Thesis Defence: Littlewood

Andisha Sabri, supervised by Professor Anne Fleming, will defend their thesis titled “Littlewood” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

An abstract for Andisha Sabri’s thesis is included below.

Defences are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. Registration is not required for in person defences.

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ABSTRACT

Littlewood is an off-beat dark comedy and pastiche of the Victorian novel about a lonely yet imaginative little girl uncovering family secrets at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Part of the novel is told through her allegedly dead, spiritualist mother’s diary. In a subversion of Jane Eyre, the little girl’s governess does not marry her father—the novel’s un-self-aware antagonist. The novel is highly intertextual in a playful yet critical way, and tackles themes like mental health, gender inequality, classism, and imperialism at a level beyond the protagonist’s age. It adopts the nineteenth century narration style of third-person-omniscient quippy asides, but with commentary that comes from the vantage point of the twenty-first century. Set within an isolated English country house of the same name, Littlewood indulges in gothic tropes and imagery while any real horror experienced by its characters stems from their unresolved and untenable moral and psychological positions—the ‘family curse’ being reimagined as a manifestation of white guilt.