Date of Graduation
5-2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (MFA)
Degree Level
Graduate
Department
English
Advisor/Mentor
Toni L. Jensen
Committee Member
Bryan M. Hurt
Second Committee Member
Jen Fawkes
Keywords
Creative writing; Fiction; Dutch East India Company
Abstract
Abstract The following thesis contains the first sixteen chapters of the novel, tentatively titled Wayward. The story takes place in a fantastical setting based roughly off the rule of the Dutch East India Company’s colonial and corporate rule of modern-day Indonesia, with a focus on the lives and actions of characters living under its corporatized, colonized rule. Following the death of her sister to disease, the protagonist deserts her inherited position as an indentured company tenant in the company of a crew of pirates, pursuing the source of a haunted mirror. Pursuing in her wake are two other young women—one a company scion working with a powerful corporate overlord in hopes of saving her position and people, the other the ghost of the protagonist’s dead sister, who travels through a phantasmagoric, limbo-like space haunted with the sea’s directionless dead. Through their tour of ever more unstable and strange holdings of the company, these three perspective characters struggle with notions of grief, community, legacy, and what it means to find agency in a world so dictated by violent and mercantile powers.
Citation
Flannery, B. C. (2024). Wayward: a Novel. Graduate Theses and Dissertations Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/5364