Theseshttp://hdl.handle.net/10034/6230332024-03-29T10:05:55Z2024-03-29T10:05:55ZYoung Adult Novel: #IsaacAndAidenAreOverParty Critical Commentary: The Development of Queer Adolescent Identities and Communities Online and the Impact of Social Media within Young Adult LiteratureWorrall, Charleshttp://hdl.handle.net/10034/6280662023-09-09T01:48:59Z2023-04-01T00:00:00ZYoung Adult Novel: #IsaacAndAidenAreOverParty Critical Commentary: The Development of Queer Adolescent Identities and Communities Online and the Impact of Social Media within Young Adult Literature
Worrall, Charles
The novel #IsaacAndAidenAreOverParty centres on two queer teenagers who incidentally go viral amidst their breakup. After discovering the opportunity of winning a competition to crown the country’s biggest viral star, they decide to keep their breakup a secret and fake it to win. The novel challenges perspectives on social media in contemporary society and its impact on adolescent identity, with each character having their own personal relationship with online platforms. As an exploration into online queer identity and communities, the novel incorporates online elements within the narrative.
The Critical Commentary explores the development of queer adolescent identities and communities online and the impact of social media within young adult literature. As authors have begun to introduce and explore social media within young adult literature, they have offered various perspectives through their characters’ relationship with online platforms and their online identities. The representation of social media platforms and other forms of online communication on the page has encouraged authors to experiment with the form to connect to readers.
Central to the novel and the Critical Commentary is the relationship between young people and social media, exploring the positive and harmful impact online spaces can have on individuals and the development of their identity online. The Critical Commentary addresses how authors from marginalized communities have offered a nuanced perspective on social media platforms and forms of online communication, illustrating how online spaces can be essential in establishing queer adolescent identity for young LGBTQIA+ people.
On a personal level, both the novel and the Critical Commentary combine my passion for presenting both the positive and harmful sides of establishing identity in the age of social media and the importance of online spaces for young LGBTQIA+ people.
2023-04-01T00:00:00ZPEARL: A Doctorate in Creative WritingHughes, Sian A.http://hdl.handle.net/10034/6279542023-08-03T02:03:11Z2022-08-01T00:00:00ZPEARL: A Doctorate in Creative Writing
Hughes, Sian A.
The novel PEARL is inspired by the fourteenth-century poem known by the same name, found in the same manuscript as the better-known Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The poem Pearl has remained until now in the hands of scholars and poets, and although it has been translated in recent years to great critical success, by Jane Draycott and Simon Armitage, it has not previously inspired a prose story based on its emblems or central concerns. A meditation on the imagery and preoccupations of the poem, the novel borrows from its patterns as well as its plot, moving the original work into a new genre.
Central to both the poem and the novel is a relationship between a parent and child that continues after the death of one of them, and where the roles of teacher and pupil, child and adult, become in time reversed or complicated.
In the second part of the thesis the Critical Commentary draws on my reading and translations of the poem Pearl, as well as research into local myths and village customs, children’s singing games and rhymes about death and burial and folklore, in particular those stories that deal with transmigration of the soul. As the novel is set in the early 21st century the Critical Commentary also draws on readings of contemporary fiction and memoir that deal with sudden death, suicide and grief.
Both the novel PEARL and the Critical Commentary are forms of creative autobiography, and share a structure that weaves poetry, song, and memory into a dense collage of prose. This in turn echoes the complex repetitions and patterns of the poem that inspired both pieces of writing.
The poem Pearl has been called a lament, or a meditation on death, but it is also a love-song addressed to the lost infant and a kind of wish-fulfilment in that the poem brings the lost child to the riverbank of life and death to console her father. Similarly the novel can be read as a lament for a lost childhood, but also, more positively, as a re-creation of that lost world and an act of devotion to the person who is being mourned. The novel and the commentary are both a form of tribute to the poem that inspired them, re-creating a sensory map of the lost world of the poem. On a personal level they are also both also an act of mourning for my mother, a way of re-visiting the songs and stories she taught me, a re-creation of the mythical and musical map of the village where I lived as a child.
