Believing in mermaids : the creation of persuasive underwater worlds in the face of disenchantment

Abstract

The thesis is composed of two parts: Believing in mermaids""the creation of persuasive underwater worlds in the face of disenchantment: a critical and creative response and Believing in mermaids""the creation of persuasive underwater worlds in the face of disenchantment: a critical essay. The first part 'The Cry of the Swan' is a folktale composed by mermaids. It is known to have its origins in a human story of which all that survives is the title, The Suicide Kiss""the story itself having been lost to the sea. The tale has been known variously in other editions as The Call of the Siren (or The Siren Call), The Starless Pools, The Shy Water and The Unlit Lake. The version presented here is a re-translation of that tale from the mermaid tongue into English, based on mermaid engravings. It must be accepted that with each successive shuffle there have been losses and gains. The second part represents the fruits of an inquiry into literary method whose objective was to find a means of imparting the literary qualities common to the genre of literary fiction""such as the foregrounding of interesting language forms, cadence, specificity and complexity""to fantastic literature, using stories involving mermaids as a case study. Part I provides a comparative analysis of a group of three texts from the early 20th-century""The Sea Lady, The Sea Fairies and Wet Magic""which betray a tension between the realist and fantastic modes when telling stories involving mermaids and underwater worlds. In part II I propose a method of imparting the believability and "precision" of detail that Borges discusses (77) to an underwater fantasy world in which the physical environment renders most real-world details meaningless or absurd. This method entails an application and re-purposing of the theory of "functional equivalence" from translation theory and is based upon a utilisation of the writings of Umberto Eco. Part III will discuss the use of mistranslation as a model and other strategies for creating a dense, specific and richly-textured 'other world' in Vladimir Nabokov's Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.

Date of Award	2017
Original language	English