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PEARL: A Doctorate in Creative Writing
Hughes, Sian A.
Hughes, Sian A.
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2022-08
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Abstract
The novel PEARL is inspired by the fourteenth-century poem known by the same name, found in the same manuscript as the better-known Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The poem Pearl has remained until now in the hands of scholars and poets, and although it has been translated in recent years to great critical success, by Jane Draycott and Simon Armitage, it has not previously inspired a prose story based on its emblems or central concerns. A meditation on the imagery and preoccupations of the poem, the novel borrows from its patterns as well as its plot, moving the original work into a new genre.
Central to both the poem and the novel is a relationship between a parent and child that continues after the death of one of them, and where the roles of teacher and pupil, child and adult, become in time reversed or complicated.
In the second part of the thesis the Critical Commentary draws on my reading and translations of the poem Pearl, as well as research into local myths and village customs, children’s singing games and rhymes about death and burial and folklore, in particular those stories that deal with transmigration of the soul. As the novel is set in the early 21st century the Critical Commentary also draws on readings of contemporary fiction and memoir that deal with sudden death, suicide and grief.
Both the novel PEARL and the Critical Commentary are forms of creative autobiography, and share a structure that weaves poetry, song, and memory into a dense collage of prose. This in turn echoes the complex repetitions and patterns of the poem that inspired both pieces of writing.
The poem Pearl has been called a lament, or a meditation on death, but it is also a love-song addressed to the lost infant and a kind of wish-fulfilment in that the poem brings the lost child to the riverbank of life and death to console her father. Similarly the novel can be read as a lament for a lost childhood, but also, more positively, as a re-creation of that lost world and an act of devotion to the person who is being mourned. The novel and the commentary are both a form of tribute to the poem that inspired them, re-creating a sensory map of the lost world of the poem. On a personal level they are also both also an act of mourning for my mother, a way of re-visiting the songs and stories she taught me, a re-creation of the mythical and musical map of the village where I lived as a child.
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Hughes, Sian A. (2023). PEARL: A Doctorate in Creative Writing [Unpublished doctoral thesis]. University of Chester.
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University of Chester
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Thesis or dissertation
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en