Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Three Thingness: A Critical Introduction To The Collection, Kasey Peters

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The following project, "Three Thingness," consists of a critical introduction and craft essay on short story writing, and a sample of the collection Very Light in the End. The critical essay "Three Thingness" introduces a framework for evaluating short stories, and then evaluates a few key components undergirding the collection: gender, plot, and comic relief. Part postmodern realism and part absurst-lite^tm fiction, the collected stories depict characters as they navigate prescriptive narratives about bodies, gender, queerness, and illness.

Advisor: Chigozie Obioma

Women Of The Wolf, Rosemary Sekora

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This is a creative thesis that introduces the novel Women of the Wolf and discusses the writer’s influences and research progress. Themes within the novel will include women relationships, cult culture, religious influences, and Native American (mis)representation. The sample included is the first ten pages from the novel.

Advisor: Timothy Schaffert

College Slasher Novel, Jeff Hill

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This project was completed in hopes of creating a new novel that combines the research and craft worlds of composition and creative writing while merging the social worlds of teaching and campus Greek life, as well as making relevant contemporary commentary on the genres of satire and horror. In preparation, beyond necessary course work completion and time to outline, write, workshop, and revise, I read numerous novels and articles and watched dozens of films and television episodes as well as conducted research regarding current campus demographic to compose the best novel I could write in my time within the program. …

The Evans Family: Familial Relationships In George Eliot's Life And Fiction, Hailey S. Fischer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Biographers of George Eliot, when writing about her childhood, have focused on her close and complicated relationships with two of the most important men in her life, her father Robert Evans and brother Isaac Evans. Less discussed are Eliot’s relationships with her immediate female family members, her mother Christiana Pearson Evans and her sister Christiana (Chrissey) Evans Clarke. This thesis reviews the predominant interpretations of Eliot’s relations with her father and brother. It also pulls together the known information about Christiana and Chrissey from several major biographies and adds new insights from Eliot's letters in combination with two of her …

Ghosts In The Wood Pile, Susannah Rand

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

GHOSTS IN THE WOOD PILE is a creative thesis comprised of an artist statement, statement of creative influences, and five short stories. The artist statement serves to depict my goals in writing this collection—namely, to provide investigatory, critical, and joyful fantasies for a young queer audience—and addresses what work still needs to be done to complete this collection. The collection itself explores dystopian and fantastical alternate realities in which characters struggle with desire, selfhood, and societal expectation. A sample of the collection is included here.

Advisor: Jennine Capo Crucet

The Only Way Forward, Michael Reed

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The Only Way Forward is a creative thesis with a combination of Poetry and Fiction. There is a short introduction that shows the form and styles Michael has used as well as his back story into the creative writing world. He talks about many different authors that have helped him through his journey as well as many other peers and mentors. His biggest take away with his education is to “Just Keep Writing.”

A Critical Analysis Of History’S Best Wishes, Jeffery Keene Short

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This is a critical, reflective analysis of a work of fiction by the author Keene Short, as a means to assess and analyze the artistic and creative development of the project as a whole. The creative work is collection of nine historical fiction short stories, some connected by characters and others standing alone in the collection. The analysis actively explores and engages with several facets relevant to the author’s creative goals, including theory, influences, background, motive, form, genre, and content. The analysis is divided into a summary, critique, and sample of one story from the collection, History’s Best Wishes.

Advisor: …

The Creation Of A Novelist, David Henson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Some notes on writing, a brief bibliography of current influences, and an excerpt from the novel Went Out Laughing by David Henson.

Advisor: Timothy Schaffert

"In The Land Of Tomorrow": Representations Of The New Woman In The Pre-Suffrage Era, Natalie B. O'Neal

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This digital anthology explores feminism in selected short fiction by women writers from the 1911 run of the popular women’s magazines Woman’s Home Companion, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Farmer’s Wife. This fiction furthered the women’s rights movement by allowing women to imagine a world similar to their own with a heroine who voiced their desires and enacted change. Rather than the more experimental, inaccessible literature of avant garde high modernist writers consumed by the upper class, popular fiction reached a wider, middle class audience and was more effective at producing a progressive zeitgeist following the stilted Victorian …

Redwoods, John Joseph Hill

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

To the outside world, Northern California might be trees, granola, hippies, rivers, snowboarders, environmentalists, farming, beaches, diverse wildlife, and wealth. Through a series of loosely interlocking fiction stories, this thesis explores the Northern California below the surface where people work as garbage collectors by day and attend community college by night, where teenage girls scam people in the park for free alcohol, where lovers spend their date night as part of a nude human-chain to protect an old growth redwood from being cut down, and where animal rights activists smoke cigarettes and seek love. Informed by personal experience and a …

Scenes From The Gaijin Life, Ian Rogers

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Scenes from the Gaijin Life contains eight interconnected stories about foreigners (gaijin in Japanese) living and working as English teachers in urban Japan. It recounts their daily lives and initial struggles, their jobs and their nights out, their formal conversations and their personal ones. The first five stories use a detached, neutral narration that forces readers to interpret sensory details on their own, while the latter three use an omniscient narration that helps readers understand the characters’ interactions with Japan. Though the eight scenes are all different, they’re connected by estrangement, longing, uncertainty, and the characters’ ever-present dissatisfaction with …

Getting Away: Three Chapters Of A Novel Draft, Martin M. Chaffee

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis consists of three chapters of a novel in progress. Getting Out is the story of Joel and Sarah Bauer, a couple in their mid-twenties who teach at an international school in Maracaibo, Venezuela. They are struggling to break the news to Sarah’s conservative Christian parents, Bill and Cindy, that they are planning to make a career as international teachers instead of returning home as previously planned. Anticipating that Bill and Cindy will receive the news poorly, Joel and Sarah have decided to fly her parents to Maracaibo to break the news. But on the morning of her parents' …

Cumberland [Abstract], Megan Gannon

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Set in a fictional town on the coast of Georgia in July of 1972, Cumberland is the story of two fifteen-year-old twin sisters, Ansel and Isabel (“Izzy”) Mackenzie, who have lived with their frugal, eccentric grandmother since the age of eight when their parents were killed in a car accident and Isabel was paralyzed. Over the years, the burden of caring for her sister has fallen increasingly on Ansel. However, as Ansel cultivates a romantic relationship with a local boy, as well as an artistic apprenticeship with a visiting photographer, her growing desires for selfhood and independence compromise her ability …