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In 2020, as she worked on her novel The Vaster Wilds, Lauren Groff was reading through all of Shakespeare’s plays. The Vaster Wilds is set in the late winter of 1610, during the “starving time” of the Jamestown colony, and her reading project was helping her to catch an ear for the language of the time––as an exercise, Groff reportedly wrote a version of the novel in blank verse. While The Vaster Wilds taps into the textures and rhythms of Shakespearean language, it tends to avoid citation or quotation, except in one part of the text: the names given to the servant girl whose escape from the Jamestown colony into the wilderness makes up the action of the novel. Through these appropriations of Shakespeare, the novel plays out an ambivalence about the relationship between words, writing, and power, working through multiple possibilities for how to evade or overcome the dominating force of names.

If literary narrative as a practice is well suited to capture morally complex situations, that is in large part due to the work of literary (that is, narrative and stylistic) form . This article examines the specific contribution that metaphorical language makes to the literary negotiation of moral complexity. The discussion is positioned vis-à-vis debates on the specific forms of moral knowledge that literature can provide, which I distinguish from both propositional meanings and the dilemmas entertained by analytic philosophers (for instance, the trolley problem). Instead, I draw on metaphor theory to suggest that metaphorical language can enrich the moral resonance of literature by deepening (and complicating) readers' engagement with fictional characters and the situations in which they are embedded. These metaphorical figures probe the experience captured by Cora Diamond under the rubric of the \"difficulty of reality.\" This idea is illustrated through a close reading of Lauren Groff's short story \"Flower Hunters,\" which skillfully orchestrates metaphorical language so as to encapsulate the protagonist's existential and moral impasse in times of ecological crisis.

Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies thoroughly unravels its own ‘marriage plot’. Narrating the romance of the golden Lancelot (‘Lotto’) and the mysterious Mathilde from each protagonist's perspective in turn, Groff's novel exposes countless cracks in the decades-long relationship between a pair of twenty-first-century college sweethearts. The second half of the novel is particularly haunted by a sadomasochistic and dubiously consensual relationship between Mathilde and a wealthy older man upon whom she has become financially dependent, a subplot that includes vivid and erotic descriptions of sexual humiliation and subjugation. Groff is certainly not the only modern author to explicitly and self-consciously interrogate the terms of the romantic novel as such: Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot announces its generic play in its title.

My thesis explores disjointed thoughts, or what I never considered to possibly be undiagnosed ADHD, through a hybrid of CNF prose, poetry, song lyrics I wrote on my guitar, experimental work with fiction, and an essay about my guitar. When I wondered how to anchor this project, I thought about feedback I’ve been fortunate enough to receive during my time as a BU student in both creative and academic writing. Usually, I’ll hear a pattern of critiques: stick in the moment, cut down sprawling wordiness, fix my stream-line-conscious ramble style, sharpen focus, and restrain from tangents. It was not until the beginning of this semester when my advisor, Joe Weil, challenged me to go against the grain of normal feedback I’ve received, to embrace my frazzled brain and chase the random clouds of thought and messy associations zipping through my head at zillions of miles per an hour.

Holt profiles writer Lauren Groff. Groff was born in 1978 and raised in Cooperstown NY, but she has lived for the past nine years in Gainesville FL, with her husband and two young sons. At thirty-six, she has published four books, including The Monsters of Templeton, her bestselling debut novel, which was shortlisted for the Orange prize for new writers. Groff is a wonderful storyteller, in the vein of Charles Dickens, but she is also a prose stylist, who counts Virginia Woolf among her many influences.

[...]for Dial as for Peter Carey, it is the \"famous felons\" who deserve the blame for the fiasco, those young radicals whose passionate, careless politics leave innocent children, elderly parents, and aggrieved fellow travelers to clean up the mess, to carry on (34). Only slowly, reluctantly does Genna reveal the horrors that she witnessed and endured in her childhood home. Because she was \"as invisible to them, as I was invisible to myself,\" young Genna could quietly observe the events of the house (120). Bit, the young protagonist and point of view of Lauren Groff 's Arcadia (2012) is, like Carey's Che, a \"star child\" and, because of his premature birth, a \"miracle baby\" (Carey 129, Groff 186). Because Bit is undersized for his age (thus his nickname), he is (like Oates's Genna) often unnoticed, which makes him unusually observant and, like Lumet's Danny, uncommonly sensitive and caring. By choice, Bit does not venture outside Arcadia, and pets and personal property are prohibited in the community, so he doesn't know, for instance, \"what, exactly, a dog is, or why people want to keep them\" (20). Because he is so quiet, some people think Bit is \"retarded,\" but he is instead intuitive and bright (59).