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Issue Details: First known date: 2009... 2009 After the Celebration : Australian Fiction 1989-2007
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'After the Celebration explores Australian fiction from 1989 to 2007, after Australia's bicentenary to the end of the Howard government. In this literary history, Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman combine close attention to Australian novels with a vivid depiction of their contexts: cultural, social, political, historical, national and transnational.

'From crime fiction to the postmodern colonial novel, from Australian grunge to 'rural apocalypse fiction', from the Asian diasporic novel to the action blockbuster, Gelder and Salzman show how Australian novelists such as Frank Moorhouse, Elizabeth Jolley, Peter Carey, Kim Scott, Steven Carroll, Kate Grenville, Tim Winton, Alexis Wright and many others have used their work to chart our position in the world.

'The literary controversies over history, identity, feminism and gatekeeping are read against the politics of the day. Provocative and compelling, After the Celebration captures the key themes and issues in Australian fiction: where we have been and what we have become.' (Publisher's blurb)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Carlton, Parkville - Carlton area, Melbourne - North, Melbourne, Victoria,: Melbourne University Press , 2009 .
      image of person or book cover 1177350355077106064.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: xii, 292p.p.
      Note/s:
      • Publication date: January 2009.
      • Bibliography: p. 264-280.
      • Includes index.
      ISBN: 9780522855975

Works about this Work

In the Same Boat Emmett Stinson , 2013- single work criticism
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , March 2013;
'Discussions of the cultural cringe are now conducted in the past tense. Cringe-thinking, or so the contemporary narrative goes, can no longer function in a globalised, cosmopolitan, multicultural Australia where local literature circulates in an international milieu. This new literary internationalism is perhaps best exemplified by the designation of Melbourne as an UNESCO City of Literature in the 2008 and the subsequent founding of the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas, but evidence of Australian cultural bodies' increasing collaboration with foreign organisations can be found everywhere: the establishment of the 2012 conference NonfictioNow, which was a joint initiative of RMIT and the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop; the 2010 creation of if:book Australia, a collaborative venture between the Queensland Writers Centre and the international Institute for the Future of the Book; the 2012 recognition of Clunes as one of sixteen members of the International Organisation of Booktowns; Allen & Unwin's 2010 launch of an Australian version of the Faber Academy, which offers creative writing classes; and the recent announcement of a Melbourne chapter of Alain de Botton's School of Life, which will host literary events, offer 'bibliotherapy', and contain a bookshop run by local seller Readings.' (Author's introduction)
[Review] After the Celebration : Australian Fiction 1989-2007 Nishi Pulugurtha , 2012 single work review
— Appears in: Transnational Literature , November vol. 5 no. 1 2012;

— Review of After the Celebration : Australian Fiction 1989-2007 Ken Gelder , Paul Salzman , 2009 selected work criticism
The ‘Hermeneutics of Equivocation’ in JM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello Fiona Hile , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 12 no. 1 2012;
'Much has been made of the purported insignificance of the postscript that appends JM Coetzee's eleventh novel, Elizabeth Costello. In J.M. Coetzee's Austerities, Graham Bradshaw writes that 'Apart from some searching pages in an essay by Lucy Graham on "Textual Transvestism", Coetzee's "Letter" has barely been discussed, and when it became the "Postscript" to Elizabeth Costello one reviewer complained that it had no connection with that work'. In "The Subject and Infinity", the French philosopher Alain Badiou re-evaluates Jacques Lacan's notorious formulas of sexuation to argue that 'Lacan only summons the infinite to dismiss it.' What Badiou wants to do then is give 'full recognition to the existence of the infinite' and to insist that 'the infinite of inaccessibility is not adequate. What must be discovered is the affirmative force of the infinite, which is always lodged in some axiomatic decision' (227). This essay argues that the reader needs to axiomatically decide to further investigate the seemingly nonsensical inclusion of the Postscript in Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, in order to encounter this affirmative force.' (Author's abstract)
Foreword : Sold by the Millions Amit Sarwal , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Sold by the Millions : Australia's Bestsellers 2012; (p. viii-xvi)
Magwitch Madness : Archive Fever and the Teaching of Australian Literature in Subject English Larissa McLean-Davies , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Teaching Australian Literature : From Classroom Conversations to National Imaginings 2011; (p. 129-152)
'...Magwitch madness...has been inspired by Derrida's notion of 'archive fever' - the 'compulsive, repetitive and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin' (Derrida, 1998, p. 9). Like the convict Magwitch in Charles Dickens's novel, who is relocated to Australia, but remains imaginatively and materially linked to the centre of the Empire through his patronage of the boy Philip Pirrip (Pip), contemporary manifestations of Magwitch madness, whether they be in curriculum documents, media debates, text selection or pedagogical practices, are distinguished by a nostalgia for classic texts...and metaphorical and virtual proximity to the cultural capital that these classic works represent. ...

