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Thesis advisor: Thomas Kaplan-Maxfield / In this series of interconnected vignettes, the members of the Massachusetts-based McCullough family cope in the aftermath of their patriarch's death. This family saga unfolds through memories across decades and reflection in the 21st-century present narrative, as relatives young and old move through the traditions in which the family is rooted and towards the changing world of their future. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: English.

This thesis is a second draft of a novel about an orphaned girl and boy, Kate and Penn, who befriend one another on a Midwestern college campus and discover belonging and a sense of self, as well as a fantastical quality they both possess called Influence. The story explores themes of family, friendship, community, fear culture, and adult identity. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

by Lo Man-wa. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-102). / Chapter Chapter One --- Female Initiation in Comparative Perspectives --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter Two --- Rebellion Against Conventional Womanhood: Katherine Anne Porter and Virginia Woolf --- p.11 / Chapter Chapter Three --- Womanhood Redefined: Shen Congwen and Ding Ling --- p.34 / Chapter Chapter Four --- Contemporary Chinese Feminist Writers --- p.66 / Chapter Chapter Five --- Chinese Female Subjectivity Reconsidered --- p.77 / Notes --- p.84 / Works Cited --- p.87

Exploring the traffic between U.S. literary culture and political philosophy, this thesis surveys works by a range of leading male contemporary American novelists alongside the recent resurgent interest in friendship as a political concept. Long exiled from serious political philosophy, friendship returned as a crucial term in late twentieth-century communitarian debates about citizenship. Friendship also became integral to continental philosophy's exploration of the ontology of democracy, and, in a different guise, to histories of sexuality. Across these disciplines, friendship has been invoked as a pliable figure of affiliation, and often idealised as modelling equality. This thesis probes the origins of friendship's re-emergence in American political thought, and analyses how this far-reaching revival has registered in American fiction. The Introduction outlines how friendship has played a central role in the theory and practice of democratic politics since Aristotle suggested philia as fundamental to citizenship. In the U.S. context, male friendship in particular functioned as model for civic association in the nascent republic, and continued to be employed as a figure of egalitarian association in canonical works of nineteenth-century fiction. Yet despite its prominence historically in the U.S. civic imaginary, friendship was sidelined from American political culture for much of the twentieth century, until its rediscovery in the 1980s and 1990s as part of a wide-ranging critique of liberal individualism. The Introduction analyses how this renewal of critical commentary within mainstream liberal thought mirrored continental philosophy's contemporaneous exploration of democratic theory, wherein friendship was similarly examined as a vexed yet evocative site for the contestation of forms of political community. Marshalling this history, the thesis' main chapters argue that contemporary U.S. fiction continues to look to male friendship to explore questions of civic affiliation, political agency, and community, and to probe the history of these concepts in twentieth-century American liberalism. Chapter One focuses on Philip Roth's I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000), and analyses how Roth connects the political culture of the 1940s to the 1990s through the male friendships framing each narrative. Chapter Two draws on the anthropology of the gift to examine forms of reciprocity between male friends in Paul Auster's fiction. Chapter Three considers how novels by Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem contextualise their portrayals of interracial male friendship within the legacies of 1960s political radicalism. A Conclusion considers how some of the key themes emerging in previous chapters are reflected in Benjamin Markovits' You Don't Have to Live Like This (2015).

As popular genre of novels predominantly written by African American and Latinx authors, street fiction is often characterized in terms of the sex, violence, and illicit activities present in its narratives set in low socioeconomic urban communities across the United States. Street fiction’s popularity has soared since the early 2000s, and several authors who formerly self-published their novels and sold them through grassroots channels now sign lucrative contracts with major publishers. The purpose of this study is to offer a recontextualized description of street fiction exploring its ideological, political and cultural connections to other spheres of influence including: the tradition of the American novel, African American literary history and theories, popular fictions, and hip hop. Using critical discourse analysis and cultural studies as combined methodologies, I offer a dialogic analysis of three themes present in four examples of the genre, namely: 1) ambivalence between “straight” lives and “street” lives, 2) the interplay between constructions of “self” and “other” in street fiction, and 3) the dynamics between the “real” and the “fantastic” elements in the novels. I offer a concluding analysis of how the literacy practices surrounding street fiction dovetail with key conversations in the field of English, including the definition of literature, the relationships among authors, readers and texts, the purpose of reading and writing fiction, and the notion of books as both cultural artifacts and commodities.

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / Creative writing / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z