This paper is a discussion of parallels between John Lydgate's Dance of Death and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

This thesis contains what I consider to be the best of my work over the course of my three years in the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University, and it is meant to demonstrate my range of ability as a creative writer. Included are a portion of my unfinished novel, Twelve Hearts of Clay, as well as a few of my favorite short stories. "Calluses," my foray into experimental writing, is perhaps the most completed piece in the collection, having found publication in the October 2010 issue of Blue Crow Magazine, an Australian literary journal. "Dead Baby Jokes," the short short piece included here, was also published, in Front Porch Flash Fiction, a local anthology from Sink/Swim Press. "An Epic Masterpiece, TBD" veers into the realm of the absurd and "Grace" is my attempt at straightforward realism. "The Dragon's Daughter" is a modern retelling of a medieval folktale. I see the novel, Twelve Hearts of Clay as the heart of the thesis. The concept for the novel came to me slowly, and over the course of a number of drafts, beginning in the Fall of 2010 in Dr. Cokal's Novel Writing Workshop. I've included the first fifty pages in sequence, and then I jump forward in the narrative to events coming down the line. Included are four modern fairy tales that will mark the four different sections of the novel and also serve as a fantastic versions of the main characters' histories and backstories. My novel and many of the stories included here place the magical world of myth and folktale right alongside the realistic world we know and see daily, and elements of each world can seep into the other. These stories are meant to draw on the reader's pre-existing understanding of narrative as a way of processing the world, something I think we learn in the form of childhood stories and fairy tales. The novel's themes and concepts of art, troubled romance, constructed identities, fairy tales and folklore are all reflected in the short stories. Each story takes a single theme and explores it outside of the context of the novel, which is, I believe, a result of the way I've been working, switching back and forth between the novel and stories, depending on which project was frustrating me the least at that moment, but ruminating always on the same questions and concerns.

Cette étude est consacrée à la potentielle part superstitieuse immanente aux contes fantastiques français du XIXe siècle. Au sein de cette forme concise du récit, nous cernons l’impact dégagé par la collision du fantastique et de la superstition, ces deux ennemis de la raison, témoins d’une époque où l’imaginaire est à la recherche d’un nouveau souffle littéraire. Nous revenons sur les origines de la rencontre de ces deux notions en faisant le point sur leurs étymologies et histoires respectives, puis mettons en exergue leurs assonances narratives. Le second temps de notre analyse s’articule autour des auteurs précurseurs, initiateurs et romantiques allant de J. Cazotte à P. Mérimée. Notre troisième partie est consacrée aux œuvres phares de la seconde moitié du siècle, qui, sous l’impulsion du très remarqué E. A. Poe et de quelques auteurs réalistes jugés mineurs, profitent d’un nouvel imaginaire s’achevant avec le décadentisme de J. Lorrain. Ces recherches permettent de constater la présence, la nécessité et l’évolution de la croyance dans un genre tributaire d’une verve particulièrement réceptive au désenchantement causé par une réalité exécrée. Nous observons que fantastique et superstition se situent conjointement à la croisée du monde ordinaire et d’un au-delà alternatif paradoxalement anxiogène et salvateur, reflet de la sensibilité des fantastiqueurs qu’ils retranscrivent au travers d’une pensée de plus en plus macabre au fil du siècle, folklore traditionnel puis pathologies psychiatriques à l’appui. / This study is dedicated to the potential superstitious part inherent to French fantastic tales of the XIXth century. Within this concise form of storytelling, we outline the impact arising from the collision of fantastic and superstition, two enemies of reason, witness of a time when imagination was in search of a new breath in literature. We return to the origins of the reunion of these two notions by considering their respective etymologies and evolutions, before focusing on their narrative similarities. The second part of our analysis revolves around the precursors, initiators and romantic authors, from J. Cazotte to P. Mérimée. Our third part is dedicated to major works of the second half of the century, which, at the instigation of the particularly famous E.A. Poe and other few realistic authors considered as less influent, benefit from a new form of imagination ending with J. Lorrain’s Decadent movement. This study shows the existence, necessity and evolution of the belief, in a genre dependent on a verve particularly receptive to the disillusion caused by a despised reality. We observe that fantastic and superstition both stand at the point where the ordinary meets an alternative hereafter which is paradoxically source of anxiety and salvation, reflecting the sensibility of the fantastic authors who transcribed it into an increasingly macabre imagination throughout the century, supported by traditional folklore, then by psychiatric pathologies.

This thesis explores Chaucer's devices for securing verisimilitude by various methods in the Canterbury Tales.

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This thesis examines the idea of China in British literature during a clearly defined period. Between 1757 and 1785, when Britain still had little direct contact and cultural exchange with the Chinese, China evoked various attitudes, images and beliefs in the British imagination. At times uncertain and evasive, popular understandings of China were sufficiently malleable for writers of the period to knead into domestic political satire and social discourse, giving fresh expression to popular criticisms, philosophical aspirations, and religious tensions. The period presents several prominent English, Irish, and Scottish writers who use the idea of China precisely in this manner in writings as generically diverse as drama, translation, travel writing, pseudo-Oriental letters, novels, and fairy tales. Some invoke China’s supposed defects to accentuate Britain’s material, scientific, and moral progress, or to feed contemporary debate about decadence in British society and government. Others exploit the notion of a more civilized and virtuous China to satirize what they regard as a supercilious cultural milieu attendant on their own emerging polite and commercial society, or to interrogate their nation’s moral criteria of the highest good, public-spiritedness, or evolving global enterprise. All give the idea of China new currency in the dialectical interplay between literary appeals to antiquity and the pursuit of modernity, enlisting it in philosophical and theological debates of Enlightenment. This thesis will argue that its subject writers, including Arthur Murphy, Thomas Percy, Oliver Goldsmith, John Bell, and Horace Walpole, use the idea of China to help define a British identity as culturally and politically distinct from Europe, especially France, and to contemplate Britain’s place within global history and a broadening world view at mid-century.

