AustLit

Carmen Lawrence says: I'm not suggesting that writers or critics should crank out polemic, but that they should not underestimate the power of literature to chip away at orthodox ways of thinking; that they celebrate the power they have to insinuate new images into our repertoire. Works of literature can provoke us to question accepted verities and can show us that there are always alternatives; that descriptions of reality are only tentative and that a final understanding of the way things are isn't possible -- or even desirable. For me, as a reader, what remains intoxicating is that through literature I am provoked into seditious perceptions that erode my certainties and settled doctrines.'

'This paper examines the cultural and political legacies of Dad Rudd, a fictional character who first appeared in short stories by 'Steele Rudd' (A. H. Davis) in the Bulletin in 1895 and has since appeared in popular fiction, theatre, film, television and radio adaptations throughout the twentieth century. It traces a set of national tropes - particularly that of the battler - through stump speeches made by Dad Rudd in On Our Selection! (1899), Dad in Politics (1908), the stage melodrama On Our Selection (1912), and Ken G. Hall's film Dad Rudd, M.P. (1940), and considers how they have continued to be used to create both political and cultural constituencies in Australia.'

'This article provides a queer reading of Marcus Clarke's His Natural Life that pays particular attention to Clarke's thematic of sexual unspeakability. More specifically, it revisits the infamous fate of the young convict Kirkland in order to explore the perverse dynamics of the homosocial romance between Clarke's gentleman hero Rufus Dawes, and perhaps Clarke's most enigmatic and queer creation, the prison priest Reverend James North.' (JASAL abstract)

'Behind the books that serve most critics and biographers as signposts to the development of Vance Palmer's short fiction, another sequence of events is found in the newspapers and magazines to which he contributed. In addition to the stories for which he is best-known, he published hundreds more in Australian periodicals. This article considers Palmer's career through his contributions to the Bulletin, the Triad and the Australian Journal. Palmer might be best-known as a representative figure in Australia's literary culture, but he is also one of the most representative figures of the magazine culture of his time.' (JASAL abstract.)

'This paper investigates Norman Lindsay's 1918 illustrated children's novel The Magic Pudding with a view to understanding how the text reflects the state of Australian wishfulness at a particular moment in the history of Australian literary consciousness and the national self-conception. In The Magic Pudding the distorting mirror shown [sic] the subject entering culture is one which hails (as it teaches) a characteristic cynicism with regard to the rules and rights of possession - a cynicism befitting the un-nameable anywhere of the action. This essay argues that the puddin' as possession (slave and cannibal commodity) has provided an apt palimpsest for wishful thinking of the Australian kind, likewise for Australian styles of cynicism with regard to such wishfulness.' (JASAL abstract)

'In both her fiction and autobiographical essays, author Lily Brett describes the process of travelling 'home' to Poland as an adult child of Holocaust survivors. In a close reading of her novel Too Many Men, I will discuss the contemporary concern with returning to the 'past' for a sense of contemporary 'self' represented in this novel. In Too Many Men the protagonist Ruth journeys to Poland with her father, visiting the sites of his former life and the places of his family's destruction. However, the journey represents very different things for these two characters. Sites of memory, 'simulation' and the 'trace' are key ideas adopted in this reading.' (JASAL abstract)

'Attention to Jennifer Rankin's poetry was spare within her lifetime. Twenty-eight years after her death, the time has come to challenge her critical reception and to recognise the importance of her poetics on its own terms. Her work has an antithetical relationship to the generation of '68, and the shadowy place that it takes among the poetry of her peers can be defined by its struggle against subjectivity; a poetics at odds with John Tranter's descriptions of a new Australian poetry. This article reads several of Rankin's poems closely, and in comparison with a poem by Robert Adamson, to demonstrate Rankin's approach to subjectivity and the influence of painting on her poetry.' (JASAL abstract)

'The article traces the trajectory I observe in Wallace-Crabbe's writing since his first poetry publication. The focus is on his consciousness of the paradox of language's ability to express what Auden called 'unmentionable private concerns' - and, I would add, 'unmentionable' aspects of public life. The essay necessarily dwells only fleetingly on several divagations from the coherence I observe in his critical writing and his poetry.' (JASAL abstract)