Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Secrets, Shame And Forgiveness In Celebrity Culture And Literature, Jacqueline Swift

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis comprises a novel written for a general readership and an accompanying essay, both of which explore secrets and lies, shame and guilt, and confession and forgiveness in relation to celebrity culture and literature.

The novel, ‘Ophelia’, explores the notion that, beneath the surface of many lives, there may be thoughts and events people are ashamed of and wish to keep hidden. The revelation of secrets can have both expected and unexpected consequences. The novel focuses on the experiences of a woman who creates different identities and lives vastly different lifestyles at different times. When exposed, she must confront …

Fowl Feathered Fox: Monsters, Pipers, Families And Flocks, Michelle Aslett

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Fowl Feathered Fox: Monsters, Pipers, Families and Flocks is a doctoral work consisting of a full-length stage play and an exegesis. An introduction outlines the scope of the doctoral work, while a concluding chapter reflects on research findings and considers staging issues and implications. Appendices include images incorporated into the play’s action as well as photographed excerpts from a series of visual diaries used to document the play’s evolution. The play, Fowl Feathered Fox, explores the nature of delusion, deception and the tragedy of The Beast Within. Borrowing as it does from the traditions of revenge tragedy, comedy and horror, …

Maps For The Lost: A Collection Of Short Fiction And Human / Nature Ecotones: Climate Change And The Ecological Imagination: A Critical Essay, Susan Heather Greenhill

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The thesis comprises a collection of short fiction, Maps for the Lost, and a critical essay, “Human / Nature Ecotones: Climate Change and the Ecological Imagination.” In ecological terms, areas of interaction between adjacent ecosystems are known as ecotones. Sites of relationship between biotic communities, they are charged with fertility and evolutionary possibility. While postcolonial scholarship is concerned with borders as points of cross-cultural contact, ecocritical thought focuses upon the ecotone that occurs at the interface between human and non-human nature.

In their occupation of the liminal zones between human and natural realms, the characters and narratives of Maps …

The Historian’S Daughter (A Novel); Monsters And Memory (An Essay), Rashida Murphy

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis comprises two parts, a novel and an essay. ‘The Historian’s Daughter’ is a work of fiction based on family memories and historical research that speaks to the trauma of abandonment and displacement in an immigrant family living in Australia. The accompanying essay is titled ‘Monsters and Memory’ and is an autoethnographical text which combines theoretical, experiential and embodied research to argue that the inclusion of women’s stories, particularly those of trauma and abuse, must be foregrounded in any exploration of cultural and diasporic memory. Drawing primarily on the work of Said (1978, 1993, 1999, 2001), Bhabha (1990, 1994), …

Writing Into The Apocalypse - An Examination Of The Method Of Writing Into The Dark Within The Context Of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction: An Exegesis, Brendan Ritchie

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This Creative Writing thesis consists of an original novel, titled Carousel, and an exegesis examining the practice-led method of writing without a narrative plan.

Carousel explores the lives of four young adult characters who find themselves trapped inside a giant shopping complex in post-apocalyptic Perth. A central creative decision that informed the process of writing Carousel was to write without knowledge of the narrative destination. Within this research, I have termed this practice ‘writing into the dark’.

The initial focus of the exegesis is to define and explore what it means to write into the dark. Here the exegesis …

Sexuality, Desire And The Ageing Female Body: An Essay, Lauren Marsh

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis consists of a novella, ‘One Night in Hong Kong’, and an essay, ‘Sexuality, Desire and the Ageing Female Body.’ The novella tells the story of an erotic affair between the female narrator and a man in a hotel room in the neon city of Hong Kong. Told in four parts, the story shifts in time, reflecting on earlier events in the narrator’s life and a trip she made to the Sicilian city of Catania in 1954.

Older female protagonists and their sexuality are rarely depicted in contemporary Australian fiction. Where representations do exist, they act as ‘interventionist’ texts, …