A Free Flame

A Free Flame
Author: Ann-Marie Priest
Publisher: Apollo Books
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2018
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781742589589

***Highly commended in the 2016 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript*** 'I need to be a writer, ' Ruth Park told her future husband, D'Arcy Niland, on the eve of their marriage. 'That's what I need from life.' She was not the only one. At a time when women were considered incapable of being 'real' artists, a number of precocious girls in Australian cities were weighing their chances and laying their plans. A Free Flame explores the lives of four such women, Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Christina Stead and Ruth Park, each of whom went on to become a notable Australian writer. They were very different women from very different backgrounds, but they shared a sense of urgency around their vocation-their 'need' to be a writer-that would not let them rest. Weaving biography, literary criticism and cultural history, this book looks at the ways in which these women laid siege to the artist's identity, and ultimately remade it in their own image. *** "Ann-Marie Priest writes with admirable clarity and a strong sense of appreciation for her subjects. A Free Flame weaves fascinating biographical details and critical insights into an examination of the various ways in which these talented artists negotiated the tension between their sense of vocation and the hindering cultural expectations they faced as women." --James Ley, critic and judge of the Dorothy Hewett Award [Subject: Non-Fiction, Biography, Gender Studies]

A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900

A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900
Author: Nicholas Birns
Publisher: Camden House
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9781571133496

A fresh twenty-first century look at Australian literature in a broad, inclusive and multicultural sense.

The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature

The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature
Author: Jessica Gildersleeve
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 669
Release: 2020-12-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000281701

In recent years, Australian literature has experienced a revival of interest both domestically and internationally. The increasing prominence of work by writers like Christos Tsiolkas, heightened through television and film adaptation, as well as the award of major international prizes to writers like Richard Flanagan, and the development of new, high-profile prizes like the Stella Prize, have all reinvigorated interest in Australian literature both at home and abroad. This Companion emerges as a part of that reinvigoration, considering anew the history and development of Australian literature and its key themes, as well as tracing the transition of the field through those critical debates. It considers works of Australian literature on their own terms, as well as positioning them in their critical and historical context and their ethical and interactive position in the public and private spheres. With an emphasis on literature’s responsibilities, this book claims Australian literary studies as a field uniquely positioned to expose the ways in which literature engages with, produces and is produced by its context, provoking a critical re-evaluation of the concept of the relationship between national literatures, cultures, and histories, and the social function of literary texts.

Twentieth-century Literary Criticism

Twentieth-century Literary Criticism
Author: Gale Research Company
Publisher:
Total Pages: 520
Release: 2005
Genre: Literature, Modern
ISBN:

Excerpts from criticism of the works of novelists, poets, playwrights, and other creative writers, 1900-1960.

Christian Mysticism and Australian Poetry

Christian Mysticism and Australian Poetry
Author: Toby Davidson
Publisher: Cambria Press
Total Pages: 286
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 1621967948

Australian poetry is popularly conceived as a tradition founded by the wry, secular and stoic strains of its late-nineteenth-century bush balladeers Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Lawson and ‘Banjo’ Paterson, consolidated into a land-based ‘vigour’ in publications such as the Bulletin. Yet this popular conception relies on not actually consulting the poetry itself, which for well over one hundred and fifty years has been cerebral, introspective, feminine and highly — even experimentally — religious. This book casts Australian poetry in a new light by showing how Australian Christian mystical poetics can be found in every era of Australian letters, how literary hostilities towards women poets, eroticism and contemplation served to stifle a critical appreciation of mystical poetics until recent decades, and how in the twentieth century one Australian Christian mystical poet began to influence another and share their appreciations of Dante, Donne, Traherne, Blake, Wordsworth, Brontë, Rossetti, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot and Lowell.

Carpentaria

Carpentaria
Author: Alexis Wright
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2024-02-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811238040

Alexis Wright’s award-winning classic Carpentaria: “a swelling, heaving tsunami of a novel—stinging, sinuous, salted with outrageous humor, sweetened by spiraling lyricism” (The Australian) Carpentaria is an epic of the Gulf country of northwestern Queensland, Australia. Its portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centers on the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight’s renegade Eastend mob, on the one hand, and with the white officials of Uptown and the nearby rapacious, ecologically disastrous Gurfurrit mine on the other. Wright’s masterful novel teems with extraordinary characters—the outcast savior Elias Smith, the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, the murderous mayor Bruiser, the moth-ridden Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist Will Phantom, and above all, the rulers of the family, the queen of the garbage dump and the fish-embalming king of time: Angel Day and Normal Phantom—who stand like giants in a storm-swept world. Wright’s storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, politics and farce. She has a narrative gift for remaking reality itself, altering along her way, as if casually, the perception of what a novel can do with the inside of the reader's mind. Carpentaria is “an epic, exhilarating, unsettling novel” (Wall Street Journal) that is not to be missed.

The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century

The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century
Author: Bonnie S. McDougall
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 526
Release: 1997
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780231110846

The written culture of 20th-century China has only recently begun to receive sustained attention from Western readers and critics. This book presents illuminating information on writers, audiences, and the impact of various literary works on politics and culture--and provides a unique window on Chinese society.

Travelling Home, 'Walkabout Magazine' and Mid-Twentieth-Century Australia

Travelling Home, 'Walkabout Magazine' and Mid-Twentieth-Century Australia
Author: Mitchell Rolls
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2016-07-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1783085398

'Travelling Home' provides a detailed analysis of the contribution that the mid twentieth-century 'Walkabout' magazine made to Australia’s cultural history. Spanning five central decades of the twentieth century (1934-1974), 'Walkabout' was integral to Australia’s sense of itself as a nation. By advocating travel—both vicarious and actual—'Walkabout' encouraged settler Australians to broaden their image of the nation and its place in the Pacific region. In this way, 'Walkabout' explicitly aimed to make its readers feel at home in their country, as well as including a diverse picture of Aboriginal and Pacific cultures. Given its wide availability and distribution, together with its accessible and entertaining content, 'Walkabout' changed how Australia was perceived, and the magazine is recalled with nostalgic fondness by most if not all of its former readers. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, 'Travelling Home' engages with key questions in literary, cultural, and Australian studies about national identity and modernity. The book’s diverse topics demonstrate how 'Walkabout' canvassed subtle and shifting fields of representation; as a result, this analysis produces complex and nuanced readings of Australian literary and cultural history.

The Rest Is Noise

The Rest Is Noise
Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 706
Release: 2007-10-16
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1429932880

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.