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Issue Details: First known date: 1854... 1854 Clara Morison : A Tale of South Australia during the Gold Fever
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Contents

* Contents derived from the Adelaide, South Australia,:Rigby , 1971 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Introduction, Susan Eade , single work criticism
Argues that Spence's illustration of Australian characters is concentrated on the domestic lives of a small number of characters. She was familiar with the romantic conventions popular in her day, but believed that fiction should be improving as well as entertaining.
(p. xi-xviii)
* Contents derived from the Adelaide, South Australia,:Wakefield Press , 1986 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Introduction, Susan Eade , single work criticism
Argues that Spence's illustration of Australian characters is concentrated on the domestic lives of a small number of characters. She was familiar with the romantic conventions popular in her day, but believed that fiction should be improving as well as entertaining.
(p. v-x)
Note: Written as Susan Magarey.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Other Formats

  • Also sound recording.

Works about this Work

y separately published work icon Novel Politics : Studies in Australian Political Fiction John Uhr , Shaun Crowe , Carlton : Melbourne University Press , 2020 18807115 2020 multi chapter work criticism

'Percy Bysshe Shelley once described poets as the 'unacknowledged legislators of the world'. If this is true, Australian political scientists have shown curiously little interest in the role that literary figures play in the nation's political life.

'Novel Politics takes the relationship between literature and politics seriously, analysing the work of six writers, each the author of a classic text about Australian society. These authors bridge the history of local writing, from pre-Federation colonial Australia (Catherine Spence, Rosa Praed and Catherine Martin) to the contemporary moment (Tim Winton, Christos Tsiolkas and Kim Scott). Novel Politics unpicks the many political threads woven into these books, as they document the social world as it exists, while suggesting new possibilities for the nation's future. As political commentators of a particular kind, all six authors offer unique insights into the deeper roots of politics in Australia, beyond the theatre of parliament and out into the wider social world, as imagined by its dreamers and criticised by its most incisive discontents.'(Publication summary) 

The Antipodes of Victorian Fiction : Mapping 'Down Under' Tamara S Wagner , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: Victorian Popular Fictions , Autumn vol. 1 no. 2 2019;

'Victorian settler fiction produced in colonial Australia and New Zealand increasingly expressed a search for settler identity, and yet it partly remained targeted at readers “at home,” at the centre of the British Empire. Nineteenth-century novels of daily life in the colonial settlements, therefore, also functioned as fictional maps for readers in Victorian Britain and elsewhere in the expanding empire. While some of these publications explicitly addressed potential emigrants, others endeavoured to reshape Britain’s antipodes in the popular imagination more generally. Australian and New Zealand women writers dismantled clichés involving bush-rangers, gold-diggers, as well as escaped convicts and resented returnees. By drawing on a variety of settler novels by female authors, I aim to track how their fictional maps for readers overseas worked and how these maps shifted in the course of the century. In particular, I focus on the motif of the homecoming and how its reworking in nineteenth-century settler fiction reveals shifting attitudes towards emigration and empire, homemaking and homecoming, old and new homes.'

Source: Abstract.

'Your Vocation Is Marriage' : Systematic Colonisation, The Marriage Plot and Finding Home in Catherine Helen Spence's Clara Morison (1854) Sarah Sharp , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: Scottish Literary Journal , Spring-Summer vol. 11 no. 1 2019; (p. 27-45)

'Scottish-born author Catherine Helen Spence's 1854 novel Clara Morison is a landmark in Australian literary history and has often been identified as the first work of fiction about Australia written by a woman. Eschewing the now more prominent iconography of the Australian bush, the novel focuses almost exclusively on domestic spaces and women's experiences. This article considers Spence's preoccupation with the domestic in relation to Edward Gibbon Wakefield's ideas of 'Systematic Colonisation'. In his writings Wakefield identified a crucial role for women in the development of the British settler colonies as wives and mothers. This article argues that Spence engages with this context by drawing upon the nationally figurative role of the marriage plot in contemporary writing to explore and complicate the gender roles which underwrote the development of Australia's first and only Wakefieldian colony.' (Publication summary)

