About Her is a story of grief, regret, and the lengths some of us will go to avoid confronting and healing from trauma. Charlotte Day is a twenty-year-old college student embarking on her senior year of college when her younger sister Abby dies in a botched fake suicide attempt. In the wake of said tragedy, Charlotte is left behind with her loving, well-intentioned father and sedated, increasingly distant mother. As Charlotte attempts to cling to normalcy, her efforts fail once she returns to school, seeking out a path of unhealthy relationships and partying, which culminates in the former honors student dropping out of her senior year. A coming-of-age story at its core, About Her explores the dysfunctional ways one young woman navigates grief and fractured relationships while learning to forgive herself along the way. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

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This novel describes the uncompromising struggles of two very different characters against the crippling influences of conventional morality. The autobiography of the late medieval Johannes Faustus is interwoven with the third-person story of the twentieth-century figure Sybil Wagner. In their different historical contexts they fight against abuse, violence and depression in order to gain the ultimate objectives of sexual fulfilment, professional success, and a harmonious relationship with self and others. Part I describes the two characters' first encounters with love and death. It shows how their indomitable spirits cope with the hypocrisy of the adult world, with the confusing experience of their adolescent bodies, and the puzzling moment of losing their virginity. Part II describes their respective attempts to find out who they are and what they want. The structural parallelism between a male and a female Faustus from different social and historical backgrounds invites the reader to think about the barriers of historical and gender difference. Both narrative strands engage in a sophisticated play with the ambiguities of the archetypal story of transgression and allow for a number of different interpretations of, for instance, the nature and role of immaterial forces such as the devil. Both narrative strands portray a credible or 'realistic' framework for the uncanny elements of the Faustus narrative and thereby explore the borderlines between conventional and subjective reality.

Bea Dumont's life was full of youthful joys; cribbage games with her grandfather and Sunday morning pancackes with her older brother, Trip. When something happens that tears her typical American family apart, she begins a lifelong struggle to understand why it all came crashing down and learns along the way what it takes to forgive.

God Says No is a novel purporting to be the testimonial of Gary Gray, a young black man coming of age in Charleston, South Carolina. Gary cannot reconcile his Christian faith with his homosexual desires. Eventually, before a suicide attempt, he asks God for a sign. The following day, his Amtrak train derails outside Atlanta and a vision of Christ inspires him to run away from his old life. While hiding out, he joins a dance/theater company and continues to explore and battle his sexuality. Eventually, his wife tracks him down and he agrees to attend a reparative therapy center in Memphis. While there, he rooms with Nicky, a former hustler, with whom he falls in love. Nicky dies tragically. Though the therapy center gives Gary a job setting up a new branch in Atlanta, his faith in the possibility of changing his sexual orientation is severely shaken. He tries to reconcile with his wife and family and is forced to make painful compromises and accept himself. You Must Remember This is a prequel to Casablanca (1942) that focuses on the love story between Ilsa Lund and her husband, Victor Laszlo. When the Nazis capture Victor, Ilsa must find and save him by posing as a reporter for a Nazi newspaper. Victor, in the meantime, devises a way to escape from a concentration camp. The couple cross paths at just the wrong moment, and Ilsa believes that her husband is dead. She returns to Paris and has an affair with Rick Blaine. Victor makes his way through the Sudetenland and has an affair of his own. Eventually the two find each other and make their way to Morocco, and they must untangle their pasts and find their way to America. / text

Son Bird Saint is a literary novel that explores the idea of human lives influencing each other. At its core it is the story of Simon Hemphill who receives the handwritten life story of Wren Wallace, a famous friend of his parents’ whose life and death has shaped Simon’s past and future. When Simon travels between Saskatoon, Montreal and Toronto to interview the characters from Wren’s manuscript, he pieces together all the stories that converged to influence Wren Wallace’s life and, ultimately, his own. A story about understanding where you came from, Son Bird Saint is an omniscient narrative comprised of first-person narrators. Alternating between Simon’s interviews and Wren’s manuscript, the novel unravels a story much larger and more intricate than Wren or Simon could have foreseen. Spanning three generations and five decades, this novel explores character from youth to old age. It examines how we’re shaped by the people in our lives and those absent from it. Using metafictional techniques, the novel merges form and content into a multi-narrative story that exists outside the boundaries of traditionally structured literary novels.

The thesis covers the period roughly between 1688 and the 1780s and is concerned with the construction and perfonnance of heterosexual male identity and the emergence, during that period, of what would become a culturally dominant model of an ideal masculinity. It is a model which is adapted to the requirements of a capitalising economy and is therefore inextricably linked to the rise of the middle classes and the Puritan tradition which informs their ethical perspective. The introductory chapter gives reasons why I regard the novel as particularly relevant in looking at the dissemination of culturally determined notions of gender. Chapter One is concerned with contemporary anxieties about identity and the attempts to forge a middle-class male identity, which is 'authentic' and differentiated from that of the upper classes Changes in the way gender identity was percei ved are also traced and the novels of Tobias Smollett are discussed to illustrate the struggle towards the definition of an ideal masculinity. Chapter Two examines the genesis of 'sensibility' and how it was modified and adapted by the novelists of sensibility to create a benevolent man of virtue who was dissociated from any notion of 'softness' and femininity. Chapter Three looks at the models of masculinity presented by Samuel Richardson in Clarissa (1748) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753/4) and the author's concern to discover and present the ideal model of a bourgeois patriarch. Chapter Four discusses the perceptions and representations of masculinity by women writers, how they portrayed gender relationships and what kind of critique they offered of a construction of gender which rendered women as passive and men as active.

This thesis explores three accounts of male erotic fantasy. In my second chapter, I apply Roland Barthes’ conceptions of bliss and pleasure to John Cleland’s 18th century erotic novel, Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure in order to test Barthes’ theory. In my third chapter, I use D. H. Lawrence’s own erotic theory to analyze his depictions of boredom, tenderness and the mind/body divide in his 20th century novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In my fourth chapter, I rely on the theory of sadomasochism to explore the ways in which pleasure, pain and degradation figure in the Pauline Réage’s 20th century sadomasochistic novel, Story of O. In all three of these novels, erotic pleasure, love and transcendence are central themes and I ultimately elucidate the ways in which Cleland, Lawrence and Réage strategically use them to influence the reader’s reception of their accounts of male erotic fantasy.

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