Fiction Commons^™

Postmodern Fantasy & Its Twin Traditions, Skyler J. Alexander

Honors Thesis

Fantasy literature is diverse and difficult to categorize; nevertheless, throughout the twentieth century two main subgenres emerged: sword-and-sorcery and high fantasy. This thesis examines the differences and similarities between these two traditions, how contemporary examples of the genre fit into or diverge away from the traditions that influenced them, and proves in the negative what and how much of contemporary fantasy fiction is original to itself, with no prominent antecedent. The analysis was performed by comparatively reading two contemporary fantasy novels, The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan and A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin, with …

The Thinnest Veil, Charles Butler

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

The Thinnest Veil is a work of fiction set in a historical colonial world that traces the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. The main character, Anuli, is abducted from her home in Nigeria and is sold into deeper levels of the American slave system. I wanted to write from a woman’s perspective in this project and think about what power this character would have in this world. I also wanted to explore West African culture and origin, and the influence they have left in other places they have been. In August 2025, I traveled to Barbados to research the …

Sediment: A Magical Realist Road Novel, Nicolas Victor Rago

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This magical realist novel follows G and Louie, two strangers, as they road trip west to east across the continental United States. As they travel, they drift through time, exploring historical and personal pasts through surreal atmospheric prose.

From Story To Stage: A Journey In Pursuit Of Virtuous Leadership And Artistic Intentionality Through Student Directing A Full Play Production At University Level Theatre, Josephine L. Partridge

Honors Projects

A passionate storyteller and artist, earning her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Honors Liberal Arts and Theatre-Performance, explores her personal potential as the play Director of Little Women, a stage play adaptation based on the 1868 novel by Louisa May Alcott, adapted from the 1912 play by Marian de Forest and Jessie Bonstelle written by Josephine Partridge. Throughout the course of four months, Partridge adapted the script and works as Director and Marketing Director for this production with SPU Theatre Company club. She uses this experience to deepen her understanding and practice of intentionality with artistic vision and virtuous leadership. …

Draw To Breathe, Ranran Ma

Masters Theses

This thesis explores visual expression in drawing as an intuitive mode of thinking suited to everyday life—a form of expression that runs parallel to language and surpasses it.

The project begins with a daily Post-it note drawing practice. These drawings often emerge before conscious understanding, subsequently accompanied by brief text, allowing image and word to resonate through emotion and intuition. Through the use of small-scale, portable, low-pressure materials, and with immediacy and intuitive freedom as the foundation of making, a visual language system grounded in the self develops. Through this sustained practice, I developed an instruction-based card system titled Draw …

Where Each Step Lands: Reconnecting And Reparenting Through Visual Narrative, Skye Wang

Masters Theses

This research begins with lived experiences of dissociation and a persistent sense of disconnection between body and consciousness. It explores the potential of visual narrative as an embodied practice. Through daily walking and sketching, bodily sensations are translated into visual language through a synesthetic process, forming the foundation for a picture book as the central outcome of this project.

The picture book adopts the perspective of a jumping spider positioned beneath a five-year-old girl’s shoe, creating a shifting, downward-facing viewpoint. The spider functions as a viewing position, while the girl represents the inner child. The narrative is constructed around the …

An Anxious Artist's Guide To Magic, Mot Tuman

Masters Theses

Illustration’s essence is using some type of media to tell a story. This could be anything from sculpture, watercolor, even just text alone. Beyond its medium, I have been thinking for a while of illustration and storytelling as a type of illusory magic. Magic, according to the Oxford language dictionary as being "The power of using supernatural or other unseen forces to apparently influence events or human behaviour." It gives us the power to reach inside the mind and heart of a person and change their emotional and mental state. It's the ability to create a world and have others …

A Puff's Exploration Of Wayne Hopkins, Ethan G. Mullen, Leon Wiebers

Honors Thesis

This thesis is a synthesis of modalities I have studied during the course of my Theatre Arts degree, applied to the realization of the principal character, Wayne Hopkins in the award-winning play Puffs (Or: Seven Increasingly Eventful Years at a Certain School of Magic and Magic) a LMU Theatre Arts Department production. This work is divided into three major sections. First, I reflect on how I applied acting tools I have studied at LMU to the development of my character and performance. These include script analysis, story structure analysis, breath work, and Viewpoints training. Second, I share media displaying my …

