This Great Love Affair with Britain

Date of Award

Spring 2025

Project Type

Thesis

Program or Major

Writing

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts

First Advisor

Thomas Payne

Second Advisor

Christine O'Kreefe

Third Advisor

Susan Hertz

Abstract

This thesis is profusely divided into two parts. Both respectively explore characters in a desperate search for love, belonging, and happiness with the places and people around them. The collection of seven short stories, but specifically the first six, operate as works of linked literary fiction chronicling authentic experiences, including the people I have loved and lost along my journey to England. My obsession with British culture surfaced early as a child, and like each character’s distinct struggle, this yearning manifests naturally in its intensity as does their isolation. Despite the latter story departing from lived reality, this does not dismiss its value as linked and another installment in my experiment with writing historical fiction. An exiled Aztec man, servant to a king, watches Tenochtitlán, his home, collapse upon the mysterious arrival of the Spanish in the Americas. The second half of this thesis includes five consequential chapters from The Loyalist, a novel set before, during, and after the events of the American Revolutionary War for Independence. It champions the marginalized lens of a Tory boy, James Shackleton, who navigates the Thirteen Colonies over a lifetime to defend the British against his governor father and Whig-leaning contemporaries. My creative goals are rather clear: develop nourishing worlds, rich characters with extremely rich emotions, the complex and unanswerable sort that defies conventional storytelling means and reckons with what it feels like to be human. These works are testament to my imperfections, but also to my unique and bountiful strengths, as always being the main character of my fiction writing.

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