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Item Unforgettably in love : uses of the amnesia trope in contemporary romance : a dissertation presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand. EMBARGOED until further notice.(Massey University, 2021) Kołodziej, GajaThis study examines and demonstrates ways in which contemporary romance employs the amnesia trope, focusing on its potential for both plot development and protagonists’ personal transformation. The amnesia trope allows authors to explore a variety of issues, such as matters of identity, the nature of human existence, deception and morality, as well as extreme vulnerability on the part of the heroine or hero due to lack of social context. The critical component of this thesis investigates the meaning and usages of amnesia in contemporary romance fiction, with a particular focus on medical amnesia resulting from external trauma. To analyse the trope, I briefly summarize how the genre has evolved over the last 70 years, highlighting its ability to impart guidance and its aptitude for flexibility and openness. While drawing connections between romance subgenres, particularly between contemporary romance and romantic suspense in which the protagonist experiences medical amnesia, I examine popular employments and implications of literary amnesia to demonstrate a spectrum of possibilities available to authors. Based on an in-depth analysis of six romance novels, I describe three frequently occurring approaches to the trope: amnesia as an ultimate proof that love conquers all; amnesia as an extreme vulnerability which transforms strangers into lovers; and amnesia as inner drive for reinvention, which heals emotional wounds and fosters the lovers’ personal development. The creative portion of the thesis, a full-length relationship-based novel titled Disremembered, applies many of the strategies discussed in the critical part to explore the richness of the amnesia trope within a cross-genre form that incorporates elements of romance, suspense, travelogue, and metafiction. The novel also gives narrative form to a personal endeavour to understand the character of ego, including elements of the nature versus nurture debate, popular understandings of dissociative identity disorder, and the theory of reincarnation.Item Illusions, transformations, and iterations : storytelling as fiction, image, artefact : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Arts, College of Creative Arts, Massey University, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand(Massey University, 2020) Richards, JessThis creative practice research project proposes that books may act as performative artefacts, and simultaneously discovers the narrative potential of fragmented fictional texts. The hybrid processes used during this research incorporate artistic practice and fiction writing. Throughout the duration of this project, there have been presentations of work across different modes – print publication, live art/performance, conference presentations, articles/essays, workshops, installations and readings. The most significant outcomes of the project are a small collection of physically transformed books, which stand as hybrid art/fiction artefacts. The reader/viewer is encouraged to performatively engage with the books by exploring what is visible, partially visible, and concealed. To spend time touching and reading words, whispers, silence.Item More dream than memory the inextricable link between fiction and dreaming : a novella, "Daydreams of empty skies," together with a critical essay presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in Creative Writing at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand(Massey University, 2019) Miller, PeriThere is a clear and inextricable link between dreaming and fiction. Because of the way REM- sleep dreaming functions, as a hyper-creative state, dreams often serve as the source of inspiration for many authors. Dreaming is also, as one of the most central and yet mysterious aspects of the human experience, commonly used as a plot device or theme in multiple genres of fiction. Furthermore, in terms of how it works in the brain, the experience of reading fiction is remarkably similar to that of a dream. The critical essay argues the above and investigates the use of dream-related themes and devices in Banana Yoshimoto’s Asleep (1989) and Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971). The three short stories that comprise Asleep each take place in a transitional period in each of the respective protagonists’ lives, and the protagonist is required to confront and come to terms with the past in order to escape this dreamlike limbo. The Lathe of Heaven protagonist George Orr’s ability to change reality via his dreams is reflective of the fluctuating dreaming/creative process itself: it is only once Orr loses this ability that he is able to escape the entangled dreams and realities. In the novella, Daydreams of Empty Skies, the protagonist, Astra, finds that her dreams are direct reproductions of her memories. She is recruited to be part of an experiment by Tenjin, a researcher, in Tokyo, Japan. Throughout the story Astra finds the divisions between dream, memory, and reality becoming increasingly thin, and by the end it is unclear whether or not she has escaped this state of being. The novella, in its form and construction, is much like a lucid dream itself—a point which is enlarged upon in the essay.Item The dream called overseas : mobility and creative self-exile in fiction by Charlotte Grimshaw, Paula Morris, and Anne Kennedy : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand(Massey University, 2018) Mitchell, EkaterinaThis thesis investigates how the cultural imaginary of New Zealand is re-examined and redefined through a mobilities paradigm in three contemporary novels by local writers: Charlotte Grimshaw’s Foreign City (2005), Paula Morris’s Queen of Beauty (2002), and Anne Kennedy’s The Last Days of the National Costume (2013). This textual archive evokes and revises mid-century settler cultural nationalist concerns, specifically New Zealand’s perceived cultural and geographical remoteness from the metropolitan centre. Within cultural nationalist discourse, “here and there” were critical geographical and cultural co-ordinates, where “here” referred to a local, derivative reality, while "there” was the centre where history took place. In each of the three novels, the female protagonist moves overseas through a form of creative self-exile, pursuing truthfulness to her artistic nature. However, the characters’ desire for movement takes its origins in patterns of mobility and displacement as experienced by earlier generations. A comparative reading of these novels, alongside a theoretical body of work on mobility, can reveal a unique way in which each writer deals with these concerns, reinterpreting a modernist worldview in the context of the globalised world of the new millennium. Grimshaw approaches literary geography from a semi-ironic angle: although Foreign City deals with a New Zealand artist’s attempt to revisit the inspirational site of Bloomsbury, it is not the real Bloomsbury experience, and thus, it has a distant significance attached to it. For Morris, the remapping project involves inserting Māori cultural aspects into the mobilities paradigm, aligning mobility of stories with mobility of people. In Kennedy’s novel, mobility exposes a settler culture that has failed to live up to its own ideals. Partly set in metropolitan centres, these works of fiction reflect on this country’s settler and immigrant past, proposing an alternative to the modernist European longing that had forged New Zealand’s literary character for several generations. Taken together, this body of contemporary New Zealand fiction indicates the continuing relevance and preoccupation with cultural remarking of distance, isolation, and periphery.Item Inherited body : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand(Massey University, 2017) Styles, Rebecca JoyNarrative ethics is a useful tool for approaching New Zealand historical fiction about family history because it looks to the risks and losses of appropriating family for the author, their subjects, and readers. In the following critical analysis I discuss three recent New Zealand novels based on family historical narratives, each of which depict characters attempting to write their own stories within power structures that threaten to silence them: Alison Wong’s As The Earth Turns Silver (2009), Paula Morris’s Rangatira (2011), and Kelly Ana Morey’s Bloom (2003). For a writer a narrative ethics analysis ensures they acknowledge the ethical implications of their work, not just for their own family, but for collective understanding. My novel Inherited Body fictionalises an incident from my family’s history about mental health and sits alongside a contemporary narrative that seeks to understand the possible causes of a psychotic break. A narrative ethics analysis has highlighted my dual role as reader/critic and writer. Wayne C. Booth’s discussion of narrative ethics emphasises the connection between writer, character and their readers. Adam Zachary Newton expands on this transactive connection and shows the ethical consequences of narrating story and fictionalising people, and the reciprocal claims connecting teller, listener, witness and reader in that process. As a reader, I took on an ethical responsibility to understand the texts, and as a writer, I attempted to understand the effect of my characters and readers of the book’s content. Connecting my critical and creative components with a narrative ethics framework ensures that I see both sides of narrative ethics.Item "Drawing a daisy on a post-it" : expressions of the phenomenology of illness in literary fiction set in 1956 and the present day : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements of Master of Arts in Creative Writing, English and Media Studies at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand(Massey University, 2015) Wootton, Susan RayThis thesis explores representations of the experience of illness in literary fiction. It argues that the portrayal in literature of an imagined character's subjective experience of illness constitutes a phenomenological perspective on the illness experience, and that literary fiction's performance of a phenomenological approach offers important insights to a holistic understanding of illness. Section One is a critical essay which examines two contemporary literary texts by the light of recent scholarship in the areas of medical philosophy and medical sociology. A concern frequently expressed by writers in these areas is that the modern biomedical paradigm, while increasingly sophisticated in its science, risks neglecting its art, and that this, in turn, de-humanises medicine in a manner that is fundamentally harmful to the lived experience of illness. Modes of talking about illness which encompass subjective, phenomenological, experience offer a way to rectify this. I argue that creative fiction is therefore a powerful form in which to explore the lived experience of illness. I apply this notion to a close reading of two literary texts, one set in 1956 and one in the present day. By its very nature, however, literary fiction's power lies in its effects on the imagination, and is only clumsily explained by analytic argument. Thus Section Two of this thesis is a creative partner to the critical essay and aims to demonstrate, or perform, the thesis. This creative section is an extract from a novel called Strip, set in present day New Zealand and told from the perspectives of a mother and a father whose teenage daughter has a terminal illness.Item Images and visions of society in the selected fiction of three New Zealand writers : a thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy at Massey University(Massey University, 1981) Cox, Shelagh FrancesImages and visions of New Zealand society, as they appear in selected works of fiction by John A. Lee, Frank Sargeson and Robin Hyde, are the prime concern of the thesis. The fiction selected for analysis broadly encompasses the decade 1930 to 1940. The dominant image is of New Zealand as the respectable society. However, Lee, Sargeson and Hyde emotionally reject the bourgeois-puritan world they portray in their fiction; all three writers seek alternative societies in which the human qualities they see as denied in bourgeois-puritan life can find expression. The world of the dispossessed, a world seen particularly clearly in the light of the deprivation of the Depression, plays a large part in the fictional images cast by each writer; sometimes it is depicted as a world separated from the respectable society, sometimes it is depicted as a world inevitably locked into the dominant and respectable way of life. However, none of the three writers can find an imaginative resting-place in the world of the dispossessed as an alternative way of life. Furthermore, the writers cannot extend their images of society as they experience it into a Utopian vision of an ideal society which is attainable within the existing social structure. The