In this chapter, I will examine some contemporary manifestation of Magwitch madness in Some Australasian texts set for study in senior English. Thorough this analysis, I will pursue the connection between these texts and a more systemic manifestation of this condition in the recent debate around the teaching of Australian literature and in the Australian Curriculum: English. In the final section of this chapter, I will explore the implications of Magwitch madness for classroom practice, by drawing on data collected in four diverse Victorian secondary schools in 2010 as part of the project National Stories: Teaching Australian Literature in Secondary English. Through the examination of these various and inter-connected expressions of antipodean archive fever in text, curriculum and practice, this chapter will map some of the complexities and challenges of teaching Australian literature in twenty-first century classrooms.' (From author's introduction, 130, 131-132)
[Review] After the Celebration : Australian Fiction 1989-2007 Portia Lindsay , 2008 single work review
— Appears in: Bookseller + Publisher Magazine , Summer 2008-2009 vol. 88 no. 5 2008; (p. 49)

— Review of After the Celebration : Australian Fiction 1989-2007 Ken Gelder , Paul Salzman , 2009 selected work criticism
Coping with the Hangover James Ley , 2009 single work review
— Appears in: The Age , 24 January 2009; (p. 21)

— Review of After the Celebration : Australian Fiction 1989-2007 Ken Gelder , Paul Salzman , 2009 selected work criticism
Non-Fiction Elli Housden , 2009 single work review
— Appears in: The Courier-Mail , 31 January - 1 February 2009; (p. 24)

— Review of After the Celebration : Australian Fiction 1989-2007 Ken Gelder , Paul Salzman , 2009 selected work criticism
In Short : Nonfiction Bruce Elder , 2009 single work review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 21-22 February 2009; (p. 31)

— Review of Father of the House : The Memoirs of Kim E. Beazley Kim E. Beazley , 2009 single work autobiography ; After the Celebration : Australian Fiction 1989-2007 Ken Gelder , Paul Salzman , 2009 selected work criticism
Sour Emanations Peter Pierce , 2009 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , April no. 310 2009; (p. 7-8)

— Review of After the Celebration : Australian Fiction 1989-2007 Ken Gelder , Paul Salzman , 2009 selected work criticism
Paul Salzman Replies to Peter Pierce: Paul Salzman , 2009 single work correspondence
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 311 2009; (p. 5)
Empty Celebration? Ken Gelder , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: Overland , Winter no. 195 2009; (p. 110-112)
Archival Salvage : History’s Reef and the Wreck of the Historical Novel A. Frances Johnson , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue vol. 11 no. 1 2011; (p. 1-21)
'In recent years debates about the ethics of portraying Indigenous subjects and subject matter have almost been superseded by circular debates about 'true' Australian history and who has the right to tell it. This has been disappointing in a context of the morally and formally imaginative speculations of historians such as Tom Griffiths, Fiona Paisley, Stephen Kinnane and Greg Dening, and also in a context of Indigenous studies Professor Marcia Langton's evidently too-hopeful calls for the activation of a shared cultural space. But as this local debate has become more heated, more public, the oddest spectacle of all in recent years was the recent lambasting of historical novelists.

Novelist Kate Grenville was a particular target of attack. Notable historians such as Mark McKenna, John Hirst and Inga Clendinnen vociferously condemned dramatic accounts of the past as anachronistic, unethical and, most curious of all in relation to the fictioneer's job description, untrue. I revisit the 'history wars' stoush to argue that these historians overlooked the suasion of broader, local political battles to determine and culturally enshrine particular narratives of Australian pasts; I argue that they also eschewed the linguistic turn of postmodernism and the contributions made therein by prominent historical scholars in their own field such as Hayden White and Dominic LaCapra. The paper finally shows how Grenville, Kim Scott and other novelists have engaged with colonial archival materials, deploying particular narrative techniques that enable them to generate compelling postcolonial dramatisations of colonial pasts. (Author's abstract)
The Solid Mandala and Patrick White’s Late Modernity Nicholas Birns , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Transnational Literature , November vol. 4 no. 1 2011;
'This essay contends that the Australian novelist Patrick White (1912-1990) presents, in his novel The Solid Mandala (1966), a prototypical evocation of late modernity that indicates precisely why and how it was different from the neoliberal and postmodern era that succeeded it. Late modernity is currently emerging as a historical period, though still a nascent and contested one. Robert Hassan speaks of the 1950-1970 era as a period which, in its 'Fordist' mode of production maintained a certain conformity yet held off the commoditisation of later neoliberalism's 'network-driven capitalism'. This anchors the sense of 'late modernity,' that will operate in this essay, though my sense of the period also follows on definitions of the term established, in very different contexts, by Edward Lucie-Smith and Tyrus Miller.' (Author's introduction)
"Twisted Ghosts" : Settler Envy and Historical Resolution in Andrew McGahan's The White Earth Marc Delrez , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Splintered Glass : Facets of Trauma in the Post-Colony and Beyond 2011; (p. 191-204)
Last amended 7 Jun 2018 12:58:19
Subjects:
  • 1989-2007
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