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y separately published work icon The Songlines single work   prose   travel  
Issue Details: First known date: 1987... 1987 The Songlines
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

The Songlines is Chatwin's beautiful, elegiac, comic account of following the invisible pathways traced by the Australian Aboriginal people. Chatwin was nothing if not erudite, and the vast, eclectic body of literature underlies this tale of trekking across the outback.

Source: Trove.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Jonathan Cape ,
      1987 .
      image of person or book cover 7960452326627759774.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 293p.
      ISBN: 9780670806058
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Jonathan Cape ,
      1987 .
      image of person or book cover 4184776006334646026.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 293p.
      Note/s:
      • Published November 28th 1998 

      ISBN: 9780099769910
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Penguin Books ,
      1988 .
      image of person or book cover 1757776430239305199.png
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 295p.
      ISBN: 9780140094299
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Vintage Australia ,
      2018 .
      image of person or book cover 5009169676664457650.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 293p.p.
      Limited edition info: Moleskine special edition
      ISBN: 9781784873004
Alternative title: Drømmespor : roman
Language: Danish
    • c
      Denmark,
      c
      Scandinavia, Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Samleren ,
      1994 .
      Extent: 306p.
      ISBN: 8756810105
    • c
      Denmark,
      c
      Scandinavia, Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Samleren ,
      2000 .
      Extent: 350p.
      ISBN: 8756815840
    • c
      Denmark,
      c
      Scandinavia, Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Rosinante ,
      2010 .
      Extent: 350p.
      ISBN: 9788763813594

Works about this Work

Born to Be Nomads David Malouf , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: The Times Literary Supplement , 10 April 2020; (p. 34)

— Review of The Songlines Bruce Chatwin , 1987 single work prose
What If : The Literary Case for More Climate Change Lucy Burnett , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: ISLE : Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment , Autumn vol. 26 no. 4 2019; (p. 901–923)

'What if there is more than two degrees of global warming? What if the Gulf Stream stops? What if we encounter abrupt climate change? What if there is sufficient sea level rise to make certain states and countries, such as the Polynesian island of Tuvalu, uninhabitable? The tenor of contemporary climate change discourse is best captured by the trope “what if …?” Such questions have provided the basis for decades of United Nations negotiation aimed at avoiding the worst-case scenarios, or indeed “solving” climate change itself. These debates are informed by the scoping reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which project outcomes forward from a range of possible scenarios. And, in a broader cultural context, plotting these “what if” scenarios has been a dominant vision of climate change among writers, film-makers, and other artists, perhaps most famously captured in the fictional blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, which asks: “what if” ocean circulation patterns become disrupted and usher in severe climatic change?' (Introduction)

A Wild Roguery : Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines Reconsidered Christine Nicholls , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: Text Matters: A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture , November vol. 9 no. 9 2019; (p. 22-49)

'This article revisits, analyzes and critiques Bruce Chatwin’s 1987 bestseller, The Songlines, more than three decades after its publication. In Songlines, the book primarily responsible for his posthumous celebrity, Chatwin set out to explore the essence of Central and Western Desert Aboriginal Australians’ philosophical beliefs. For many readers globally, Songlines is regarded as a—if not the—definitive entry into the epistemological basis, religion, cosmology and lifeways of classical Western and Central Desert Aboriginal people. It is argued that Chatwin’s fuzzy, ill-defined use of the word-concept “songlines” has had the effect of generating more heat than light. Chatwin’s failure to recognize the economic imperative underpinning Australian desert people’s walking praxis is problematic: his own treks through foreign lands were underpropped by socioeconomic privilege. Chatwin’s ethnocentric idée fixe regarding the primacy of “walking” and “nomadism,” central to his Songlines thématique, well and truly preceded his visits to Central Australia. Walking, proclaimed Chatwin, is an elemental part of “Man’s” innate nature. It is argued that this unwavering, preconceived, essentialist belief was a self-serving construal justifying Chatwin’s own “nomadic” adventures of identity. Is it thus reasonable to regard Chatwin as a “rogue author,” an unreliable narrator? And if so, does this matter? Of greatest concern is the book’s continuing majority acceptance as a measured, accurate account of Aboriginal belief systems. With respect to Aboriginal desert people and the barely disguised individuals depicted in Songlines, is Chatwin’s book a “rogue text,” constituting an act of epistemic violence, consistent with Spivak’s usage of that term?'

Source: Abstract.

