Arts and Humanities Commons^™

This Is Not Your Life, Ella M. Carroll-Smith

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

My novel, This Is Not Your Life examines themes of identity, class, and fate. Identical twin sisters, Annie and Quinn Graves, shared a troubled childhood, which led each of them down very different life paths. Annie is now climbing the corporate ladder at work, while Quinn leads the perfect family life in Richmond’s elite suburbs. And yet, they’re both unhappy, yearning for something different than the lives that seem to have chosen them. The two women decide to switch places for a while, hoping for a change of scenery and lifestyle. However, that decision has potentially disastrous consequences for them …

The Beast Inside, Steve Cave

Stonecoast MFA Theses and Capstones

This thesis contains the first seven chapters of the novel Ravenous, the short story “Faithfall,” and the academic paper “From Hellhound to Hero: Tracking the Shifting Shape of the 21st Century Werewolf.” Both of the stories deal with werewolves as a common element, but use very different types of werewolves in each. The werewolves of Ravenous transform through losing control or giving in to their passions, while the werewolves in “Faithfall” change only with the full moon, and retain no control once transformed. Both stories have a gay male protagonist, though also in very different ways. Ravenous follows the story …

Desert Palms, Carolyn D. Pledge-Amaral

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

DESERT PALMS is a contemporary women’s novel set in an Arizona RV park. When Miamians Margie Campos and her husband, Carlos, unexpectantly inherit Desert Palms, a rundown retirement community, Margie reluctantly agrees to stay in Arizona to overhaul the park. With the discovery of a secret letter that threatens to unravel the family, an unscrupulous broker determined to buy the park on the cheap, and a husband bent on hitting it big, Margie digs in and starts to find purpose amidst a desert microcosm.

Told from Margie’s perspective in a closely attached third person, DESERT PALMS is a realistic and …

All The Waking Things, Jonathan L. Duckworth

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This literary fantasy novel is presented as the manuscript of a writer under the pseudonym of “Noisette,” who possesses the final writings of the revolutionary Cazimir Pazikov, a historical figure in the book’s world of whom little is known. In his journal entries, Cazimir Pazikov details the final days of his life. After accidentally murdering his lover, Varina, Cazimir buries her at a crossroads as part of a ritual to resurrect her. To complete the ritual, Cazimir must journey around his native Alban Province (a region of the wartorn Kingdom of Paradigm modeled off 19^th century America with European …

"Sinful Creature, Full Of Weakness": The Theology Of Disability In Cummins's The Lamplighter [Review], Claudia Stokes

English Faculty Research

After several decades of scholarship that discerned general patterns in literary representations of disability, recent years have seen a turn toward the specific and the particular, with a focused concentration on the ways in which individual texts and literary moments limn bodily difference. In a recent essay about disability in the early American novel, Sari Altschuler made a compelling case for this transition by showing that some of the standard claims about literary representations of disability simply failed to apply to the specific nature of early American fiction, and she consequently called for more particularized, historically grounded analyses of literary …

Genre Categorization In Contemporary British And Us-American Novels, Carlos Ceia

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Genre Categorization in Contemporary British and US-American Novels" Carlos Ceia discusses a certain type of resistance to genre categorization in many novels in contemporary literature. Many British and US-American contemporary novels show patterns in narrative creativity where novel-writing techniques are sometimes more important than the traditional subject matter driven work of fiction. Ceia reviews experimental/metafictional novels which do not show intent to fulfil an aesthetic role pre-determined in a certain moment in history. Not having this kind of burden before them, many contemporary British and US-American novelists devote their artistic imagination more to the "potential" of the …

Humberto: The Fire Next Time, John David Fournie

Theses

“The Fire Next Time” is the opening section of a novel, Humberto, that tells the story of a group of people working at a biomedical engineering firm in St. Louis. The section follows Charles, a well-respected employee and leader whose marriage is slowly disintegrating. In the first chapter, a larger-than-life employee, the Priest, joins the company. He befriends Charles while working closely with him. The Priest, however, begins an affair with Charles’ wife, Linda. Charles is put in a difficult position: how should he work with a man he both hates and admires? As Charles struggles with this dilemma, a …

The Female Accomplice: Rape, Liberalism, And The Eighteenth-Century English Novel, Dawn Arendt Nawrot

Theses and Dissertations

Previous scholarship on rape narratives within the emerging eighteenth-century novel focuses on a dichotomous construction of the female agent struggling against the male rapist and against a biased patriarchal society. However, my project expands this gendered model by evaluating how the presence of colluding female accomplices complicate understandings of female agency and patriarchal violence. I argue that depictions of femes soles as treacherous and mercenary liberal subjects, who embody the corruption of the market, play a vital part in domesticating single women of the developing middle class. I analyze the ways in which female accomplices to rape represent a sizeable …

Paranormal Orgy, Cameron M. Contois

All NMU Master's Theses

Paranormal Orgy is a novel length work that explores a world full of the paranormal— demons and vampires and aliens— and how some very real, very flawed characters get by in the face of these monsters. Many different points of view are utilized in this work, beginning with the point of view of a 15-year-old girl who may or may not be possessed. Haunted by the prospect of growing up, this girl attempts to live and love in the world of the strange. Other point of views explored include that of an addict, an estranged daughter, a strict grandmother, and …

Faithlessly Or Faithless Lie?: The Name Symbolism Conundrum In Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, Erin Wade

