Committee Chair

Baker, Sybil

Committee Member

Babine, Karen, 1978-; Hampton, Bryan

Department

Dept. of English

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Publisher

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Place of Publication

Chattanooga (Tenn.)

Abstract

The thesis titled “Lucille Excerpts” by Graicen O’Neal Hixson contains two parts. The first is a ten-page craft paper analyzing worldbuilding within three novels: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. The craft paper uses the book Wonderbook: The Illustrative Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff VanderMeer to analyze how setting and character form worldbuilding within the three chosen novels. This thesis also contains approximately fifty pages of prose from Lucille, a dystopian novel about the titular character’s world-altering actions after the murder of her wife by their government. The multi-chapter excerpts from this novel are non-chronological with summaries of the plot between chapters.

Acknowledgments

More than is possible to acknowledge, I am grateful for and thank my family who have given me the privilege of living the life I have just begun. Mom, Dad, Nana, Grandpa and Alwayna, Lawler, Sissie, Deb, Johnny and more-- you are the reason I am capable of my accomplishments. I also want to thank every friend, especially my two best friends of over a decade, Robin and Lily, who have supported all of my aspirations. Specifically, I give my gratitude to Hannah Storm and Keily Blair who I leaned on for academic and non-academic support. You two were always my first readers or first listeners. I would have been unable to complete this process without my professors. Thank you to my thesis director Professor Sybil Baker for teaching me how to sit down and write a novel. Thank you to my committee members, Dr. Karen Babine and Dr. Bryan Hampton, for supporting me where my knowledge lacks. And thank you to my seventh-grade English teacher, Kelly Picone, for encouraging my creativity before I realized that I could write as a career. Also, a huge shout out to the staff in the UTC Library’s Studio, Amber you know how long we worked on this! My appreciation also goes out to the WCC staff in the UTC Library. I am grateful, too, for my peer Madison Silva who served as a lighthouse that guided my way through this thesis process. And a final, special thank you to my dogs, both gone and still here, who provided names for many characters or places in my novel. May they live forever in my world.

Degree

M. A.; A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts.

Date

5-2024

Subject

Characters and characteristics in literature; Description (Rhetoric); Dystopias in literature; Fantasy fiction--Authorship; Plots (Drama, novel, etc.); Setting (Literature)

Keyword

creative writing; novel; novel excerpts; dystopia; craft; fiction

Document Type

Masters theses

DCMI Type

Text

Extent

vii, 51 leaves

Language

English

Rights

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Date Available

5-31-2026

Download

Available for download on Sunday, May 31, 2026

Share

COinS