The Machinery Of Division, Ethan D. Ernst

Honors Capstones

This single chapter of a future fictional work follows the protagonist, Grace Scott, as her twenty-first birthday approaches, yet things are not as they seem. In this world, alien creatures known as the Marauders have forced humanity to hide within fortified cities, while all children are at risk of mutating into these monsters and eventually losing their minds. This risk is guaranteed to disappear after reaching the age of twenty-one, making it the most celebrated birthday for every society on Earth. As this grand day arrives for Grace, however, strange events occur that indicate that the world may be about …

How To Fail At Faith, Olivia R. Bacon

Honors Theses

How to Fail at Faith tells the story of Ruth, a girl in middle school who begins to doubt her faith in the Christian God. With these doubts come existential questions, fear, and, most strangely, a voice that narrates Ruth’s everyday activities inside her head. Ruth is scared this voice means she is only a character inside a story, but is even more scared to tell her parents about her internal struggles. As Ruth grapples with her faith, this “narrator” becomes a tangible support amid uncertainties. Ruth surrenders to trusting God after fighting her doubts, and discovers that her mysterious …

The Oncoming Light: An Experiential Approach To Psychological Exposition Through Dialogue-Driven Narrative, Benjamin G. Dewitt

Honors Theses

Narrative is a lens through which we understand ourselves, our histories, our futures, and our ties to those around us. Narrative form has undergone vast transformations over time, and in the case of “postmodern” literature, pushes the boundaries of form into the experimental, questioning the truth of knowledge itself. While these experimental works can give rise to uniquely powerful emotional experiences, some components of narrative, when abandoned, may only hinder the immersion of the reader. This thesis evaluates several experimental, dialogue-driven narrative works against these components: linguistic, literal, emotional, and intellectual significance, in a hierarchy of importance as proposed by …

Lovepilled, Zhiliang Zhao

Theses and Dissertations

"Lovepilled" is a collection of essays and stories about love, the longing for it, and where it takes place.

Another Inconsistency: A Collection, Christy Luong

Student Theses

A collection of stories.

Alternative, Ashlynn M. Stroud

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

A series of illustrations, sculptures and comic book issues designed to introduce a series of stories and characters that represent the history and members of a fictional mythology depicting the cultural social group often referred to as the “alternative” community. Alternative takes place in a world that combines high fantasy and science fiction with elements of pop culture and music. This world uses iconography of the various genres of the alternative subculture and music, metal, post-punk, and the evolving scene of the underground with varying visuals from both gothic and industrial time periods. Viewers are encouraged to read and follow …

"Black History Is Black Horror": Hauntology And Cultural Trauma In 20th And 21st Century Black Women's Gothic Horror, Destini S. Beckwith

Theses

Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturistic, gothic horror, neo-slave narrative Kindred (1979) vividly illustrates the story of a woman, Dana, involuntarily time-traveling from her home in 1976 Los Angeles, California, to a plantation in 19th-century Maryland. The interactions that she has with her ancestors, such as Alice, a free Black woman, and Rufus, a white man who enslaves Alice, leave Dana mentally and physically scarred. The 20th-century novel is meant to graphically reflect on the horrors of enslavement and the mental and physical effects that Black people endured/still endure because of it (i.e., grief, racial violence, and post-traumatic stress disorder). Furthermore, the novel’s …

The Keepers' Shadow, Julietta Thron

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

"The Keepers' Shadow" is a 350-page fantasy novel. The project's base concept/idea is one I've always had, however, the in-depth world-building that brings that story to life is what I researched and expanded on during my independent study and thesis. The agriculture, economics, architecture and government systems are heavily influenced by Renaissance Italy, Spain, and Ireland. Moreover, I heavily researched and implemented themes/issues such as colonization, tyrannical governments, religious restriction/conflict, erasure of history, slave labor, and the successful use of fear mongering. These concepts are not ones unlike what we see in our own political and social climate today, hence …

If You Come Looking: A Novella, Rachael Davis

Senior Theses

My final product is a 26,000 word novella called If You Come Looking, following the journey of a young man named James Gibbard as he struggles with loneliness and tries to make sense of his family’s confusing history. The story alternates between memories of James’ childhood and his current-day cross-country journey as he heads toward the coast for a hidden reason.