Lost and Found in Translation : Who Can Talk to Country? Kim Mahood , 2019 single work essay
— Appears in: Griffith Review , January no. 63 2019; (p. 29-46)

'Unlike many city-dwelling Australians, the desert holds no terrors for me. Instead, like DH Lawrence, I find the cathedral forests of the coastal regions oppressive and disquieting. Lawrence brought to his descriptions of the Australian bush the same overwrought sensitivity that created the claustrophobic emotional landscape of 'Sons and Lovers', and the appalling, majestic insularity of the Italian mountain village in 'The Lost Girl'. He was the writer who made explicit the sense of some non-human presence in the Antipodean landscape, and while I have a different interpretation of the 'speechless, aimless solitariness' he attributes to the country, his instincts were good.'  (Publication abstract)

 

Walking, Frontier and Nation : Re/tracing the Songlines in Central Australian Literature Glenn Morrison , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Intercultural Studies , vol. 40 no. 1 2018; (p. 118-140)

'Central Australia is widely characterised as a frontier, a familiar trope in literary constructions of Australian identity that divides black from white, ancient from modern. However, recent anthropological and literary evidence from the Red Centre defies such a clear-cut representation, suggesting more nuanced ‘lifeworlds’ than a frontier binary can afford may better represent the region. Using walking narratives to mark a meeting point between Aboriginal and settler Australian practices of placemaking, this paper summarises and updates literary research by the author (2011–2015), which reads six recounted walks of the region for representations of frontier and home. Methods of textual analyses are described and results appraised for changes to the storied representation of Central Australia from the precolonial era onward. The research speaks to a ‘porosity’ of intercultural boundaries, explores literary instances of intercultural exchange; nuances settler Australian terms for place, including home, Nature and wilderness; and argues for new place metaphors to supersede ‘frontier’. Further, it suggests a recent surge in the recognition of Aboriginal songlines may be reshaping the nation’s key stories.' (Publication abstract)

Nomads Rule, O. K.? Christopher Pearson , 1987 single work review
— Appears in: The Adelaide Review , October no. 43 1987; (p. 27)

— Review of The Songlines Bruce Chatwin , 1987 single work prose
Book Reviews : By QATSICC Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Consultative Committee , 1989 single work review
— Appears in: The Aboriginal Child at School , August/September vol. 17 no. 4 1989; (p. 49-52)

— Review of The Macquarie Bedtime Story Book 1987 anthology children's fiction poetry ; The Songlines Bruce Chatwin , 1987 single work prose
In Which Travel is Boring Ellena Savage , 2012 single work review
— Appears in: The Lifted Brow , no. 14 2012; (p. 32-33)

— Review of The Songlines Bruce Chatwin , 1987 single work prose ; Small Indiscretions : Stories of Travel in Asia Felicity Castagna , 2011 selected work short story ; Melbourne Sophie Cunningham , 2011 single work prose
In Search of the Great Web Mary Wimsatt , 1987 single work review
— Appears in: Commonweal , 20 November vol. 114 no. 20 1987; (p. 684-687)

— Review of The Songlines Bruce Chatwin , 1987 single work prose
Making Tracks David Malouf , 1987 single work review
— Appears in: The Times Literary Supplement , 4 September 1987; (p. 948)

— Review of The Songlines Bruce Chatwin , 1987 single work prose
Crossing the Border: Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux Clare Johnson , 2002 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 16 no. 1 2002; (p. 59-63)
The Songlines : Blurring the Edges of Traditional Genres in Search of a New Nomadic Aesthetics Christine Texier-Vandamme , 2004 single work criticism
— Appears in: Commonwealth , Autumn vol. 26 no. 1 2004; (p. 75-82)
'Chatwin's book cannot be related to any specific genre. Though it may appear as a travel book or as a philosophical dialogue, it concerns an anthropological quest based on the works of a controversial author. The core of the book may not be the Australian 'songlines' but a more general reflection on the innate restlessness of man' (Author's abstract p. 75).
Bruce Chatwin's Curio Cabinet Clare Johnson , 2004 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Regenerative Spirit : Volume 2 : (Un)settling, (Dis)locations, (Post-)colonial, (Re)presentations - Australian Post-Colonial Reflections 2004; (p. 160-169)
Noting the effect of ethnography in 'incarcerating' oral cultures, and the effect of travel writing where writers have fashioned themselves as amateur anthropologists, the author examines Chatwin's perceptions of Indigenous people in The Songlines, seeing a misfit between the living, dynamic culture Chatwin encountered and the pristine pre-contact culture of his preconceptions.
Identity, Alterity, Writing: "Songlines" by Bruce Chatwin Floriana Perna , 1998 single work criticism
— Appears in: Anglistica , vol. 2 no. 2 1998;
Floriana Perna analyses Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines to draw attention to the limits of this European account of otherness.
The Songlines : A Very British Perception Ruth Brown , 1994 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australia in the World : Perceptions and Possibilities 1994; (p. 129-132)
Last amended 11 Jun 2020 15:07:34
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