Remarkable progress has been made in our ability to design and produce synthetic DNA binding domains (TALE or Cas9-based), which can be further functionalized into synthetic transcription factors (sTFs). This technology is revolutionizing our ability to modulate expression of endogenous mammalian genes. Forced expression of cDNAs encoding transcription factors (TFs) is widely used to drive lineage conversions. However, this process is often inefficient and unreliable. Multiplex delivery of sTFs pool to activate endogenous master regulators and extinguish the expression profile of the host cell type could be a potential solution to this problem. We have developed a novel, simple TALE assembly method that enabled us to produce and screen large numbers of TAL effectors and compare their activity to dCas9-based TFs. During this process, we constructed many new functionally validated sTFs. Our ultimate goal is to test whether combining synthetic transcriptional activators and repressors can efficiently reprogram fibroblasts to NS cells or alternatively ‘program’ NS cell differentiation to neurons. We performed analyses of the transcriptome and chromatin accessibility of both fibroblasts and neural stem cells to unravel their core TF networks and their epigenetic state. This will allow us in the future the targeted design of sTFs and synthetic chromatin modifiers for specifically changing cell identity.

The main assertion of this thesis is that both 19th century and contemporary Gothic literary texts are characterised by fugitivity, embodied by the fugitive ‘figure’ which through its ambiguity is re-deploying the distinction proposed by Ross Chambers – inescapably both narrative and textual. The fugitive figure is intimately related to desire and its textual mobilisation. This mobilisation simulates the paradoxical experience of the sublime in which the pursuer of the fugitive figure is left speechless before the feared and desired unnamable other. Anne Rice’s ‘The vampire chronicles’ are discussed, as are ‘Frankenstein’, ‘The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ and ‘Dracula’. Analysis of these texts constitutes a ‘genealogy’, conceived and executed in poststructuralist terms, consisting of a deconstructive analysis inflected by psychoanalytic inputs. The genealogy is applied to indicate the importance of the family structure and its potential for dissolution in Gothic texts, and recreates a search for origins, which is a recurring theme in Gothic writing. The fugitive figure, through its embodiment of insatiable desire, is beyond either narrative or tropaic apprehension. It is in continual metamorphosis and invites pursuit in its different guises. However, although it appears as the objectified pursued, it actually arises from within the pursuer, so any attempt to arrest the disruptive flow it signifies is, although unavoidable and necessary, a self-deceptive act doomed to failure. This failure is registered simultaneously at narrative and textual levels. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Set in mythical Humble County, Georgia, Days of the Endless Corvette tells the story of Earl Mulvaney, a high-school dropout and auto mechanic. Earl loves Ellen, the brainy and beautiful girl next door, who unfortunately must marry Troy, the star of the high school football team. Throughout the book Earl labors on his “Endless Corvette,” a project as impossible as trying to build a perpetual motion machine. Earl has noticed that each time he takes something apart and rebuilds it, there are leftover parts. He reasons that by disassembling and reassembling his boss’s ’59 Corvette, and saving the leftover pieces each time, eventually he will have enough parts to build an entire car, leaving the original behind. The novel ends with the suggestion that perhaps Earl has succeeded at his project, which stands as a metaphor not only for Earl’s hopeless love, but other searches for answers to life’s perplexities.

My thesis includes a collection of short stories that showcases my growth and potential as a fiction writer. The thesis also includes a critical introduction that highlights my aims and the influences on my work. My introduction seeks to establish the overarching purpose of creative work. Specifically, I focus on how my work reflects the theme of using projection as a defense mechanism to cope with internal and external crises that force characters to deal with undesirable situations or aspects of their personality. The introduction then expounds on the commonly accepted Freudian definition of ?projection,? as well as the related Jungian ?shadow.? Both of these psychoanalytic concepts are closely linked to the doppelg�nger. To expound on the tradition of using these concepts in literature, I list works that employ these themes and dispute the traditional association of such themes with invariably tragic endings. Next, I attempt to explode the common assumption that links projection to dysfunction by pointing to both maladaptive and adaptive uses of projection. I point out that people can project both negative and positive aspects of their personality onto outside entities with both positive and negative consequences. I then detail examples from my stories that reflect these uses of projection. I go on to further expand the definition of ?projection? by challenging the notion that people only project aspects of their personality onto other people and that this is a strictly psychological process, providing additional examples from my work. Finally, I illuminate how my stories seek to reevaluate the common assumption that the doppelg�nger and the ?shadow? are figures that foreshadow destructive outcomes. Next, I move on to a discussion of the specific research methods and influences of each story, drawing on literary works and personal reasons for exploring my topics. I also mention how previous study has fueled my work on the themes in these stories. The stories themselves are products of my purpose and research. My conclusion relates how these stories reflect my theme and purpose and how they shaped my growth as a writer.