AustLit
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Gail Jones is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary novelists. Her books have won or been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Miles Franklin Award, the Stella Prize, and numerous state literary awards. They are taught in high schools and universities across the country.
'This collection of essays offers reflections on Jones’ fiction by leading Australian and international literary critics. For readers who loved Sixty Lights, Five Bells, Sorry and Jones’ other novels, and for students of Jones’ work, this book will be an illuminating companion. With chapters on her use of language, her thematic preoccupations, and her place in local and global literary culture, it is a timely guide to the work of an exceptional Australian writer.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Contents
- Constellations of Light and Image | Contemplations on Deep Space: Apparent Magnitude and Scale, single work criticism
- Bioluminescence : Materiality, Metaphor and Trace in Sixty Lights, single work criticism
- Gail Jones' Novel Modernism : Sixty Lights and Literary Tradition, single work criticism
- