AustLit
Latest Issues
Notes
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Only literary material within AustLit's scope individually indexed. Other material in this issue includes:
Site Unscene: Medial Ideology and the Literary Interface by Johanna Drucker
Contents
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‘An Explosive Novel of Strange Passions’ : Horwitz Publications and Australia’s Pulp Modernism,
single work
criticism
'The scant academic attention Australia’s pulp publishing industry has received to date tends to focus on pulp as a quickly and cheaply made form of disposable entertainment, sold to non-elite audiences. This paper will examine Australian pulp fiction from a different standpoint, one which links New Modernist Studies and the history of the book. This approach, referred to as pulp modernism, is used to question the separation of low and high publishing culture, dominant for much of the twentieth century. I apply this methodology to late-1950s and early-1960s Australian pulp fiction by examining the Name Author series released by Sydney-based Horwitz Publications, one of the largest pulp paperback publishers in the decades after World War II. The series took prominent mid-century Australian authors and republished them in paperback with covers featuring highly salacious images and text. The series offers a glimpse into a uniquely Australian version of pulp modernism. It also yields valuable insights into the changing dynamics of local publishing and literary reputation in mid-century Australia, and the little researched operations of Horwitz Publications.' (Publication abstract)
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On Not Having Sex : Sumner Locke Elliott and Queer History,
single work
criticism
'This essay argues that we need ways to read unexpressed queer desire and the absence of sex in writing by gay authors that don’t fall back on the trope of the closet. It makes this argument through pairing Sumner Locke Elliott’s 1948 play Rusty Bugles with his 1990 ‘coming out’ novel Fairyland, two texts that draw upon Elliott’s time at an ordinance depot during the Second World War. Elliott’s work has often been read as out of step with the politics of gay liberation. However I will argue that both these texts reflect upon the queer potential of not having sex. In Elliott’s writings about the Second World War the structured sexual abstinence of the ordinance depot provides his protagonists with an escape from the burden of homosexual identity in the twentieth century and allows for new modes of queer intimacy and exchange.' (Publication abstract)
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Review of Ink in Her Veins : The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer, by Sylvia Martin,
single work
review
— Review of Ink in Her Veins : The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer 2016 single work biography ;'Ink in Her Veins is the first book-length biography of Aileen Palmer: poet, socialist and daughter to Australia’s most renowned literary couple, Nettie and Vance Palmer. Sylvia Martin has written a precise, penetrating but humane account of Palmer’s life. She has carefully gathered and drawn on evidence for her claims, speculating in a reasoned way when sources are scant. She has fulfilled the biographer’s brief. Beyond this, the book asks big questions about the biographical endeavour, principally whether a life lived around the margins – albeit the margins of cultural, intellectual and political centres – is a life worth telling.' (Introduction) -
Review of Reading Corporeality in Patrick White's Fiction : An Abject Dictatorship of the Flesh, by Bridget Grogan,
single work
review
— Review of Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction : An Abject Dictatorship of the Flesh 2019 multi chapter work criticism ;'The distinctive repetition of embodied characters and material environments in Patrick White’s prose has always busied Australian literature scholars. Bridget Grogan’s new work on the author’s obsession with corporeality delves deep into the discomforting realm of the body and its bleeding, burning and pulsing pressures. Indeed, Grogan invites us, as she argues White himself does, to ‘“kiss the corpse,” to accept the body’ and with it the dissolute qualities of human subjectivity White examines so closely in his narratives (16).' (Introduction)