AustLit

'In recent years, Australian literature has experienced a revival of interest both domestically and internationally. The increasing prominence of work by writers like Christos Tsiolkas, heightened through television and film adaptation, as well as the award of major international prizes to writers like Richard Flanagan, and the development of new, high-profile prizes like the Stella Prize, have all reinvigorated interest in Australian literature both at home and abroad. This Companionemerges as a part of that reinvigoration, considering anew the history and development of Australian literature and its key themes, as well as tracing the transition of the field through those critical debates. It considers works of Australian literature on their own terms, as well as positioning them in their critical and historical context and their ethical and interactive position in the public and private spheres. With an emphasis on literature’s responsibilities, this book claims Australian literary studies as a field uniquely positioned to expose the ways in which literature engages with, produces and is produced by its context, provoking a critical re-evaluation of the concept of the relationship between national literatures, cultures, and histories, and the social function of literary texts.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'In an interview that followed the publication of his 2013 novel Barracuda, Christos Tsiolkas declared that he ‘learnt to feel Australian by travelling to Europe’.¹ It’s a sentiment perhaps best expressed in Dead Europe (2005), a novel in which to be Australian is repeatedly compared to naivety or childishness. Such expressions suggest that for Tsiolkas, we can only understand Australian national identity in relief, an idea hearkening back to the earliest definitions of the nation made by its colonisers and continuing throughout Australia’s migrant and multicultural history.' (Introduction)

'In the middle of the nineteenth century, Marcus Clarke famously described the Australian outback as displaying a “Weird Melancholy” (qtd. in Gelder 116). The strange sights, sounds, and experiences of Australia’s rural locations made them ripe for the development of the European genre of the Gothic in a new location, a mutation which has continued over the past two centuries. But what does it mean for Australia’s Gothic landscapes to be associated with the affective qualities of the melancholy? And more particularly, how and why does this Gothic effect (and affect) appear in the most accessible Gothic media of the twenty-first century, the television series? Two recent Australian television adaptations, Wake in Fright (2017, dir. Kriv Stenders) and Mystery Road (2018, dir. Rachel Perkins) provoke us to ask the question: how does their pictorial representation of the Australian outback and its inhabitants overtly express rage and its close ties to melancholia, shame and violence? More particularly, I argue that in both series this rage is turned inwards rather than outwards; rage is turned into melancholy and thus to self-destruction – which constructs an allegory for the malaise of our contemporary nation. However, here the two series differ. While Wake in Fright posits this as a never-ending narrative, in a true Freudian model of melancholics who fail to resolve or attend to their trauma, Mystery Road is more positive in its positioning, allowing the themes of apology and recognition to appear, both necessary for reparation and forward movement.'

Source: Author's introduction.

'Although she is often perceived as a writer of the local, the rural or the regional, Thea Astley herself notes writing by American modernists as her primary literary influence, and emphasises the ethical value of transnational reading and writing. Similarly, she draws parallels between writing of the American ‘Deep South’ and her own writing of the ‘Deep North’, with a particular focus on the struggles of the racial or cultural outsider. In this article, I pursue Astley’s peculiar blend of these literary genres — modernism, the Gothic and the transnational — as a means of understanding her conceptualisation of kindness and community. Although Astley rejects the necessity of literary community, her writing emphasises instead the value of interpersonal engagement and social responsibility. With a focus on her first novel, Girl with a Monkey (1958), this article considers Astley’s representation of the distinction between community and kindness, particularly for young Catholic women in Queensland in the early twentieth century. In its simultaneous critique of the expectations placed on women and its upholding of the values of kindness and charity, Astley considers our responsibilities in our relations with the Other and with community.' (Publication abstract)

