AustLit

‘Vincent Buckley maintained that as an Irish Australian he had grown up as a member of a persecuted minority. He also claimed that, although this minority was crucial in shaping the Australian identity, its members had failed to keep an imaginative connection with their homeland. Much of his work can be read as an attempt to rediscover this link, but his understanding of the Irish element changes over his career. In his earlier work, his concern is with the Irish tradition of WB Yeats and James Joyce, and with his own forefathers as people dispossessed by the heartless English. Later he becomes involved with the fate of the nationalists in Northern Ireland. This leads him both to take direct political action in Australia and to write some of his most significant poems. These show the influence of Seamus Heaney or John Kinsella rather than Yeats, but also bring to bear a distinctly Australian sensibility.’ (38)

‘Syd Harrex was born in Smithton, Tasmania, in 1935 and completed his education in Hobart in the 1950s and 60s. He left Tasmania in 1966 to become a Foundation staff member at Flinders University from where he retired in 2001 as Reader in English and Director of the Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English. Harrex began writing and publishing poetry while a student at the University of Tasmania and his poetry retains something of the “silent croon” of his island home. This chapter considers Harrex’s kinship with the poetry of some of his contemporaries and predecessors. It shows how Harrex’s relationship with these writers is a creative dialogue that shapes and enhances his thematic concerns, rather than displaying any sense of Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence.” The chapter also charts Harex’s poetic journey through different Australian landscapes and from immediate and personal concerns to an exploration of some of the poetry’s universal themes.’ (48)

'This chapter explores some of the many illuminating literary as well as film intertexts of Xavier Herbert's "vast" 1938 novel Capricornia, looking backwards and forwards in time. It considers both "vertical and "horizontal" types of intertextuality. Thus, some relationships begin with reference to another literary text ("horizontal"), while others work across modes, from novel to film or vice versa ("vertical"). Locating the novel in terms of a global system of intertexts, the chapter offers a balance to readings that attempt to objectify and limit the novel's "reality," especially by narrowly nation-focused explanations. The effect is expansive, moving between conventional literary codes of meaning and into mythic, cartographic and astrological realms of apprehension. What emerges is a text just as impure as the novel's own social idealism - a creole text to embody the Creole Nation. (62)

‘This chapter considers the extent to which Rudyard Kipling may have drawn on the writings of an earlier “Anglo-Indian” precursor, the Australian-born John Lang, noting some interesting similarities in both their careers and their writings.’ (74)

'Counter-discourse theory urges readings of postcolonial fictions that are renarrativisations of canonical texts of empire in terms of their strategies of resistance. Recent novels by Peter Carey and Lloyd Jones amply acknowledge their debt to their precursor, Charles Dickens Great Expectations, but this chapter argues that the contestatory imperial relationship is overlaid with the equally compelling theme of postcolonial home and belonging. Carey exploits the oppositional "writing back" paradigm; Jones, by contrast, makes veneration of the Dickensian text central to his plot. Both, however, can also be described as diasporic novels in their preoccupation with the colony as home, as their colonial protagonists, after a fraught encounter with their Victorian heritage in the metropolitan centre of London, find their destiny/destination in the "return." Although this diasporic reading reiterates the familiar binaries of metropolitan centre and colonial periphery, it repositions the filial relationship as one of postcolonial habitation and settlement.' (220)

'Richard Flanagan employs literary allusions in his 2009 Miles Franklin award-winning historical novel Wanting (2008) to play out themes of power and privilege in a contrapuntal composition that dramatizes links between connecting and precursor texts. Alternating narrative lines follow Mathinna, an Indigenous Tasmanian girl adopted by Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin, and Charles Dickens' infatuation with actress Nelly Ternan. He interrogates apocryphal historical events, such as the extinction of Tasmanian Indigenous people. This chapter argues that Flanagan's intertext exposes the savagery of his ageing male protagonists and the patriarchal society they represent. His author's notes describe Wanting as a "mediation on desire," anticipating and summarily dismissing criticism of his depiction of a Zeus-like Sir John Franklin figuratively or actually raping Mathinna after ball. But does he go too far, debauching Mathinna's historical character in the process? Dickens' love affair with Ellen Ternan, the young female lead in his play The Frozen North (1859), becomes a variation on the father/daughter incest paradigm. Employing archetypal dramas and postcolonial theory, Flanagan ensures that every note plays on others, creating riffs. This surely demonstrates his confidence as an established writer, increasingly popular in the United States of America, perhaps more so than in his own country. Flanagan's novel is intent on discord rather than historical re-inscription.' (23)