Date of Award

Fall 2023

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

English Language and Literatures

First Advisor

David Bajo

Abstract

Iowa Gothic deals with the stories that we tell ourselves, for better or worse, and is an interconnected short story collection set in the fictional town of Madison, Iowa. The stories are grounded in realism, but are also slightly off from the way we typically experience the world: a hoarder who tries to win a cooking contest by boiling a rabbit, a woman who recreates her neighbors' living rooms out of their yard sale items, a hypnotic rooster that starts a feud, residents who believe in ghosts, or at least the communal value of ghost stories. By asking the reader to agree to these conceits, the narrative exists in a world that is at once familiar and unfamiliar, one that's only mostly comfortable because liable to split open at any time. Characters reappear at different stages in their lives and in the context of their relationships to other characters. Each story is told in the third person point of view except the very last, the story told by the overarching figure of the book, the only "I" narrator. The characters' grotesque ways of thinking are born from the dynamics of their town and the latent guilt created by its forgotten origins. The buried nature of this communal guilt contributes to many of the gothic moments in the collection.

Rights

© 2024, Caroline Bailey Lewis

Download

Share

COinS