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Australian literature was generally limited to the nationalist poetry and stories of writers like Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, and approved by the nationalist project of The Bulletin magazine. This is important not only for the way it underpins our understanding of Australian cultural discourses in general, but for the ways in which these inform literary value. Decades ago, Susan Sheridan argued that these cultural discourses depend on other (often gendered) binary oppositions, such as ‘outside (the bush or the city) vs inside (the domestic, the home)’, ‘Australian nationalist vs British colonial vigour’, and ‘action vs emotion’.1 What this means is that writers like Ada Cambridge and Rosa Praed ‘were denigrated as “Anglo-Australian,” “lady-novelists” whose cosmopolitan romances were considered derivative, commercial, frivolous and irrelevant to the new national literary tradition’.2 This dominant mode of thinking still influences the patterns of literary theory and criticism in the study of Australian literature today, so that these preoccupations with identity in Australian culture are necessarily coming full circle. While it is true that the 1970s and 1980s saw dominant attention being paid to feminist revisionism, uncovering ‘lost’ women and reinstating them into a literary canon, if Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing is any indication, this project seems to have emerged again as one of eminent importance.'  (Introduction)

'More than two decades ago, Christos Tsiolkas’s his first novel Loaded was published and he had achieved a cult following in the short-lived grunge fiction scene of Australian writing. The novel was quickly adapted as the film Head On (1998), directed by Ana Kokkinos, and starring popular young Greek actor, Alex Dimitriades; like the novel, it was well-received by critics, if not by mainstream literary and cinematic culture. For the next few years, Tsiolkas worked on Jump Cuts, an experimental collaborative autobiography, with Sasha Soldatow (1996), as well as a number of theatre productions – Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? (1999, co-written with Andrew Bovell, Melissa Reeves and Patricia Cornelius, and adapted to film as Blessed, also directed by Kokkinos [2009]), Thug (1998, written with Spiro Economopolous), and Elektra AD (1999) – but when The Jesus Man (1999) was published, its violent depiction of depression and suicide received critical attention as offensive and unnecessary. Partly because of the reception of The Jesus Man, and partly because of the density of its subject matter, his next novel, Dead Europe (2005) took six years to write. In the interim, he published a critical study of the film The Devil’s Playground (2002), and several more plays and screenplays: Viewing Blue Poles (2000), Saturn’s Return (2000), Fever (2002, co-written with Bovell, Reeves and Cornelius), Dead Caucasians (2002), Non Parlo di Salo (2005, written with Economopoulous), and The Hit (2006, written with Netta Yashin). Dead Europe was a triumphant return: it won the Age Book of the Year and the Melbourne Best Writing Award in 2006.'  (Publication summary)

'In her contribution to Maria Katsonis and Lee Kofman’s collection, Rebellious Daughters: True Stories from Australia’s Finest Female Writers (2016), Krissy Kneen cites fairy-tale scholar Marina Warner, who notes that the original term for the fairy tale was Wundermärchen, the wonder tale. ‘To wonder’, writes Warner, ‘communicates the receptive state of marvelling as well as the active desire to know, to inquire’ (40). In the same way, Kneen observes, the (often horrific) fairy tales told to her by her grandmother, stories which did not at all adhere to the philosophy of characters who lived ‘happily ever after’, filled the young girl ‘with a powerful and dangerous curiosity’ (40). It is that desire to know, that epistemophilia, which not only drives the women and girls of the stories collected here, but those about whom they read, and whom we now, in this collection, voraciously follow, hungry for knowledge, for endings happy or otherwise.' (Introduction)

'Cultural narratives also function as lifelines in the work of another Queensland Indigenous woman writer, Vivienne Cleven. Cleven's novel, Bitin’ Back (2001), begins when Mavis Dooley's son, Nevil, announces that he is no longer Nevil, but the writer Jean Rhys. Although Nevil eventually reveals that he has simply been acting as a woman in order to understand the protagonist of the novel he is writing, his choice of Rhys in particular is significant. Nevil selected Jean Rhys as a signifier of his female role because, he explains:

She's my favourite author; she wrote Wide Sargasso Sea [1966]. She was ahead of her time; she wrote about society's underdogs; about rejection and the madness of isolation. I know it sounds all crazy to you, Ma, but this is about who I am . . . [A] lot of people would never understand me and they wouldn't want to. (2001: 184)' (Publication abstract)