This thesis explores creative processes in literary creativity and art-making via fictocritical responses to the works of Emily Brontë. It provides new insights into creative processes as responses to fiction and art. Fictocriticism is a methodology that combines fiction and criticism, existing within, and exploring the space between, these two categories. ‘We Three’ presents its fictocritical responses to Brontë through two Brontë-inspired fictional characters: literary academic and poet Dr Emily Lamb, and visual artist Heather Bradshaw. By oscillating between and subverting the modalities of literary and art criticism, poetry, visual art and ekphrasis, it examines the intersubjective dynamics of creativity at multiple levels of remove from its muse for creativity (Brontë’s works). Brontë’s poetry (1836-1848) and novel Wuthering Heights (1847) are pertinent subjects to unite the elements of this thesis. This is because they are concerned with creativity in the sense of the power of the imagination and the limits of narrative and poetic form. The hauntings, visions and dreams in Wuthering Heights make it a vivid and indelible reading experience. As such, the exploration of its life in the imagination of a fictional writer and artist provides insights into the nature of that experience, inspiration, and creative and critical synthesis as responses to fiction. The choice of Brontë enabled the author to root this fictocritical research in an extended, personal, and intellectual relationship with a literary text. This is important for the depth and breadth of both the fiction and art created, and its critical analysis. This thesis contributes to the field of Creative Writing by providing a new model for conducting fictocritical research: that of responding to a literary work through fictional characters working across disciplines and modalities, to engage with and produce new knowledge about a given subject (in this case, creativity). It models the use of a literary work as a rhizomatic map for creativity (in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari set out in A Thousand Plateaus), orientating the researcher towards experimentation in contact with the real. This thesis contributes to Literary Studies and3Brontë scholarship by providing a unique phenomenological description of imaginative and artistic engagement with Brontë, which adds to our understanding of her work. Finally, it develops, presents, and affirms the value of a particular kind of private, necessary, ‘ritual creativity’, inspired by Wuthering Heights, that communes with the ineffable, multi-dimensional experience of a work of art or fiction.
‘We Three’: processes of literary creativity and art- making through fictocritical responses to the works of Emily Brontë
Bell, E. (Author). Jun 2024
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis