Notes from Source: The Creative component of this thesis consists of a long poem, If all the World and Love Were Young. It is a pastoral, an elegy, and a work of ekphrasis. The poem begins with a photograph of the author as a child, sitting in front of a television playing the video game Super Mario World in 1998. The poem also describes, in varying degrees of focus, each ‘level’ of this video game as it might have appeared on the television captured in the photograph. The Critical component of this thesis suggests that in her ‘epitaph’ for her brother, Nox (2010), Anne Carson’s approaches to elegy and translation are intertwined, each containing aspects of the other’s representational impulse and deficiency, and each concerned with the possibility of rendering one text into another. Beginning with an overview of the genre of elegy and some of its significant features, I discuss the ways in which Nox is an unconventional book containing a conventional elegy, by assessing the extent to which Nox iterates tropes and conventions of elegies both contemporary and historical, such as: the propensity of elegy tolncorporate significant repetition; a particular focus on the name of the deceased; and its proclivity for intertextuality and polyvocality.

Further Notes: Accepted: 2017