My novel, A Proper Life, is about a 14 year old girl called Marey who runs away from foster care and becomes a prostitute. I aim, in this creative section of my thesis, to convey a voice little heard in British writing, and to give that voice a significant place in the text. Therefore, the novel is written entirely in the first person pronoun and conveys Marey's distinctive London vernacular speech. The novel follows Marey's decline after she meets a man who becomes her pimp and becomes involved with a punter, who she terms her 'Sugar Daddy.' The novel is set at the end of the 1990s and culminates with the Brixton nail bomb attack. The critical section of my thesis, Angel in the House: A Revision of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, continues my concern with marginalised individuals. I start with the premise that a non-white uneducated woman like Marey is largely excluded from discussions in A Room of One's Own concerning the restrictions placed on a woman's creativity. I combine critical and creative writing techniques to imagine that Virginia Woolf has returned in spiritual guise to update her compelling essay. My Woolf character furthers her idea that writer's must find a suitable language in which to express themselves by embarking on an examination of contemporary vernacular fiction. She also imagines a set of contemporary characters to illustrate her new ideas that a writer needs resources and 'soul spaces,' in addition to a room and money, if she is to thrive. When I began to pastiche Woolfs voice I kept at the forefront of my mind black musical techniques of 'versioning,' in which artists lend their own lyrics to an original tune. I was also inspired by Woolfs own views about the fluidity of being and by post-modern ideas that no one has a final say.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:658711 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Hynes, Claire |
| Publisher | University of East Anglia |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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