Haunted by the Present: Revelation and the Queer Historical Thriller

Fergusson, Ben Richard (2023) Haunted by the Present: Revelation and the Queer Historical Thriller. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This PhD seeks to explore how revelation is figured in historical thrillers centred on queer characters. Queerness and history, as well as the genre of the thriller, all have an elemental relationship to questions of concealment and disclosure. As such, in what this study refers to as the ‘queer historical thriller’, queer, historical and narrative conceptions of concealment and disclosure work with and against one another to subvert the idea of truth and its relationship to queer identities.

The critical element of this PhD will explore these questions by making the case for the queer historical thriller as a distinctive sub-genre. This will be followed by the core of the critical submission: a close reading of Sarah Waters’ novel, Fingersmith, which, it will be argued, is an exemplary queer historical thriller, in both the sense of a best example and originator of broader tendencies in a genre that Waters helped define.

The creative element of the PhD is a new queer historical thriller entitled Finch. The novel, set in Victorian Liverpool, follows a professional widow, Florence Lilly, and a charlatan, Stephen Breslin, who decide to pass themselves off as the missing siblings of John Finch ¬– a man about to inherit the largest fortune in Liverpool. But their endeavour is not without great risk: Finch is a suspect in the disappearance of his siblings, which will allow him to inherit the Finch fortune in full. As Florence and Stephen attempt to embed themselves in Finch’s life, the lines between their real and assumed identities begin to blur, and family secrets, death and desire threaten to undo them.

Taken as a whole, the critical and creative submissions of this PhD explore the complex ways in which the queer historical thriller is able to expand our notions of concealment and revelation in fictional texts and thus subvert our expectations of genre.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	05 Nov 2024 08:47
Last Modified:	05 Nov 2024 08:47
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/97492
DOI:

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