'From the Smallest Things' a Novella-in-Flash and Forms and Forming: An Enquiry into the Form and Narrative Potential of the Novella-in-Flash and the Writing of 'From the Smallest Things'

Using a creative-critical methodology, this thesis explores the form and narrative potential of a literary hybrid, the novella-in-flash. The first part is a novella-in-flash about Fanny Imlay and her relationship with her half-sister, Mary Shelley and their stepsister, Claire Clairmont. The accompanying critical commentary discusses formal characteristics that are paradigmatic of the novella-in-flash and how they have been used to tell Fanny’s story. As a hybrid of two pre-existing literary forms, the novella-in-flash has the self-reflexive quality and intensity of a novella and is constructed from a sequence of independent but interdependent flash fictions that are resonant rather than fully resolved, and that are reliant on the reader making imaginative leaps with the writer. ‘From the Smallest Things’ uses this distinctive form to build a layered and complex narrative, based on archival evidence, about the events leading up to Fanny’s suicide in 1816, with the gaps in the text reflecting gaps in the archive. Although the story of Mary and Claire and their relationships with the poets Shelley and Byron is well known and frequently told, Fanny’s story has been largely overlooked. The critical commentary, ‘Forms and Forming’ explores how the novella-in-flash in general, and ‘From the Smallest Things’ in particular, uses both fracture and cohesion as techniques to foreground plurality and resist absolute closure. The key formal elements examined are hybridity, brevity, (dis)continuity, narrative order or sequence, and the relationship between the parts and the whole. Using an interdisciplinary and critically pluralist methodology, this commentary explores how these formal elements can performatively embody narrative content and how, for the novella-in-flash, the mode of telling is as important as the story told.