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Issue Details: First known date: 2013... 2013 Going Viral : The Swan Book by Alexis Wright
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'This is the saddest love story I have ever read. But not for the reasons you might imagine.

'The Swan Book is Alexis Wright’s third novel and like her first two – Plains of Promise (1997) and the Miles Franklin Award winning Carpentaria (2006) – it opens in her ancestral country, the grass plains of the Gulf of Carpentaria. It bears all the hallmarks of Wright’s astonishing narrative powers: her linguistic dexterity, mashing words and phrases from high and low culture, from English, Aboriginal languages, French and Latin; her humour and scathing satire; her fierce political purpose; her genre bending; her virtuosic gift for interweaving stories on multiple levels, from the literal to the metaphoric, the folkloric and the mythic. But The Swan Book takes all these – especially the last – to new levels. In August 2008, as part of her Oodgeroo Noonuccal Lecture, Wright said: ‘Oodgeroo absolutely understood the power of belief in the fight for sovereignty over this land – that if you could succeed in keeping the basic architecture of how you think, then you owned the freedom of your mind, that unimpeded space to store hope and feed your ability to survive.’ The Swan Book constructs this architecture of the mind – and, as with a mind, it operates in many dimensions simultaneously. It teems with songs, stories, images and fragments of culture from across the planet.'  (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Sydney Review of Books August 2013 7000280 2013 periodical issue 2013
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Australian Face : Essays from the Sydney Review of Books James Ley (editor), Catriona Menzies-Pike (editor), Artarmon : Sydney Review of Books Giramondo Publishing , 2017 12141177 2017 anthology essay

    'The Sydney Review of Books is Australia’s leading space for longform literary criticism. Now celebrating five years online, the SRB has published more than five hundred essays by almost two hundred writers. To mark this occasion, The Australian Face collects some of the best essays published in the SRB on Australian fiction, poetry and non-fiction. The essays in this anthology are contributions to the ongoing argument about the condition and purpose and evolving shape of Australian literature. They reflect the ways in which discussions about the state of the literary culture are constantly reaching beyond themselves to consider wider cultural and political issues.

    'The Sydney Review of Books was established in 2013 out of frustration at the diminishing public space for Australian criticism on literature. There’s even less space for literature in our newspapers and broadcast media now. The Sydney Review of Books, however, is thriving, as the essays in The Australian Face show. Here, you’ll read essays on well-known figures such as Christos Tsiolkas, Alexis Wright, Michelle de Kretser and Helen Garner, alongside considerations of the work of writers who less frequently receive mainstream attention, such as Lesbia Harford and Moya Costello.' (Publication summary)

    Artarmon : Sydney Review of Books Giramondo Publishing , 2017
    pg. 18-26
    Note:

    With title : Going Viral

Last amended 30 May 2019 07:07:37
https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/going-viral/ Going Viral : The Swan Book by Alexis Wrightsmall AustLit logo Sydney Review of Books
18-26 Going Viral : The Swan Book by Alexis Wrightsmall AustLit logo
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