Dreamland : a novel, and, Modes of textual division in the post-2000 novel : critical thesis

Mohan, Des (2020) Dreamland : a novel, and, Modes of textual division in the post-2000 novel : critical thesis. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This thesis comprises two parts. The novel, Dreamland, is the story of seventeen-year-old Joe Duffy, who leaves his family home in Liverpool in search of his older brother who has gone missing in London. The themes, techniques, and findings examined in the critical thesis have informed the composition of the novel: in particular, the creative work exploits the capacity of techniques of narrative division to interact with linguistic content in the representation of the protagonist’s consciousness.

The second part is a critical study that investigates the form and function of a mode of textual division in a group of twenty-first-century novels whose linguistic content is presented in short narrative sections divided by horizontal margins of white space; it is a technique that imparts an unconventional ‘gappy’ appearance to the pages. This gappy mode of textual division in certain contemporary novels is historicized in two preliminary chapters: the first chapter surveys formative pre-novelistic influences on conventions of narrative division; the second chapter follows the course and career of modes of narrative division in novelistic practice. The primary focus of the thesis is contained in the third chapter where case studies are made of four twenty-first-century novels that share the distinctive gappy format. By a close reading of these works, the thesis analyses how their modes of textual division interact with the linguistic content of the novels to generate a range of interpretative possibilities for their narratives.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature and Creative Writing (former - to 2011)
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	02 Aug 2021 13:23
Last Modified:	02 Aug 2021 13:23
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/80951
DOI:

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