typical of the short-story cycle, the title serves as a central unifying symbol. …