2022-08-01T00:00:00ZNovelty Fades: Science Fiction and PosthumanismHay, Jonathanhttp://hdl.handle.net/10034/6271852022-09-22T02:32:25Z2022-09-01T00:00:00ZNovelty Fades: Science Fiction and Posthumanism
Hay, Jonathan
This thesis contends that Critical Posthumanism and Science Fiction studies are symbiotic academic disciplines, which both stand to benefit significantly from critical approaches that accurately recognise their dialogic resonances. It contends that the posthuman qualities of SF texts are manifest rhetorically, rather than simply within their narrative schema. The Introduction argues that Posthumanist disciplines often undervalue SF texts, as a result of a common misconception that the genre is insufficiently posthuman. Likewise, SF critics have long disregarded texts’ mundane elements in lieu of an eschatological focus upon their novel technologies. As I proceed to outline, a new posthumanistic conception of the internal mechanics of SF is not only overdue, but also key to conceptualising our Anthropocene epoch.
The thesis therefore proceeds to provide demonstrative posthumanistic readings of works by a number of canonical SF authors. Chapter 1 inaugurates this project in practice by undertaking a textual analysis of a series frequently regarded as the keystone of Golden Age SF. The diegetic metaverse established within Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Robot stories, I argue, comprises a future history which overtly gestures towards the profoundly everyday character of our posthuman futures. By taking notice of the banal elements of Asimov’s narratives, we newly discern their futuristic extrapolation of everyday life. Meanwhile, Chapter 2 examines the repetitive qualities of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle. Taking the series as an exemplar of New Wave SF, it explores the pluralistic ways in which Le Guin’s seminal series gestures towards the primacy of daily life to the posthuman. In addition to textual analysis, this chapter undertakes a concordance analysis of the series, further demonstrating the manner in which its data prove just as vital as its nova.
Moving towards a consideration of contemporary written SF, Chapter 3 analyses the posthuman qualities of Kim Stanley Robinson’s oeuvre. The palimpsestuous qualities of Robinson’s future histories, in particular, gesture towards his mundanely-embedded figuration of the posthuman future. In the process of delineating the Anthropocenic interventions of Robinson’s novels, the chapter concludes with a comparative analysis of variant forms of his omnibus Green Earth, evidencing the penetration of environmental nova into our everyday lives. Finally, Chapter 4 explores the repetitive schema of two prominent televisual SF texts, claiming that their participatory qualities significantly alter the textual positionality of their audiences. This chapter begins by analysing the Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat eras of the BBC television series Doctor Who, before undertaking an autoethnography of the videogame Outer Wilds. In a science-fictional fashion, the Conclusion of the thesis underlines its ecocritical value for a world whose near future will be increasingly devastated by starkly novel climactic phenomena.
2022-09-01T00:00:00ZMy Friend, the Queen, an historical novel, with an accompanying Critical Commentary, Historical Fiction in the 21st Century: its Purpose and PracticeJones, Sheilahttp://hdl.handle.net/10034/6268892022-05-24T02:36:23Z2022-04-01T00:00:00ZMy Friend, the Queen, an historical novel, with an accompanying Critical Commentary, Historical Fiction in the 21st Century: its Purpose and Practice
Jones, Sheila
1509. On the day of the Coronation of the new young King and his Spanish Queen, eight-year-old Kat Champernowne goes to live and work at Hever Castle. There she strikes up a friendship with the family’s middle child, Anne: it is a lifelong bond that will take her to France, to London, to the birth of a Princess, and to the execution of a Queen.
My Friend, the Queen is a feminist novel in the historical literary fiction genre, which presents the story of Anne Boleyn from an original perspective. Its protagonist, Kat Champernowne, more familiarly known by her married name of Ashley, is a real person whose early life has not previously been voiced. Throughout the substantive part of my thesis - the novel - she narrates her own story, closely intertwined with that of Anne Boleyn, from their imagined first meeting at Hever to Anne’s beheading in 1536.
My Critical Commentary begins by tracing the trajectory and evolution of historical fiction from 1971. Drawing on the experience of undertaking a practice-based PhD, I then examine the relationship between history and fiction, linking my analysis of historical fiction’s current purpose and practice to the research and methodologies I employ in synthesising ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’
into a cohesive whole. I incorporate both critical and theoretical issues, as well as drawing on the works and methodology of other novelists, to delineate the role and status of historical fiction in the twenty-first century from the viewpoints of both a practitioner and a theorist.
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