Composed of interlocking critical and creative parts my proposed thesis will increase understanding of the ways in which social media, whilst alleging to be democratic and polyphonic, has to a large extent become the monologic narrative of our time. The research will be grounded in Virginia Woolf's notion of 'a saturation of detail' in 'The Waves' and 'Between the Acts' and Bernadine Evaristo's 'fusion fiction', evidenced in her 2016 novel, 'Girl, Woman, Other'. I have chosen to focus on these texts, despite the radically different positionalities of their authors, because they align closely with the thematic concerns at the heart of my novel: the narrating I, the identification and diversification of self and an enduring concern for those who are 'othered'. Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the polyphonic novel, and the critical discourse which surrounds it, will inform the project's theoretical framework. I will also look at how the modern polyphonic novel, which embraces simultaneity, empty space, and multimedia intrusions into the text (for instance, Jenny Egan's 'Visit to the Good Squad'), can more accurately reproduce the ways we construct and negotiate our modern narrative self in the world. The question of voice is central to my novel, which will focus on a ten-year-old child's decision to stop speaking, following a prolonged Covid lockdown with her family. Competing voices in the novel will seek to establish reasons for her decision, creating counter stories: her aunt is a climate activist and has paralysed the child with anxiety, her mother has lost touch with her family over Brexit and is now depressed, her grandparents are contemplating divorce, her brother is being bullied online, her father is a fitness fanatic and failed businessman. Opinion will divide on questions of what explains the silence; desiring a harmonising truth that is impossible to establish, thereby setting up tension of form and subject in a polyphonic novel that will push against Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia. The effect of the child's silence will ripple beyond the family and immediate community, as she becomes a social media sensation, where the choice of silence is seen by some as a rebellious, even treacherous, act and by others as a stand against a world that insists a 'self' only exists when it is in dialogue. I have in mind the image from 'Between the Acts' where Giles steps on the snake having so much trouble swallowing the toad that it seems to become a 'monstrous inversion' of the birth process. The child in my novel, raised to socialise and be fluent in both verbal and nonverbal language, is similarly choked by the competing voices. The novel will explore how the family negotiates the attention, opprobrium, incendiary and violent language emanating from 'public opinion' as mediated via social media. It will use white space (the equivalence of silence), inference, gaps in story and multiple viewpoints to disrupt the generic narrative structure and challenge the authority of voice(s), as the question all the characters want answered, why won't the child speak, cannot be resolved unless she chooses to. The close analysis in my critical thesis, regarding the scope and metamorphoses of the polyphonic novel, and my practice-based writing of it, is timely as it reflects new technology, plays with it, rails against it and explores its potential to shape a modern sense of self in a world filled with so much competing noise.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Though magical realist fiction has been recognised as a powerful medium with which to represent trauma and extremity, the capacity of the genre to speak about traumatic experiences of mental illness is only just being discovered. With the prevalence of mental illness rising dramatically in Western cultures, creative engagement with the topic has never been more needed. I propose to write a magical realist novel about a young woman diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and her bewitching therapist, in order to push the boundary of how the genre can be used to portray the internal world of a mentally ill protagonist. This project will be informed by a critical examination of four contemporary magical realist 'madness novels', which I will use to explore (1) how magical realist techniques can be used to bring the reader closer to the trauma of madness, (2) how the boundary between magic and madness can be blurred to portray the bewilderment of being mentally ill, and (3) the extent to which it is meaningful to even distinguish between magic and madness in fiction. As a whole, this creative-critical thesis seeks to diversify and deepen the conversation on mental illness in literature by investigating new ways of telling stories about it.

This project explores the ways in which historic and contemporary folk horror stories around soil and earth have shaped perceptions of and interactions with rural land in the UK and USA. I will bring scientific research on the connections between soil, public health, and bodily wellness into dialogue with dark folkloric narratives - particularly those that rely on burial, decay, and exhumation - to understand how the recent folk horror revival is connected to rising environmental anxieties about soil erosion and the pollution of land used for food production. The project will apply and evaluate the concept of One Health as defined by the WHO to assess the connections between the land, its soil, and the people who live upon and tell stories about it. The project will be based on, and contribute to, three main research fields: medical humanities, folk horror, and agricultural humanities. This project will fill a major research gap, for soil as an active agent in literature and popular culture has not received adequate scholarly attention despite the essential role of soil in the health and survival of all life on earth.

The research project is focused on composition using sound recordings that allow listener-participants to reflect on noise pollution and develop new insight into its causes and ramifications, as well as demonstrating the subjective nature of noise. A portfolio of compositions will be produced focusing in the first two years on solo and small ensemble works, allowing the exploration of different approaches using noise, with the intention of writing a larger scale work in the final year. This study will include site-specific pieces using recordings from publicly accessible areas including local National Trust sites, creating installations using local noise polluting sounds. The accompanying commentary will document and critically reflect on the process - including the rehearsing and performing of works - and provide an overview of the theoretical concepts that stimulate the work and place it in context. We all have the ability to hear noise, but rather than just hearing noise, many composers have been interested in how we listen. Pieces such as, Hildegard Westerkamp's Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989), Peter Ablinger's Sitting and Hearing (1995), and Matthew Shlomowitz's Lecture About Listening To Music (2017) all deal with our perception of noise and challenge our listening methods. With depleting natural wildlife, now struggling against our sounding environment, we are mostly subjected to the monotonous din of traffic noise (Parris and Schneider 2009). Since the release of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring (1962), which resulted in the development of the Environmental Protection Agency, the environmental crisis caused by human involvement has been at the forefront of debate (Paull 2013). Increasingly, composers are looking to environmental studies to evaluate the implications of human noise towards natural soundscapes. Of particular note is composer and theorist R. Murray Schafer's study of Acoustic Ecology, which seeks to find relationships between humans and a balanced soundscape or acoustic environment (Schafer 1977). Often, transportation is the most prominent cause of noise pollution (EEA 2009), with low-fidelity sounds removing variety and nuance from our soundscapes (Schafer 1977). Moreover, Guattari's 'The Three Ecologies' (1989) suggests that 'we have challenged the Earth enough and are now on the brink of ecocide (Pindar and Sutton 2000, pp. 3). Environmentalists are looking to sound art in demonstration of the resulting sound/silence of mass extinction. Landscape ecologist Bernie Krause uses field recordings, in The Great Animal Orchestra (2012), to show the quietening effect aeroplanes have when cruising over forests. We have also seen an emergence of composers who work with animal sounds, such as David Rothenberg (2005), who co-creates pieces with animals, exploring the importance of their communication. Theories on listening, such as Michel Chion's three listening modes (1990), causal listening (identifying sound sources), semantic listening (sociocultural reading of signs and messages) and reduced listening (sound as a purely sonorous phenomenon) and Eric Clarke's book Ways of Listening (2012), challenge our initial perceptions of noise. According to Attali (2014, pp. 26), 'noise is a resonance that interferes with the audition of a message in the process of emission'. This might suggest, in relation to Chion's semantic listening, that noise interferes with our ability to apprehend a given sound, creating a blockage in our ability to apprehend meaning.