AustLit

'In ' "A heart that could be strong and true": Kenneth Cook's Wake in Fright as queer interior' Monique Rooney presents a compelling reading of the complicated relations between self and other, interior and exterior, in the iconic, troubling text of Wake in Fright. Her discussion focuses on the play of aurality and lyricism in the novel's account of outsider relations, and proposes a reading that draws on Michael Snediker's 'emphasis on a potentially joyful Freud' in classic accounts of queer melancholy in order to attend to what she determines is a 'critique of processes of masculinist dis-identification' in the novel. This important discussion works to reanimate critical consideration not only of a significant and neglected text, but also of broader debates around the reach and nature of metropolitan subjectivities in post- WWII literature in Australia.' (Source: Introduction : Archive Madness, p. 3)