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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
A Danish woman in mourning for her husband returns to Australia in search of understanding.
Notes
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Epigraph: 'Love is a stone that settled on the seabed under grey water' Derek Walcott - Sea Grapes
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Sound recording and braille available
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Beverley Farmer 1941-2018 Archetypes and Fluency in This Water : Five Tales
2018
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 3 no. 18 2018;'It is not unusual to encounter feminist re-readings of traditional stories, in the manner of speaking back via parodic challenges to gender stereotypes, but it is rare to find a writer re-dressing the skeletal bones of narrative to offer nuanced and sensual texts which subvert but also re-animate tales. And that is what is achieved in Beverley Farmer’s This Water:Five Tales (2017). After the contemplative essays of The Bone House (2005), with their stark black and white imagery and emphasis on dormancy and stone, Farmer returns to fiction where inherited stories are re-shaped to challenge the confines of precedent. This new publication includes a first-person story that illustrates the formative effects of word and image, reinterpretations of two Celtic tales, one Greek legend and a macabre European fairy-tale. Each story is discrete but they all reconsider masculist perceptions of women through the ages. This paper considers the re-framing and interrogation of the gendered designs of oral and folkloric traditions in This Water: Five Tales, focussing on ‘water’as a unifying theme and the fluency of Farmer’s poetic prose.' (Publication abstract)
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Australia in Three Books
2018
single work
column
— Appears in: Meanjin , Autumn vol. 77 no. 1 2018; (p. 24-26)'I’ve been thinking about Beverley Farmer’s beautiful, aching book The Seal Woman again recently because I spent some time last year on the surf coast of Victoria, alone in a house on a hill above a beach, red-rocked and windy and wild—the same kind of landscape that Dagmar, the book’s protagonist, inhabits. Dagmar is Danish, but has returned to Australia, to the coastal town where she spent her honeymoon 20 years ago, to mourn her husband, who was killed recently in a shipping accident in the North Sea. Dagmar is housesitting for the friends they both met there, staying in the house alone, adjusting to life alone, walking on the beach and cooking simple meals and reading, and grieving, all the time grieving.' (Introduction)
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Figures of Life: Beverley Farmer's The Seal Woman as an Australian Bioregional Novel
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place, 2012; (p. 164-180) -
Literary Transculturations and Modernity : Some Reflections
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Transnational Literature , November vol. 4 no. 1 2011; 'In an increasingly global world literary and cultural critics are constantly searching for ways in which to analyse and debate texts and artefacts. Postcolonial theories and studies have provided useful tools for analyzing, among others, New Literatures in English and other languages, as well as throwing new light on an understanding of older texts. But today, with the increase in diaspora studies in literature and cultural studies, new ways of looking at texts are paramount, given the complexity of contemporary literature. There is, as Bill Ashcroft writes, a 'strange contrapuntal relationship between identity, history, and nation that needs to be unravelled.' With references to Australian literature, this article will present some reflections on transculturation and modernities, the themes of the Nordic Network of Transcultural Literary Studies, which considers transculturation not as a theory but, 'a matrix through which a set of critical tools and vocabularies can be refined for the study of texts from a localized world, but institutionalised globally' and where , ' the engagement of multiple sites and their routes with the progression of "one modernity" in some way or other inform the aesthetics of transcultural literature.' (Author's introduction)
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Cultural Encounters and Hyphenated People
2009
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Journal of the European Association for Studies on Australia , vol. 1 no. 2009; (p. 90-96) 'Cultural encounters are a dominant feature of contemporary society. Identities are ever-changing ‘routes’ as Hall and others have stated, so we become insiders and outsiders to our own lives. The manifaceted expression of cultural belonging and its formation is illustrated by examples from Australasian writers who express not only the conflict of belonging to more than one culture, but also its inherent value. Such writers provide the reader with alternative ways of reading culture and illustrate the increasing trend to see ourselves as hyphenated people belonging nowhere specific in a globalised world.' Source: Anne Holden Rønning.
