AustLit

'Lucy Strange, the protagonist of Gail Jones' Sixty Lights (2004), can be seen as an early example of a global citizen. Travelling between the periphery and the center of the British Empire, Lucy repeatedly makes sea-journeys that last for months—a kind of journey that no longer exists in today's world. Although this travelling helps shape her identity, it also makes her incapable of calling any one location her home. This article discusses the portrayal of Lucy as a modern 19th-century woman who is simultaneously a 21st century, neo-Victorian creation. It analyzes the links between femininity and voyages in the novel. Lucy's travels serve to depict the movement of women and mothers across the sea as an inherent part of globalization, writing them into what was often seen as a development led by male adventurers and businessmen. Jones presents Lucy as a young woman at the edge of modernity. Nevertheless, Lucy's lack of rootedness also questions whether travelling requires different—more modern—constructions of female identity.' (Publication abstract)

'Norman Saadi Nikro’s essay, ‘Paractatic Stammers: Temporality in the Novels of Gail Jones,’ sets out to explore how Jones’ ‘sense of fascination and wonder with the technology and culture of modernism informs the phenomenology and tenor of her novelistic style, especially the characters that emerge through the wave lengths of this style.’ Addressing himself to Jones’ literary fiction published to date, Nikro seeks to ‘track the duration in her novels whereby memory, history and story are experienced by her characters as something like intersections, intervals nor spacings, taut and tense folds or pleats in which time is riven by “a strange accession to memory and speech,” as the character Perdita comes to learn in Jones’s Sorry (202).’ Drawing in part on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and on Gilles Deleuze’s ‘engagement with the work of Bergson,’ Nikro examines in Jones the ‘relational contiguity of parts whose variable movements and orientations to one another bring about a transfiguration of their subjective capacities (as in Perdita’s realisation of her stuttering as a relational dynamic).’ ‘Paractatic Stammers: Temporality in the Novels of Gail Jones,’ offers a rich and original reading of Jones’ fiction, both sympathetic and critically rigorous. Echoing Jones’ own views on modernity, Nikro traces in her novels a poetics of modernity that inflects both the writing and the thematics of the work. ‘Jones’s prose style,’ he suggests, ‘what she calls “a kind of prose poetics’” (Royo Grasa 1), calls attention to the gaps and intervals by which the temporality of narration is not only possible, but rendered a vacant site for the stammer of an interruptive image or voice encompassing an alternative engagement of time and its graphic imprints.’ Like Kirkpatrick, Nikro too highlights the forceful way in which an Australian author develops a distinct narrative voice, in the case of Jones one informed by a constant intertwining of local and global aesthetic and political sensibilities.' (Editor's introduction)