Secure the Shadow is a collection of short-shorts and flash fiction, which draws heavily on the conventions of fables, parables and fairy tales to consider modern themes, desires and cruelties. The collection is linked by a meta-fictional fascination with the act of storytelling -- the liminal psychological space between the real and unreal, fantasy and delusion, seen and unseen, predator and prey. The collection also maps the topography of loss -- it explores what it means, and how it feels, to lose and to be lost. / MFA

The dissertation consists of a critical preface and excerpts from the novel Derivation. The preface details how the novel Derivation explores the tension between the artist and the academy in the university, as well as the role memory plays in the construction of fictional narratives. The preface also details how narrative voice is used to expand the scope of Derivation, and ends with a discussion of masculine tropes in the novel. Derivation traces the path of a woman trying to rebuild her life in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, returning first to her blue collar roots before pursuing a career as an academic.

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published_or_final_version / Comparative Literature / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This thesis sees the literature about 'Mau Mau' as an ideal site for the examination of certain socially significant modes of interaction between 'nonfictional' discourses ('history', autobiography, 'social psychology' etc.) and fictional discourses (both 'serious' and 'popular'). It seeks to demonstrate some of the ways in which realist fiction'can be made to 'render visible' its constitutive invisible: i.e. to reveal the historical determinations of the particular configuration of (non-literary) ideological discourses which it 'works' to produce the representatlonalillusion. Part I consists of an Introduction which outlines the theory of ideology and the literary-critical theory informing the analYSis of the fiction. This is followed by an account of 'Mau Mau' as a historical phenomenon which examines available data relating to the 'causes' of the revolt, 'Mau Mau's' relationship to Kenya African Nationalism, the conduct of the campaign by both sides, and the social composition of the movement, and concludes with an account of various historical interpretations of 'Mau'Mau'. Part 11 consists of three chapters: the fi'rst attempts to. construct a general model of Kenyan colonial settler ideology (defined as a special variant of fascism); the second situates the colonial novels about 'Mau Mau' by Ruark, Huxley, Harding, Kaye, Sheraton, Stoneham and Thomas in relation to 'public' and 'pseudo-academic' articulations of this ideology; the third discusses a further group of novels -- by Cornish, Fazakerley, Target and Reid -- produced . in closer relationship with the dominant liberal ideology of the metropolis but all informed, to a greater or lesser extent, by the colonial mythology of 'Mau Mau'. Part III opens with a discussion of the social, political and economic factors determining the possible terrain of a 'new' dominant ideology appropriate to the neo-colonial conditions of post-Independence Kenya. There follows a chapter on novAls by Mwangi, Mangua and Wachira which are shown to have been produced within that dominant ideology and to have been significant attempts to give it 'concrete' fictional development. The final chapter examines the changing image of 'Mau Mau' in the fiction of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, focusing particular attention on A Grain of Wheat, which is seen as a 'crisis' text produced at a moment of transition between mutually exclusive problematics, and thus as an ideal site for an examination of.the 'dialectically productive' relationship between fiction and ideology.

My thesis, by offering an analysis of their individual stylistic approaches, considers how Ellroy, Higgins and Leonard expand the parameters of the crime fiction genre. The genre is still essentially conservative, a mediating detective/police hero synthesising narrative strands to indicate cause and effect, problem and resolution, thereby affirming the notion of a dominant grand narrative in society, of the status quo. I examine how Ellroy, Higgins and Leonard offer a critical perspective that subverts the artificial constraints of this concept by privileging the dialogic interaction of the multiple narratives of contemporary pluralistic society over the notion of a containable, transgressive, crime. Conventionally, in crime fiction, transgression is resolved with some restoration of the 'normal'. I review how Ellroy, Higgins and Leonard interrogate notions of normality by foregrounding ambiguity and the dialogic relationship between the multiple social narratives of normless, postmodem, society, rather than offering attempts to contain them within a single, dominant, 'normal', social narrative. I investigate how their respective 'languages' offer differing juxtapositions of words and images that freely exploit the linguistic richness of dialogue, of the language of the 'street', of the intertextual imagery of popular culture and of media dominated contemporary awareness. I view how, by using multiple intertextualities, they offer modes of narrative discourse that reflect a media dominated age and engage with a society where the simple binary divisions of good and bad, cause and effect, are increasingly inappropriate. Each explores a society where fiction, the media projection of reality, is often a more powerful source of identity than reality, itself often a result of fictionalised projections by those with vested interests in preserving a dominant social narrative. I examine how each avoids the conventional heroic figure in favour of ordinary people trying to survive within the dynamic of interacting social narratives.

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No description available.