AustLit
Latest Issues
Contents
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A Dreaming, a Sauntering: Re-Imagining Critical Paradigms,
single work
criticism
Beginning with a memory from her childhood, Gail Jones explores varying perceptions of experience and imagines a mode of Australian cultural dreaming 'that is both an ethical stance and a politics of hope.' (Editors' notes)Note: Includes list of works cited.
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Fragmented and Entwined: Migration Stories in Sibyl's Cave and Other Australian Fiction,
single work
criticism
'As a writer, a reader and a migrant, I am interested in the gaps in migration narratives and in where the stories touch other stories. These features suggest the difficulty of capturing the enormity of the migrational shift in one narrative and offer a sense of the nuances contained within a single person's experiences of migration. In this article I explore some ways in which individual migration stories have similar fragmented structures and make dynamic connections to wider stories, using examples from my own and other Australian fiction.'
In addition to her own work, Sibyl's Cave, Padmore refers to Eva Sallis's Hiam (1998), Arnold Zable's Cafe Scheherazade (2001), Peter Lyssiotis and Nick Petroulias's 'New Troy' (2000) and Rosa Cappiello's Oh, Lucky Country [Paese Fortunato] (1984). 'Some of these works have fragmented structures and all contain intertextual links to other stories. The embedded stories in these texts are often not Australian in origin but have travelled to Australia from elsewhere, reflecting the migrational history that shapes one aspect of contemporary Australian identity.'
Note: Includes list of works cited. -
Italian-Australian Poetry by First Generation Writers: An Overview,
single work
criticism
Rando investigates '[p]oetry in volume form written by Italian migrants in Australia' that 'began to appear at the end of the 1940s...' He concludes that '[f]or some writers the passage to a new world and a new life involves the realisation of a richer and fuller life. For others, however, the long crossing has not lived up to its promise. The dream did not become reality and nostalgia triggers a sense of not belonging either to the past or to the present, a metaphysical wandering that cannot be fully resolved. While some poetry deals with the social realities of the diaspora, most provides perceptions of the thoughts and feelings that constitute the inner life of the migrant, the constant and ever-shifting appraisal of two different worlds and two different cultures in the attempt to demythologise and remythologise past and present in the light of new experiences.'Note: Includes list of works cited.
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The Populist Imaginary in David Ireland's The Unknown Industrial Prisoner and The Chosen,
single work
criticism
Blaber argues that 'in the shift from processes of state-nationalist identities to post-nationalist ones there emerges an opportunity for the re-figuration of a populist imaginary and an associated populist politics. By populist imaginary, I refer to a form of nostalgia, underwritten by processes of reminiscence and anecdote, which creates a sense of the past that imagines a social and political order that at once simplifies and "restores" a way of life based in community or collectivity in the face of the changing understanding of the relationship between the national and the global.'
Blaber concludes, 'the felt presence of the populist imaginary must be understood as indicative of a return to, and a new iteration of, a foundational moment, suggesting that the question of national or collective identity can never be totally settled, and that identity is always a pattern of recurrence.'
Note: Includes list of works cited. -
Insane Lane: Crowds, Contamination and Violence in Australia,
single work
criticism
David Crouch argues that White or Yellow? : A Story of the Race War of A.D.1908 'is an early manifestation of a long lineage of national paranoia, part of a history of primal anxiety which colours the contemporary rhetoric of border protection, illegal immigrants and the increasingly phobic suspicion that a multicultural Australia might include hidden cells - or "communities of interest" - within.' He suggests that William Lane's novel 'is particularly interesting because of the way in which he presents ideas about the relations between the individual and the mass that are inflected by both sexual and racial politics.'Note: Includes list of works cited.
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Prolonged Symptoms of Cultural Anxiety : The Persistence of Narratives of Asian Invasion within Multicultural Australia,
single work
criticism
'In this paper, recent invasion novels by John Marsden provide a case study for examining the subtextual configurations of meaning that underlie the proposition of Asian threat and allow insight into the historical and cultural unconscious of an anxious settler nation.' (p.86)
Ross argues that 'the persistence of the Asian invasion narrative indicates white Australia's fears for security of tenure ... and demonstrates the underlying paranoia that a nation founded on invasion could possibly be lost by invasion.'
Note: Includes list of works cited. -
George Chamier and the Native Question,
single work
criticism
Sturm concludes his discussion on Chamier's novels by saying they are 'exemplary in that they illustrate the way settler society is founded on negation through Raleigh's reflexive "tarrying with the negative." I'd say that the only way to overcome this settler bind (that settlers seem to be fated to resettle) is to accept that we just have to live with it - it cannot be solved. It can't be cut like the Gordian knot; we - settlers and Maori, that is - are tied together.
Note: Includes illustraions, portraits, diagrams and a list of works cited. -
Globalizing Indigenes : Postcolonial Fiction from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific,
single work
criticism
Wevers proposes that 'there are complex unfoldings around indigeneity, globalisation and the postcolonial which might usefully be illuminated by a consideration of some texts from Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Pacific.'
