Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Lost Children: A Postmodern Novella, Seyedeh Mania Mohseni

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Lost Children" is a novella written based on common rules of the modern and postmodern detective fiction and how those rules can be replaced by alternatives.

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, …

They're Coming For Us: A Novel, Sarah Walker Caron

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

They’re Coming for Us is a feminist dystopian novel told in a non-linear format that explores an alternate timeline in which a series of mass shootings targeting women, queer and nonbinary people and allies have led to the removal of civil rights for women in the United States. Five years later, women and others who don’t fit the heterosexual male paradigm remain excluded from the workforce, education, driving and other basic rights. But an underground network is working to right the country and restore constitutional rights. As the story unfolds forward and backward, the reader is left to confront how …

Subliminal, Eric Arnold

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Subliminal is a novel which attempts to encompass literary, science fiction, and thriller genres by centering on two male narrators who portray similar but different thought processes and means with which to move through their respective social contexts. The novel centers on the dueling perspectives of Neiko Plemons and David Tremble, ex-convict and scientific researcher, as both proceed along a path of discovery involving an underground criminal enterprise. The juxtaposition of their voices is intended to highlight the similarities in discursive consciousness across class, occupation, and level of education. The novel is fundamentally an exploration of many such ideas which …

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 …

Silver, Blood And Singing, Zachary J. Posey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Silver, Blood and Singing is a novel that is an exploration of the blurred lines between science fiction and fantasy in which the concepts of grief and mourning are explored. This thesis consists of a novel following two sisters and those around them as they try to come to terms with their grief. Along this journey they end up being opened up to worlds more dangerous and stranger than any they have come across before. As they explore these new worlds this functions as a place to examine the understanding of what it means to be a person and how …

The Swallow Dance, Kristyn M. Gerow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Swallow Dance is a novella which examines the chronically ill body in a moment of crisis. The narrative draws on trauma theory to dissect the main character’s reactions to an ill body. Eve, the novella’s narrator, is thrust into this space where her mind and body are at a discord because of a chronic illness. As part of her treatment, Eve cannot eat or drink. This destabilizes her from her traumatized body. The farther Eve disassociates from her condition, the more she feels like something is watching her. Then, she is contacted by a messenger from a different place. …

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” …

Dionysus, Cody Bursch

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The manuscript below is an amalgamation of farce with the purpose of exploring a character within an inescapable existence. Indeed, the narrator is so deep in the trench that he has been manipulated twice over at a two-fold distance from the thesis writer. First, the narrator’s story is being retold by the narrator himself from memory, then he employs the story-within-a-story cliché by placing this retelling in a narrative which he wrote on a collection of notecards. After this, the notecards themselves have been rearranged to an uncertain degree by a Professor of Philosophy somewhere in Florida after the notecards …

Discourses On Fantasy: A Narrative Allegory, Reuben Dendinger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project, though officially designated by the English Department as a creative thesis, is really a hybrid work that combines creative writing with literary criticism. The work is structured as a "dream vision," a literary genre popular in the Middle Ages in which a narrator receives some form of instruction or wisdom through an allegorical dream. Examples include The Pearl, The Romance of the Rose, and Chaucer's House of Fame. In this thesis, the allegorical space of the dream vision provides a platform for a series of essays structured as dialogues. These dialogues explore the aesthetics and …

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.