Fifth of July: hybrid genre texts and a story in a mind: on hybridity as creative practice

Moore, E.G (2024) Fifth of July: hybrid genre texts and a story in a mind: on hybridity as creative practice. PhD thesis, Bath Spa University.

Abstract

This project explores modes of hybridity in creative and critical writing. Fifth of July is a collection of hybrid genre texts: prose forms that range from short lyrics to longer narrative essays. The backbone of the book is a sequence that unfolds over the course of a single day (the speaker's 30th birthday), while shorter, interleaved texts spin off to examine the speaker's relationship with her obsessions and her own mind. A Story in a Mind engages both with the craft of the creative work and, through exploring the relationship between hybridity and creative practice, the mind that produced it. The introduction orients the reader to a lineage of hybrid genre writing and proposes the idea of the author's mind as the self-referential arbiter of the project. The subsequent three essays examine three kinds of relationships in hybrid genre writing: between writer and reader, in 'Lecture Halls and Labyrinths: On Digression'; between form and tone, in 'Anyway, Back to the Critic: On Metaphor.' In addition to the creative artefact itself (by which is meant both Fifth of July and the essays comprising A Story in a Mind), this project contributes to new knowledge in the field of creative writing by providing a model for writers to access and employ hybridity not just at the level of content and form, but at the level of creative practice. This research (by which is meant both A Story in a Mind and the texts comprising Fifth of July) suggests that perceiving, naming, and even insisting on relationships is the foundational exercise of hybridity in writing. Further, this exercise of bringing together seemingly disparate genres, modes of expression, tonal registers, ideas, images, and disciplines is a type metaphorical thinking. Ultimately, this work contends that the act of metaphor-making is more than craft strategy; it is a creative practice that is central to the impetus of the mind to understand itself.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Keywords:	creative writing, hybridity, creative practice, metaphor-making
Divisions:	School of Writing, Publishing and the Humanities
Date Deposited:	13 Jun 2024 13:44
Last Modified:	14 Jun 2024 21:39
URI / Page ID:	https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/16307

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