Between flashbacks to James’ childhood and glimpses of his travels, the reader watches James struggle to connect with others, even those who show him kindness. The story alternates between James’ perspective and the perspective of strangers who he meets …

Dark Wave - Comics And Transgender Studies In Practice, Mieke Vanderveen

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This is a thesis in two parts. Its goal is to provoke the intersection of superhero comics and transgender studies in order to interrogate the parallels between those two identities and explore ways in which pairing them together can strengthen each other narratively and academically. Rather than seeking an answer to a question, the project as a whole serves as a way of communicating trans internalities from a transfeminine perspective in a format that brings the issues to the forefront of the narrative in an in-depth and entertaining way. The result is hopefully a coherent artistic work that achieves those …

Parallel Concepts Found In The Thousand And One Nights And Sufi Hagiography, Walaa Kamal Emam Kamel

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that The Thousand and One Nights functions as more than mere populist entertainment; rather, it constitutes a literary corpus imbued with Sufi mystical epistemologies that reflect the spiritual quests and Sufi concepts evident in hagiographical traditions. Through discourse and intertextual analysis of two Nights stories, “The City of Brass” and “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,” alongside Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār’s Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ, this study demonstrates how shared rhetorical strategies—specifically David Pinault’s Leitwörter analysis and L.A. Paul’s Transformative Experience concept—reveal a narrative and rhetorical emphasis on the metamorphosis of the self from worldly attachment toward …

Laila: A Doll Memoir Of 1947 Partition Of India And Pakistan, Maleeha Malik, Maleeha Fatima Malik

Children's Literature (MFA) Theses

This abstract examines a creative and critical work centered on the 1947 Partition of India, which displaced approximately fourteen million people and caused one million deaths. The narrative introduces Laila, an anthropomorphized doll who functions as both witness and archive, embodying the memories and traumas of multiple child survivors. Through Laila’s journey across India, Pakistan, and the diaspora, the text explores themes of identity, belonging, loss, and intergenerational memory.

Blending personal family history with historical analysis, the author situates Laila within lived experiences of migration, silence, and religious marginalization, particularly as part of the Ahmadi Muslim community. The narrative foregrounds …

By The Light, Desiree Galamgam

CMC Senior Theses

On the island of Helios, the sun god, a water nymph finds comfort tending to the flora along  riverbanks. Clytie avoids her oceanid sisters’ poisonous proclivities. Modeling herself after the sun god’s incessant responsibilities, she spends her existence working. Only taking breaks to perch herself at the top of her alcove’s hill to watch Helios drive his chariot to rise and set the sun, she sees him as the epitome of perfection and freedom.

Her tranquil life is interrupted by the sudden arrival of Helios himself at the footsteps of her isolated cave. Clytie begins to feel new emotions as …

Look, Make, Play: The Natural Order In Children’S Books, Claire M. Lloyd

Children's Book Writing and Illustrating (MFA) Theses

This paper will examine conceptualizations of nature through environmentally themed picture books. While environmentalism is not a new topic for children’s book, recent works reveal changing attitudes toward the impact of human agency on the natural world. These texts provide a microcosmic view of the shift toward “green” kidlit and shows literary depictions of human interactions with nonhuman nature through an ecocritical lens. Specifically, I will look at three approaches to how humans conceive of, impact, and interact with the natural world depicted in children’s literature: observation (as the observable “other”), creation (as a communal resource), and recreation (as urban …

Dear Vincent, James H. Stone Iv

Playwriting (MFA) Theses

Dear Vincent is a play written for J. Harvey Stone’s MFA in Playwriting from Hollins University. The play is inspired by the life of Vincent van Gogh and his letters with his brother Theodore. The artist Vincent van Gogh was an avid writer to his brother Theodore. This play is inspired by, but not dictated by, the letters Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother. Connected by hymns in Act I and by the news of the 1980s in Act II, this Vincent lives through his letters as well but ultimately has to make a decision regarding this life in …

Toil And Quietus, Dylan Mitchell

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

The United States of America is haunted by its past. Be it the institution of slavery, the lack of gender equality, or the violent annexation of Native land, its ghosts are plentiful and undeniable. Still, though, questions of whether to venerate our nation’s history or condemn it pervade society. Now, then, is the time for the gothic.

For all of its existence, the gothic has served to shed light on the past, often casting on its dusty visage an ambivalence that weighs its good with its bad. Nowhere is this land more fertile than with American history, which is simultaneously …

Depths Of Power, Savannah A. Jackson

Master's Projects

When twelve-year-old Evie Johnson hears her deceased mother’s voice echoing from the depths beneath Poseidon’s temple, she is drawn into a world of magic and mystery. After a fateful encounter in a hidden cave and a shocking revelation from a trusted adult, she is thrust into the Hydrian kingdom of Ageria. She meets Nereus, the overburdened heir who enjoys spending his time with the unwanted people of his future kingdom. As they uncover the instability threatening their kingdom, they must confront Nereus’ ambitious father, Prince Aegeus, as he attempts to overthrow his sister. Together, the two embark on a journey …

110% Asset Disruption, Bradley W. Fish

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

110% Asset Disruption is a satire of the modern workplace set in a lightly dystopian near- future United States. Written as a feature length film, it follows Ethan Martens, a citizen and employee of Calcudyne. Ethan has a contentious relationship with his manager Douglas Farview, who performs a series of hostile actions towards Ethan in order to attempt to force him out of the company. The conflict between the two men escalates until Ethan is put in the position of having to prevent Calcudyne's President & CEO from starting a global thermonuclear war. 110% Asset Disruption is influenced and inspired …

Modernism’S Wild Child: The Interplay Of Modernist And Children’S Literature, Rachel Riffel

All Master's Theses

Within literary criticism, American and British modernism are often characterized by the disillusioned writers and creators who established an elitist literary community during the early 20^th century. This period is also distinguished by the Harlem Renaissance highlighting Black art, culture, and writing. Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps are well-known for contributing core texts to modernism and the Harlem Renaissance that expressed existential themes and developed experimental techniques. What many readers don’t know, however, is that these authors and many other contemporaries wrote stories and poetry for children. In this thesis, I explore the children’s …

Kaleidoscope, Katherine Kennedy

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Awkward, sullen, and superior, Avery has never been good with people, and that’s fine by him. Painting is the only thing he has ever liked; the only thing he’s ever been good at. Starting college is his chance to give himself completely to his passion and see what he’s capable of when he’s not wasting time pretending to be interested in other people.

That’s why being seated next to Daisy in Studio Art is a catastrophe.

Daisy is everything Avery finds annoying; she’s overly friendly, chatty, and emotional. But over the course of the semester, Avery finds himself drawn in …

Democratizing Music Production Through Technology, Jacob W. Alfaro

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This paper explores the history of recording technology and the effects of innovations on recording contemporary music. It follows the changing roles and relationships between artist and producer, as well as a brief look into the recording of our album as a real-time example.

Bias And The Writing Process In Adaptations And Retellings Of Mythology, Haley Sanderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My thesis is an examination of how adaptations and retellings of mythology are written and affected by readership and reception of mythology. I compare American Gods by Neil Gaiman and The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood and how they are written as adaptations and retellings of mythology. As seen in both novels, the presence of the mythological source material in adaptations and retellings of mythology is equally influenced by authors’ perception and the influence of readership. Approaching the ideological positions of Atwood and Gaiman through the similarities and differences of The Penelopiad and American Gods provides a deeper insight on the …