Theses and Dissertations
Issuing Body
Mississippi State University
Advisor
Kardos, Michael
Committee Member
Hagenston, Becky
Committee Member
Pierce, Catherine
Date of Degree
5-3-2019
Original embargo terms
Visible to MSU only for 3 years
Document Type
Graduate Thesis - Open Access
Major
English
Degree Name
Master of Science
Degree Name
Master of Science (M.S.)
College
College of Arts and Sciences
College
College of Arts and Sciences
Department
Department of English
Department
Department of English
Abstract
In Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor says this about the use of violence, “With the serious writer, violence is never an end in itself. It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially” (113). As a fiction writer, one of the questions I struggle with is the justifiability of an overtly violent landscape. In my critical introduction, I will explore how the writers Christopher Coake, Monica Drake, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Benjamin Percy leverage violence through the symbolism of architectural and natural structures—e.g. buildings and caves—in order to reveal something essential about their characters and the larger world. I will also discuss how I strive to use architectural and natural structures in my own story collection to say something essential about characters navigating a landscape fraught with violence and loss.
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/11668/21237
Recommended Citation
Beeson, Vanessa Wells, "Run from Cover" (2019). Theses and Dissertations. 3843.
https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/td/3843
Comments
fiction||architectural uncanny||environmental uncanny