The Literary Text as Historical Artifact : The Colonial Couple in Australian Romantic Fiction by Women, 1838-1860 Jodi McAlister , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Lilith , no. 24 2018; (p. 38-51)

'This article inverts the title of Hayden White's 1974 essay 'The Historical Text as Literary Artifact' by exploring literary texts as historical artifacts. It uses three novels published by Australian women writers in the mid-nineteenth century - Catherine Helen Spence's Clara Morison (1854), Caroline Louisa Atkinson's Gertrude the Emigrant (1857), and Mary Theresa Vidal's 'Bengala, or Some Time Ago' (1860) - 'as historical sources to explore the emotional culture of colonial Australia in regard to romantic love. Following Sarah Pinto, this article takes the romantic couple as the centre of its analysis, and asks four key questions of the novels in the corpus: What kind of people fall in love? Who do they fall in love with? What kind of love do they fall in? And how do their lives and their loves interact with the colonial Australian landscape? It finds that romantic love in these novels is dependent on romanticised similarity and shared sensibility rather than eroticised otherness. It argues that while this might not necessarily be uniquely nationally distinctive, the Australian chronotopic context means that this narrative would have strong and specific resonances with a female colonial audience.'  (Publication abstract)

 

Romancing Settlement in the Anglo-Globe : Material Culture in Clara Morison and Middlemarch Chi-she Lee , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: NTU Studies in Language and Literature , December no. 36 2017; (p. 37-70)
Democratic, But Not 'Offensively' Australian David J. Tacey , 1990 single work review
— Appears in: Meridian , May vol. 9 no. 1 1990; (p. 60-62)

— Review of Catherine Helen Spence Catherine Helen Spence , 1987 selected work novel criticism extract prose ; Clara Morison : A Tale of South Australia during the Gold Fever Catherine Helen Spence , 1854 single work novel
Untitled A. Bell , 1972 single work review
— Appears in: The Age , 25 March 1972; (p. 16)

— Review of Clara Morison : A Tale of South Australia during the Gold Fever Catherine Helen Spence , 1854 single work novel
Untitled J. Miles , 1972 single work review
— Appears in: The Advertiser , 10 June 1972; (p. 16)

— Review of Clara Morison : A Tale of South Australia during the Gold Fever Catherine Helen Spence , 1854 single work novel
All about Australia 1972 single work review
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 19 February 1972; (p. 12)

— Review of Clara Morison : A Tale of South Australia during the Gold Fever Catherine Helen Spence , 1854 single work novel
Untitled Bruce Bennett , 1973 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October vol. 6 no. 2 1973; (p. 220-224)

— Review of Clara Morison : A Tale of South Australia during the Gold Fever Catherine Helen Spence , 1854 single work novel ; Catherine Spence Janet Cooper , 1972 single work biography
Out of England : Literary Subjectivity in the Australian Colonies, 1788-1867 Simon During , 2004 single work criticism
— Appears in: Imagining Australia : Literature and Culture in the New New World 2004; (p. 3-21) Modern Australian Criticism and Theory 2010; (p. 61-72)
'...During traces the formation and transformation of 'modern literary subjectivity' in the distinctive conditions of nineteenth century Australia.' Source: Modern Australian Criticism and Theory (2010)
Legendary Australians The Legend and the Legacy Tom Sigley , 2008 single work criticism
— Appears in: Writing Across the Continent 2008;
Catherine Helen Spence : City Woman Helen Thomson , 1992 single work criticism
— Appears in: Populous Places : Australian Cities and Towns 1992; (p. 131-141)
Fiction Adrian Mitchell , 1981 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Oxford History of Australian Literature 1981; (p. 27-172)
Aussie Bards and Pom Reviewers : English Reviewers and Australian Writers in the Nineteenth Century Barry Argyle , 1990 single work criticism
— Appears in: Aspects of Australian Fiction : Essays Presented to John Colmer, Professor Emeritus of English, The University of Adelaide 1990; (p. 1-16)
Last amended 4 Mar 2015 17:34:33
Settings:
  • c
    Scotland,
    c
    c
    United Kingdom (UK),
    c
    Western Europe, Europe,
  • Adelaide, South Australia,
  • Victoria,
  • ca. 1854
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