Wevers investigation leads her to conclude that 'Indigeneity is always placed; its politics, worldview and social order are site- and culturespecific, but in the unfolding of many indigenous texts a new discourse is appearing, in which the nation state and its long binarising history of "natives" is only one part of the scene, and where "indigeneity" re-articulates and responds to globalised discourses, one of which is postcolonial politics.'
Note: Includes list of works cited. -
Being Elsewhere : Aesthetics, Identities and Alienation in Peter Austen's Life and Poetry,
single work
criticism
Buckridge writes, 'The life and work of Peter Austen, an Australian poet and participant in the First World War, exemplify the defamiliarising function of the single instance, and suggest the possibility of unfamiliar, even "strange" ways in which people could live out the conventional role of the "soldierpoet." This paper offers an account of his brief writing career from that perspective.'
Buckridge aims 'to consider Peter Austen's work historically, as the record of an encounter between a certain kind of literary sensibility and the experience of active service. I am interested, in other words, in the process by which he 'wrote his war", in the cultural capital and aesthetic assumptions he brought to the confrontation, and in how these may have enabled him to come to terms with it and survive it. I shall also touch, finally, on the question of how the prolonged assaults on his sensibility changed his personality and his life...'
Note: Includes list of works cited. -
For Love Alone? Anorexia and Teresa's Quest for Love,
single work
criticism
Frugtneit asserts that 'the character of Teresa Hawkins [in For Love Alone] displays many of the physiological and psychological symptoms of anorexia. She starves herself in her quest for love, a form of self-abnegation by which she gradually denies sustenance to both her body and mind.'
Frugtneit concludes: 'In the autobiographical For Love Alone Teresa Hawkin's self-starvation in her quest for love reveals how food, desire and identity are inextricably linked ... Ultimately [Theresa] is empowered and she demonstrates her empowerment by reconciling the psychological conflicts that affected her physically through writing the self. Her debilitated body strengthens as she recognises the profound way in which she has achieved independence and sexual liberation. In For Love Alone Teresa's anorexia is a testament to the paradoxes and dilemmas that confront women and their quest for identity.'
Note: Includes list of works cited. -
"Impossible Speech" and the Burden of Translation : Lilian's Story from Page to Screen,
single work
criticism
In Lilian's Story, Lilian 'claims, "I have never cultivated the burden of memory." This essay extends Lilian's suggestion in order to problematise the "burden of translation" and its significance for recent ideas of history as performance, variously applied by writers from Greg Dening to Judith Butler.' (p.162) Further, 'this essay examines the translation from novel to film, and its significance to ideas of the "re-staging" of history through performance.' (p.164)
Note: Includes list of works cited. -
Operatic Narratives: Textual Transformations in Gwen Harwood and Larry Sitsky's Golem and Lenz,
single work
criticism
Wood seeks to 'map textual transformation in Harwood's and Sitsky's operas, examining the hybrid elements that give rise to formal exaggeration'. She 'explore[s] the interrelationship of three critical elements: words/music, the visuality of performance and collaborative practice. This mapping aims to illuminate how such interrelationships produce formal exaggeration and, ultimately, the textual transformations observed.'Note: Includes list of works cited.
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Gail Jones' "Light Writing": Memory and the Photo-graph,
single work
criticism
'This article traces Jones's interest in photography/film and the ways in which metaphors of light, shadow and mirroring shape narratives.' (p.192)Note: Includes list of works cited.
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[Review] The Best Australian Poems 2005 The Best Australian Poetry 2005,
single work
review
— Review of The Best Australian Poems 2005 2005 anthology poetry ; The Best Australian Poetry 2005 2005 anthology poetry ; (p. 209-214) -
Untitled,
single work
review
— Review of Dance of the Nomad : A Study of the Selected Notebooks of A. D. Hope. 2005 single work criticism ; (p. 215-220) -
[Review] Dearest Munx [and] The Equal Heart and Mind,
single work
review
— Review of Dearest Munx : The Letters of Christina Stead and William J. Blake 2005 selected work correspondence ; The Equal Heart and Mind : Letters between Judith Wright and Jack McKinney 2004 selected work correspondence poetry ; (p. 221-224) -
[Review] The Collected Verse of Mary Gilmore,
single work
review
— Review of The Collected Verse of Mary Gilmore 2004-2007 collected work poetry ; (p. 225-226) -
Untitled,
single work
review
— Review of Settler Romances and the Australian Girl 2004 multi chapter work criticism ; (p. 227-229) -
Untitled,
single work
review
— Review of Not Wrong Just Different : Observations on the Rise of Contemporary Australian Theatre 2005 single work criticism ; (p. 230-232) -
Untitled,
single work
review
— Review of Fabulating Beauty : Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey 2005 anthology criticism ; (p. 233-237)