Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage

Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage
Author: Frances A. Johnson
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2015-11-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 900431167X

Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage examines key developments in the field of the Australian postcolonial historical novel from 1989 to the present. In parallel with this analysis, A. Frances Johnson undertakes a unique study of in-kind creativity, reflecting on how her own nascent historical fiction has been critically and imaginatively shaped and inspired by seminal experiments in the genre – by writers as diverse as Kate Grenville, Mudrooroo, Kim Scott, Peter Carey, Richard Flanagan, and Rohan Wilson. Mapping the postcolonial novel against the impact of postcolonial cultural theory and Australian writers’ intermittent embrace of literary postmodernism, this survey is also read against the post-millenial ‘history’ and ‘culture wars’ which saw politicizations of national debates around history and fierce contestation over the ways stories of Australian pasts have been written.

The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel

The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel
Author: Nicholas Birns
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2023-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 131651448X

The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel provides a clear, lively, and accessible account of the novel in Australia. The chapters of this book survey significant issues and developments in the Australian novel, offer historical and conceptual frameworks, and provide vivid and original examples of what reading an Australian novel looks like in practice. The book begins with novels by literary visitors to Australia and concludes with those by refugees. In between, the reader encounters the Australian novel in its splendid contradictoriness, from nineteenth-century settler fiction by women writers through to literary images of the Anthropocene, from sexuality in the novels of Patrick White to Waanyi writer Alexis Wright's call for a sovereign First Nations literature. This book is an invitation to students, instructors, and researchers alike to expand and broaden their knowledge of the complex histories and vital present of the Australian novel.

The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel

The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel
Author: David Carter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 826
Release: 2023-05-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009093207

The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel is an authoritative volume on the Australian novel by more than forty experts in the field of Australian literary studies, drawn from within Australia and abroad. Essays cover a wide range of types of novel writing and publishing from the earliest colonial period through to the present day. The international dimensions of publishing Australian fiction are also considered as are the changing contours of criticism of the novel in Australia. Chapters examine colonial fiction, women's writing, Indigenous novels, popular genre fiction, historical fiction, political novels, and challenging novels on identity and belonging from recent decades, not least the major rise of Indigenous novel writing. Essays focus on specific periods of major change in Australian history or range broadly across themes and issues that have influenced fiction across many years and in many parts of the country.

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction
Author: Julia Novak
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2022-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3031090195

This volume addresses the current boom in biographical fictions across the globe, examining the ways in which gendered lives of the past become re-imagined as gendered narratives in fiction. Building on this research, this book is the first to address questions of gender in a sustained and systematic manner that is also sensitive to cultural and historical differences in both raw material and fictional reworking. It develops a critical lens through which to approach biofictions as ‘fictions of gender’, drawing on theories of biofiction and historical fiction, life-writing studies, feminist criticism, queer feminist readings, postcolonial studies, feminist art history, and trans studies. Attentive to various approaches to fictionalisation that reclaim, appropriate or re-invent their ‘raw material’, the volume assesses the critical, revisionist and deconstructive potential of biographical fictions while acknowledging the effects of cliché, gender norms and established narratives in many of the texts under investigation. The introduction of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Reckoning with the Past

Reckoning with the Past
Author: Ashley Barnwell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351613359

This is the first book to examine how Australian fiction writers draw on family histories to reckon with the nation’s colonial past. Located at the intersection of literature, history, and sociology, it explores the relationships between family storytelling, memory, and postcolonial identity. With attention to the political potential of family histories, Reckoning with the Past argues that authors’ often autobiographical works enable us to uncover, confront, and revise national mythologies. An important contribution to the emerging global conversation about multidirectional memory and the need to attend to the effects of colonisation, this book will appeal to an interdisciplinary field of scholarly readers.

Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage

Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage
Author: A. Frances Johnson
Publisher: Brill / Rodopi
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2015-11-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9789004309975

"Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage" examines developments in the Australian postcolonial historical novel from 1989 to the present, including seminal experiments in the genre by Kate Grenville, Mudrooroo, Kim Scott, Peter Carey, Rohan Wilson and others.

Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities

Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities
Author: Elizabeth DeLoughrey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2015-04-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317574303

This book examines current trends in scholarly thinking about the new field of the Environmental Humanities, focusing in particular on how the history of globalization and imperialism represents a special challenge to the representation of environmental issues. Essays in this path-breaking collection examine the role that narrative, visual, and aesthetic forms can play in drawing attention to and shaping our ideas about long-term and catastrophic environmental challenges such as climate change, militarism, deforestation, the pollution and management of the global commons, petrocapitalism, and the commodification of nature. The volume presents a postcolonial approach to the environmental humanities, especially in conjunction with current thinking in areas such as political ecology and environmental justice. Spanning regions such as Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Australasia and the Pacific, as well as North America, the volume includes essays by founding figures in the field as well as new scholars, providing vital new interdisciplinary perspectives on: the politics of the earth; disaster, vulnerability, and resilience; political ecologies and environmental justice; world ecologies; and the Anthropocene. In engaging critical ecologies, the volume poses a postcolonial environmental humanities for the twenty-first century. At the heart of this is a conviction that a thoroughly global, postcolonial, and comparative approach is essential to defining the emergent field of the environmental humanities, and that this field has much to offer in understanding critical issues surrounding the creation of alternative ecological futures.

Time, Tide and History

Time, Tide and History
Author: Brigid Rooney
Publisher: Sydney University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2024-06-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1743329679

Time, Tide and History: Eleanor Dark’s Fiction is the first book-length edited collection of scholarly essays to treat the full span of Eleanor Dark’s fiction, advancing a recent revival of critical and scholarly interest in Dark’s writing. This volume not only establishes a new view of Dark’s fiction as a whole, but also reflects on the ways in which her fiction speaks to our present moment, in the context of a globally fraught, post-pandemic, Anthropocene era. Above all, the revisiting of Dark’s fiction is mandated by a desire to recognise the ways in which it anticipates vital debates in Australian literary and national culture today, about settler colonialism and its legacies, and with regard to the histories, condition and status of Australia’s First Nations people. This volume interweaves varied topical themes, from formal debates about modernism, historical realism and melodrama, to questions about modernity’s time and space, about gender and cultural difference, and about the specifics of built and natural environments. Time, Tide and History intentionally loosens the conventions of literary scholarship by including other kinds of work alongside critical and scholarly readings: a written dialogue between two contemporary historians about Dark’s legacy, and a biographical piece on the life and role of Eleanor Dark’s husband, Eric Payten Dark. Bringing together the interwar fiction’s feminist and modernist dimensions with the historical turn of The Timeless Land trilogy, the essays in Time, Tide and History collectively pursue ethical and political questions while teasing out the distinctive thematic, formal and aesthetic features of Dark’s fiction.

Mapping the Self

Mapping the Self
Author: Alex Goody
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2015-10-05
Genre: National characteristics in literature
ISBN: 1443884316

As the title indicates, three themes of perpetual interest in contemporary cultural studies – place, identity, and nationality – converge in this critical essay collection. While proffering varied and sometimes clashing arguments concerning the title themes, the essays and their authors all assert the importance of the creative text in defining, contesting, and understanding place, identity, and nationality in the modern and contemporary globalised world. The critical frameworks of these essays grow out of the groundbreaking literary and cultural studies theory of the past two decades. However, several of the essays map hitherto unchartered territory by engaging with recent works from emerging authors and a director, and providing new insight into the work of established authors. Beyond mapping new academic terrain, the collection is further distinguished by its global perspective with texts and authors from around the world which come together in a unique multinational dialogue. The collection is divided into three sections. The first, “Women Writers and Nationalism”, includes essays on Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich, Jo Shapcott, and Leila Aboulela. The second, “National Identity and Contemporary Fictions”, examines the role of contemporary fiction in establishing the respective national identities and histories of Wales and Australia. The third, “Transnational Identities”, analyses Partition literature, migrant women’s literature of France and Spain, and film director Shane Meadows’ take on new forms of nationalism. From India, Africa, Europe, Australia, and the United States, the texts and essays crisscross the globe, exploring the relationships between nationality and identity through film, memoir, poetry, and the novel. Some examine national literatures and identities; others focus on the struggle of the individual, particularly the migrant individual, to define his or her identity within a multicultural, multinational framework. Together, the essays register both collective and individual responses to nationality and illustrate new forms of nationalism and identity in the modern and contemporary world.

Deception: An Interdisciplinary Exploration

Deception: An Interdisciplinary Exploration
Author: Emma Williams
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2019-01-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1848883544

This volume explores the concept of deception from a multidisciplinary perspective, reflecting how deception is considered across numerous fields ranging from literature and historical cases to psychological science.