failure to create a practicable alternative persists in spite of a powerful interest, shared by all three writers, in the social world as they feel it ought to be as well as in the social world as it is. In their quest for alternatives, two of the three writers create visions of potential societies, that is of societies seen as lying beyond the boundaries of the existing social structure. These are not realisable Utopias, as they would be if they were practicable alternatives; instead, they are wish-fulfilment Utopias. In other words they are compensatory in that they embody values repressed in orthodox society. The analytical approach adopted in the thesis consistently views both images and visions of the writers' imagined worlds as either direct or indirect portrayals of the New Zealand society to which the writers belong and which, in the end, shapes their fictional creations. Ultimately, it is argued, the writers' Utopias, like their images of existing society, lack the imaginative and social strength to stand on their own.Item Girls and boys come out to stay : ideological formations in New Zealand-set children's fiction 1862-1917 : a dissertation presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Engliah at Massey University(Massey University, 2003) Beets, JacquelineThis dissertation examines ideological formations contained in children's fiction set in New Zealand and published between 1862 and 1917, considering forty-five primary texts (mostly novels, but also some short stories and picture-books) in light of their cultural background and relevant literary and postcolonial theory. The first three chapters discuss these works' representation of Maori, focusing upon a number of recurrent tropes and themes applicable to pakeha (European) desire for indigenisation in a colonised land; upon myths justifying dispossession of land from Maori; upon ideologies of Maori physical and moral degeneration (including cannibalism, savagery, alcoholism, and disease); and upon attitudes towards miscegenation. Chapter Four analyses the works as politically conservative middle-class propaganda which presents New Zealand as a means to financial, personal, and familial betterment for the emigrant of middling status. Chapter Five probes the texts' strongly evangelical spiritual and moral messages, which suggest the possibility of a utopian colonial settlement realised through pure young settlers. Chapter Six discusses presentations of gender roles and assumptions in this fiction, demonstrating to what extent it was receptive towards or even instigated fresh ideas for gender modelling in children's literature (for instance the feminised or androgynous boy and the active, assertive girl). Chapter Seven examines ways in which the texts advertise broad ideals of the British Empire, such as patriotism, military might, self-sacrifice or martyrdom, and imperialistic paternalism. Overall, the dissertation reveals early New Zealand-set children's fiction as perpetuating contemporary British ideological values through its intertextual recycling and repetition of familiar tropes and themes, thus making a significant contribution towards the wider corpus of postcolonial literature.Item Metafiction in New Zealand from the 1960s to the present day : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, Massey University, Albany, New Zealand(Massey University, 2011) Harris, MatthewWhile studies of metafiction have proliferated across America and Europe, the present thesis is the first full-length assessment of its place in the literature of New Zealand. Taking as its point of reference a selection of works from authors Janet Frame, C.K. Stead, Russell Haley, Michael Jackson and Charlotte Randall, this thesis employs a synthesis of contextual and performative frameworks to examine how the internationallyprevalent mode of metafiction has influenced New Zealand fiction since the middle of the 20th century. While metafictional texts have conventionally been thought to undermine notions of realism and sever illusions of representation, this thesis explores ways in which the metafictional mode in New Zealand since the 1960s might be seen to expand and augment realism by depicting individual modes of thought and naturalising unique forms of self-reflection, during what some commentators have seen as a period of cultural ‘inwardness’ following various socio-political shifts in the latter part of 20th century New Zealand.Item "Ungrown-up grown-ups" : the representation of adolescence in twentieth-century New Zealand young adult fiction : a dissertation presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand(Massey University, 2004) Laurs, Deborah ElizabethBehaviouralists consider adolescence a time for developing autonomy, which accords with Michel Foucault‘s power/knowledge dynamic that recognises individuals‘ assertion of independence as a crucial element within society. Surprisingly, however, twentieth-century New Zealand Young Adult (YA) fiction tends to disempower adolescents, by portraying an adultist version of them as immature and unprepared for adult responsibilities. By depicting events through characters‘ eyes, a focalising device that encourages reader identification with the narratorial point-of-view, authors such as Esther Glen, Isabel Maud Peacocke, Joyce West, Phillis Garrard, Tessa Duder, Lisa Vasil, Margaret Mahy, William Taylor, Kate de Goldi, Paula Boock, David Hill, Jane Westaway, and Bernard Beckett stress the importance of conforming to adult authority. Rites of passage are rarely attained; protagonists respect their elders, and juvenile delinquents either repent or are punished for their misguided behaviours. ―Normal‖ expectations are established by the portrayal of single parents who behave ―like teenagers‖: an unnatural role reversal that demands a return to traditional hegemonic roles. Adolescents must forgive adults‘ failings within a discourse that rarely forgives theirs. Depictions of child abuse, while deploring the deed, tend to emphasise victims‘ forbearance rather than admitting perpetrators‘ culpability. As Foucault points out, adolescent sexuality both fascinates and alarms adult society. Within the texts, sex is strictly an adult prerogative, reserved for reproduction within marriage, with adolescent intimacy sanctioned only between couples who conform to the middle-class ideal of monogamy. On the other hand, teenagers who indulge in casual sex are invariably given cause to regret. Such presentations operate vicariously to protect readers from harm, but also create an idealised, steadfast sense of adultness in the process.
