Sewanee DSpace Repository
DSpace is a digital service that collects, preserves, and distributes digital material. Repositories are important tools for preserving an organization's legacy; they facilitate digital preservation and scholarly communication.
Recent Submissions
Item The Sewanee Purple(University of the South, 2025-04-30)Item To Be Conquered or Conformed: The Racial Construction of the Qing Dynasty and Meiji Japan in the Western Mind Mid-Nineteenth to Early Twentieth Century(University of the South, 2025-04-25)During the mid-late nineteenth century Western constructions of the Chinese and Japanese races were based upon the country’s willingness to conform to Western epistemology. The Qing dynasty in China, through the Self-Strengthening Movement, sought to forge a hybrid path to modernity that combined Western and Chinese practices while resisting foreign intervention. The Qing’s unwillingness to conform to Euro-American norms led them to be constructed through a lens of Oriental despotism which dismissed them as stagnant and uncivilized in the Western mind. In contrast, the modernization of Japan during the Meiji Restoration (1868) and its subsequent confirmation to Western epistemology allowed it to be constructed through a paternalistic lens as a civilized nation capable of progress in Western discourse. However, in the early twentieth century the rising military power of Japan signaled a threat to the race-based epistemology of the West and the hegemony of white Western powers; thus the Japanese were constructed as the ‘modern despot’ in Western discourse.Item Butterfly Dinner Party(University of the South, 2024-07-31)Creative writing thesis for the school of letters. This includes a lot of play with form, tenses, and big ideas ("you" taking care of your elderly self/ Men with too much money/ ask your MIL permission to remarry/ life in hindsight/ retelling of the first woman/ and a portrait of family and personal experiences).Item Beneath the Cypress Shadows: A Collection of Southern Gothic Horror Stories(University of the South, 2024-12-19)Beneath the Cypress Shadows was born from a desire to create a collection of Southern Gothic stories that explore where horror stems from in our lives. Bookended with two flash fiction pieces (“Regeneration” and “Renewal”) set in a West Tennessee swamp containing a lone tree at its center that, in the real world, exists only a few miles from my house, these stories bring into question if we are the creators of our own horrors. Purposefully setting almost every story in fictional small towns that resemble many of ours in West Tennessee, I wanted to create a sense of home sometimes being the birth of many of our own horrors. Besides answering the question of horror and its development in the characters of these stories, this collection was also written as an outlet for my own personal struggles through major life changes that I was going through while writing many of the stories you read here. Deaths, divorce, career changes, and other twists and turns in my life helped me create characters that, although faced with horrors, creatures, demons, dismal settings, and more, could somehow reach readers somewhere in their own lives and their own horrors. I believe we write to reveal our own lives in a way that we can dissect or perhaps hide away the parts of us we don’t want to reveal or the parts that we want to pull out and lay bare to heal ourselves. It is my hope that through this collection, through the horrors we face in our lives, somehow a hidden healing emerges in its own way by telling ourselves the stories we must in order that we begin to change our lives.Item Aeldred’s Wandering Tales: Writ of a Mind Between Here and There(University of the South, 2024-12-19)This thesis is a collection of short stories framed as the work of a fictional character within a fantasy world called Odium. Aeldred Gundry suffers from a gradual mental decline at the end of his life due to a curse. He creates this collection of stories as a way to remember where he went and who he met in his youth. Every story documents the many lives and cultures of Odium, drawn from Aeldred’s own adventures. The collection is structured around seven short stories and smaller interview-style segments that precede each of the stories. Each one explores one of the distinct races that inhabit Odium and significant events in their histories. The interviews serve not only to introduce the cultural lens through which the following story unfolds but also to tell their own story. As the interviews progress, two distinct parts of Aeldred’s life intertwine into a mystery he is not sure he can solve. The stories connect with each other and with the interviews, and the collection as a whole is linked to a larger work in progress. Many characters featured here make a reappearance in a novel setting. This collection draws from many traditions of high fantasy and speculative fiction from authors like Garth Nix, R.A. Salvatore, H.P. Lovecraft, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Video games such as Kingdoms of Amalur, Dragons Dogma: Dark Arisen, and The Elder Scrolls series also play a large role in inspiring my writing. This influence often manifests with each story acting as a narrative “quest,” highlighting cultural and existential conflicts that connect between stories in the collection. On a different level, the collection examines the role of the storyteller as both creator and interpreter. The fictional character writing these stories to himself becomes a surrogate for the author and blurs the lines between fiction and creation. Since Aeldred is losing his grip on reality, readers are invited to question the authenticity and reliability of the stories themselves. How much of the text reflects the truth, and how much is creative embellishment? What details are made up by Aeldred’s deteriorating mind? This tension between truth and fiction mirrors the real-world ways history, culture, and identity can be preserved and distorted through storytelling. One of the primary goals in writing about the world of Odium is to create an accessible experience for readers who may not typically engage with fantasy fiction. I have often heard that fantasy feels too complicated or foreign to be relatable or enjoyable. Fantasy, at times, can create a sense of distance, and this work aims to bridge that gap. Ultimately, this work seeks to immerse readers in a world as vivid and complex as its inhabitants. It challenges readers to reflect on what it means to preserve knowledge in a world where everything is constantly changing, especially our own minds.
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