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Issue Details: First known date: 2009... 2009 'A Peculiar Aesthetic' : Julia Leigh's The Hunter and Sublime Loss
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Julia Leigh's re-animation and pursuit of the extinct thylacine in her novel The Hunter was for some reviewers an inappropriate appropriation of a Tasmanian icon. Martin Flanagan, while acknowledging the necessity of global engagement in issues such as extinction, criticised the cost of this engagement for local Tasmanian culture, writing in The Age 'I'm all for global awareness. What I'm against is clear-felling local cultures. We all know where that leads.' However, Flanagan's alignment of environmental disaster and the neglect of local identity is not as transparent as he suggests, given that, in this case, the vessel for that local identity is the no longer local thylacine. This essay argues that The Hunter examines the intersection of global ecological imaginging and local identity around the concept of place. Employing a sublime aesthetic, the novel unearths the radical loss that underpins the construction of place, forming a representation of extinction that speaks for what is lost to the landscape.

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    y separately published work icon JASAL Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature; Australian Literature in a Global World Special Issue Antonio Jose Simoes Da Silva (editor), Wenche Ommundsen (editor), 2009 Z1605155 2009 periodical issue This Special Issue of JASAL is based on the 2008 ASAL conference 'Australian Literature in a Global World' held at the University of Wollongong. The conference aimed to 'explore the effects, on the national literature, of different aspects of globalisation: transnational flows of people, ideas and cultural forms; globalisation in the publishing and education industries; the global marketplace for cultural production'. (Editor's introduction.) 2009
Last amended 9 Aug 2010 13:53:52
http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-63067-20090910-1633-www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/860/1768.html 'A Peculiar Aesthetic' : Julia Leigh's The Hunter and Sublime Losssmall AustLit logo JASAL
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