Lorna Wilkinson

Lorna Wilkinson

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College: College of Humanities

I completed my BA in English Studies at the University of Exeter in 2010 and returned later the same year to undertake an MA in Creative Writing, graduating in 2012 with Distinction. In 2013, I began my PhD in English. My thesis, entitled “‘A Blur of Potentialities’: The Figure of the Trickster in the Works of Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark”, explores how certain mid-twentieth-century British writers incorporated allusive, liminal characters into their fiction as a way of probing and potentially healing anxieties about art, society, the self, and religion. The thesis considers such characters within the literary tradition of the “trickster” figure, and argues that a "trickster paradigm" emerged in fiction in the middle of the twentieth century as a reaction to factors including the fracturing effects of war and shifting literary styles.