Abstract
Maudy is the first half of an auto-fictional Künstlerroman in verse that narrates a Nabokovian road trip through a non-specified part of modern-day rural South Island, Aotearoa New Zealand. Narrated by the eponymous main character, the novel explores how Maudy negotiates her experiences of epilepsy, CPTSD and gendered power dynamics through relationships with tangible and intangible male or gender non-specific characters as a young woman and poet. These negotiations manifest as literary aestheticization via Butlerian gender performance, the Foucauldian gaze, extreme Sadean sexual power dynamics, the Crump-esque "hunter", Mulgan-esque "man alone" and an acute awareness of her own Oedipal complex that always allude to but never fully elucidate a deep trauma.