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Farmer : Words and Worlds
1993
single work
review
— Appears in: The CRNLE Reviews Journal , no. 2 1993; (p. 97-98)
— Review of The Seal Woman 1992 single work novel -
The Seal Woman by Beverley Farmer
1992
single work
review
— Appears in: Idiom 23 , November-December vol. 5 no. 2 1992; (p. 71)
— Review of The Seal Woman 1992 single work novel -
Poetry is Where You Find It
1993
single work
review
— Appears in: Social Alternatives , April vol. 12 no. 1 1993; (p. 63-65)
— Review of Selected Poems 1939-1990 1992 selected work poetry ; Heartland 1992 single work novel ; Fabricating the Self : The Fictions of Jessica Anderson 1996 single work criticism ; The Seal Woman 1992 single work novel ; Poems 1959-1989 1992 selected work poetry ; Central Mischief : Elizabeth Jolley on Writing, Her Past and Herself 1992 selected work prose -
Language, the Instrument of Fiction
1993
single work
review
— Appears in: Southerly , December vol. 53 no. 4 1993; (p. 174-182)
— Review of The Toucher 1993 single work novel ; The House of Breathing 1992 selected work short story ; The Seal Woman 1992 single work novel -
Characters Adrift
1993
single work
review
— Appears in: Quadrant , March vol. 37 no. 3 1993; (p. 84-86)
— Review of Micky Darlin' 1992 single work novel ; The Glass Inferno 1992 single work novel ; The Seal Woman 1992 single work novel ; Love Parts 1992 single work novel ; Remember Me, Jimmy James 1992 single work novel -
Eros in Dreamland
2007
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Meanjin , April vol. 66 no. 1 2007; (p. 199-204) 'Novelist and short-story writer Beverley Farmer traces the shifting configurations and intersections of love, desire and intimacy, as reflected in the work of various artists, including her own writings. (Meanjin) -
Strutting One's Stuff
2009
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Antithesis , vol. 19 no. 2009; (p. 14-29) The article highlights the ways in which sexual identity is performed, represented and exhibited in Australian writing and suggests connections between issues of individual identity and the larger question of Australian national identity. Focussing on a spectrum of Australian writing, Pons analyses the literary strategies of this large and growing corpus and its gender-specific variations. -
The Significance of Littoral in Beverley Farmer's Novel The Seal Woman
2009
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October/November vol. 24 no. 3-4 2009; (p. 121-132) This essay 'offers some thoughts on the transformative possibility of the littoral in Beverley Farmer's novel The Seal Woman, and a brief discussion of Farmer's particular deployment of littoral as feminine or even feminist' (121). -
Cultural Encounters and Hyphenated People
2009
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Journal of the European Association for Studies on Australia , vol. 1 no. 2009; (p. 90-96) 'Cultural encounters are a dominant feature of contemporary society. Identities are ever-changing ‘routes’ as Hall and others have stated, so we become insiders and outsiders to our own lives. The manifaceted expression of cultural belonging and its formation is illustrated by examples from Australasian writers who express not only the conflict of belonging to more than one culture, but also its inherent value. Such writers provide the reader with alternative ways of reading culture and illustrate the increasing trend to see ourselves as hyphenated people belonging nowhere specific in a globalised world.' Source: Anne Holden Rønning. -
Literary Transculturations and Modernity : Some Reflections
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Transnational Literature , November vol. 4 no. 1 2011; 'In an increasingly global world literary and cultural critics are constantly searching for ways in which to analyse and debate texts and artefacts. Postcolonial theories and studies have provided useful tools for analyzing, among others, New Literatures in English and other languages, as well as throwing new light on an understanding of older texts. But today, with the increase in diaspora studies in literature and cultural studies, new ways of looking at texts are paramount, given the complexity of contemporary literature. There is, as Bill Ashcroft writes, a 'strange contrapuntal relationship between identity, history, and nation that needs to be unravelled.' With references to Australian literature, this article will present some reflections on transculturation and modernities, the themes of the Nordic Network of Transcultural Literary Studies, which considers transculturation not as a theory but, 'a matrix through which a set of critical tools and vocabularies can be refined for the study of texts from a localized world, but institutionalised globally' and where , ' the engagement of multiple sites and their routes with the progression of "one modernity" in some way or other inform the aesthetics of transcultural literature.' (Author's introduction)
Awards
- 1993 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards