Furnace Creek: A Contemporary Queer Reimagining of Great Expectations

Taking its inspiration from Great Expectations, Joseph Boone’s novel Furnace Creek teases us with the question of what Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues—racial injustice, a war abroad, women’s and gay rights, class struggle—that galvanized the world in those decades. Deftly combining elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery, Southern Gothic fiction, and detection-mystery thriller, the novel leaps the frame of Dickens’ masterpiece to provide a contemporary meditation on the perils of desire, ambition, love, loss, and family.

The novel won the Debut Novel Prize at the Next Generation Indie Book Awards (2023) and the LGBTQIA Fiction at National Indie Excellence Awards (2023).

In this lunchtime talk, Professor Boone will talk about the process of re-casting Dickens for the twenty-first century, discuss the significance of recent reimaginings and reinventions of nineteenth-century literature, and reflect on the relationship between his scholarly and creative writing.

The talk will be of particular of interest to students and scholars of Victorian and contemporary literature, and those interested in queer literature and culture.

Zoom details for those joining online: https://durhamuniversity.zoom.us/j/95189695658?pwd=ZnRvUG5zMWhlZXo5UzhYblp6YU5IQT09

Meeting ID: 951 8969 5658

Passcode: 653627