Honors Theses

This thesis focuses on the symbolic importance of names in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie. While, historically, other scholars have examined the title character’s name, I argue that examining the oft-ignored significance of Faith Leslie’s name is extraordinarily important to the thematic content of the novel and could be more interesting than an examination of Hope Leslie’s name. To delve fully into the possible meanings of the dual pronunciations of Faith’s name — as either faithlessly or faithless lie — I look at religious discrimination against Catholics and Natives during the 17th and 19th centuries, as well as literary …

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, …

Heaven On Their Minds, Rebecca Kate Robison

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Heaven on Their Minds is a novel written from the first-person perspective of teenage

protagonist Melody O’Malley. The plot details Melody’s attempt, along with two close friends, to undermine their conservative Christian theater camp’s summer production of Godspell via the edgier songs and theology of Jesus Christ Superstar. Though ostensibly a satire of the Evangelical Christian community, Melody’s insecurities are the true heart of the novel--her fraught relationship with her best friends, her concerns about her post-high school future, and her ill-advised crush on the most prominent RFC (Robot for Christ) in the camp, a crush that has terrible consequences …

Readers And Writers In The Ancient Novel [Review], Lawrence Kim

Lawrence Kim

Are there still new and worthwhile things to be said about the ancient novel? There has certainly been an explosion in publications; the volume under review is the twelfth Ancient Narrative Supplement to appear since 2002, and more are on the way, as the multi-volume proceedings of the fourth International Conference on the Ancient Novel begin publication in 2011. The eighteen articles reviewed here were originally delivered at a smaller conference in 2007 at Rethymno, and it was the organizers’ hope that the contributors would “tease out…new perspectives” on the topic of “readers and writers” by focusing on those “ …

Fragile Saints, Mary-Claire Ibarra

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

FRAGILE SAINTS is a magical realist novel set in contemporary Peru. Elsa is struggling with her recent divorce and childhood memories of her family’s silk-producing farm haunt her, so when Elsa’s dying grandmother requests to see her, she visits Peru. There, Elsa learns she has inherited a country house, near the old family hacienda, which is haunted by a dark secret. Elsa is intrigued with the house, its caretakers, and her new lover Gustavo, yet she encounters disturbing ghostly visitors.

The novel is written primarily from Elsa’s point of view, as she discovers her purpose, but an omniscient narrator is …

The Green And The Red: A Novel By Armand Chauvel, Jenna Gersie

The Goose

Review of Armand Chauvel's The Green and the Red: A Novel.

Ali: A Novel, Joshua Sabey, Stephen Tuttle

Journal of Undergraduate Research

When I was in high school, my family hosted an Iraqi student named Ali. He eventually went AWOL (absent without leave) and we were able to help him get political asylum. Since then I have built friendships and collected stories from several other Iraqi students that I have now compiled into a book.

The Secrets Of All Hearts (Novel: 4 Parts), Kirby Farrell

kirby farrell

The Secrets of All Hearts is a noel in which the frame story probes unfinished business from the Vietnam War.

Faces In A Sea Of Suffering: The Human Predicament In Saul Bellow’S The Victim, Victoria Aarons

English Faculty Research

Saul Bellow’s 1947 novel The Victim has, as its frontispiece, two epigraphs that frame and set the stage for the fraught condition of its protagonist, Asa Leventhal, as he navigates a tortuous course through the physical and psychic landscape that threatens to be his undoing. The novel’s first epigraph narrates the brief but portentous “Tale of the Trader and the Jinni,” from The Thousand and One Nights, in which a lone merchant, traveling on business and oppressed by the heat, takes shelter beneath a tree. There he breaks fast, relieving his weariness and his hunger with bread and dates. …

The Weightless Machine, Justin David Stone

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Weightless Machine is an original novel by Justin David Stone written to satisfy the Thesis requirements of a Master's in Fine Arts from the Bilingual Department of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Los Nueve Reinos, Giannina Mariana Deza

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Grey-adult fantasy novel, first of a three novel saga.

The Museum, Julie Yucai Jarema

Senior Projects Spring 2016

The Museum takes the form of a novel. It has a window carved into its steel garage door for the viewer to observe and puzzle over the assortment of ephemera inside the small space. Mia, a girl who does not know her roots, ends up working as a research assistant for the reclusive author who owns the museum. Her life becomes increasingly more chaotic and unstable as the author, Mr. E, sends her and her newborn daughter on an absurd scavenger hunt through Manhattan. Mr. E constructs each of Mia’s assignments around the plot of the novel that he is …

Epic And Genre: Beyond The Boundaries Of Media, Luke Arnott

FIMS Publications

Noting the resurgence of popular and academic interest in epics across disparate media, this essay proposes a theory of the epic genre that transcends particular media and cultures. It seeks to reconcile discussions of the epic in Aristotle, G.W.F. Hegel, Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach, and Northrop Frye, arguing that traditional definitions of epic narrative are instead subsets of a greater generic structure. The epic is, following Gregory Nagy and Franco Moretti, among others, a literary “super-genre” that encompasses as many other kinds of narrative as possible. The essay explains how epic narrative, disembedded from earlier oral poetry, is …

Prolegomena To Any Future Synthesis Of Hip-Hop And The Novel That Will Be Able To Present Itself As Dope And All-The-Way-Live, Austin Dylan Krauss

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This work will serve as a prologue to any future attempt at further articulating or writing a hypothetical HIP-HOP Novel.

O Is For Olive, Anna Rose Kornfeld

Senior Projects Spring 2016

The suicide of a young woman’s brother results in her return home to mourn his loss. She is forced to reconnect with family members as she explores the past and tries to grapple with the future.