Browsing by Author "Jackson, Conrad"

This thesis comprises a close reading of Jim Dodge’s novel Stone Junction (1999), an examination of whether the monomyth framework can be applied to protagonist Daniel Pearse’s quest, a categorisation of the novel as fully or partially belonging to certain genres, comparisons between genre features, and an analysis of the correlations between the genre and monomyth elements. The monomyth, a tool for analysing myths presented by Joseph Campbell in his seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), consists of stages of initiation, separation and return, each of which is composed of subsections. Starting and ending points of each of the monomyth’s stages and subsections are identified in Stone Junction, as are the positionings of genre features. The genres considered are Bildungsroman, Künstlerroman, Magic Realism, Mystery Fiction, Detective Fiction, the Crime Novel and the Road Novel. All monomyth stages occur in Stone Junction, whereas some subsections are absent, incomplete or do not appear in chronological order. However, this is not found to significantly reduce the applicability of the monomyth theory to the novel. All the above genres, too, occur in Stone Junction, with the exception of Künstlerroman. Some genre features are present throughout, while others are distinguishable in some parts. No one genre feature or monomyth component is found to dominate, and each element is observed to contribute in its own distinct way to the novel. Stone Junction owes much of its strength to the way Dodge has combined the genre features with the monomyth framework.