AustLit
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'This special themed issue, conceptualised by Philip Hayward and edited by Tiffany Hutton, features a series of papers exploring the connections between various forms of folklore and modernity and the development of contemporary media-lore.' (Periodical summary)
Notes
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Only literary material within AustLit's scope individually indexed.
Contents
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Sung by an Indigenous Siren : Epic and Epistemology in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria,
single work
criticism
'One of Australia’s most distinguished Indigenous authors, Alexis Wright, stages the fleeting presence of a popular character of Northern European folklore, the mermaid, in an awarded novel of epic proportions. The mermaid is not a haphazard appearance in this Antipodean narrative, but one of the multiple, cross-cultural ways in which Carpentaria, first published in 2006, invites the reader to reflect upon the ongoing tensions between the disenfranchised Indigenous minority and the empowered non-Indigenous mainstream, and their serious lack of communication due to the antagonistic character of their respective universes, one rooted in a capitalist paradigm of ruthless economic exploitation and the other in a holistic, environmentalist one of country. This essay addresses how Carpentaria, by writing across Indigenous and European genres and epistemologies, makes a call for the deconstruction of colonial discourse, for an invigorating Indigenous inscription into country, and for intellectual sovereignty as the condition sine-qua-non for the Indigenous community to move forward.' (Publication abstract)
