Welter of blood: A novel

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2011-08

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Abstract

This dissertation, Welter of Blood: A Novel, follows three generations of a family living in Oklahoma and focuses on historical events particular to the state. Set in the fall of 2001, the story uses associative memory to collapse time and allow characters to revisit moments from their past. In 1921, Louis Eishen bears witness to the Tulsa Race Riots and is complicit in concealing that tragedy. His daughter, Martha, is sent to a home for unwed mothers at the end of the Baby-Scoop Era in 1971 and gives up a child for adoption. Her son, Henry, works as an underground tattooist—defying a state-wide ban on tattooing that existed in Oklahoma from 1963 to 2006—and contends with the resuscitation of an old friendship and his family's history. Told in alternating points of view, the story has a polyphonic quality that acknowledges the problematic nature of objectivity and employs one of the privileged modes of narration for the Historiographic Metafiction novel as defined by Linda Hutcheon. Moving from themes of burial to excavation, the novel explores how we understand each other and ourselves through the stories we tell and those we are unwilling or unable to articulate.

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Oklahoma

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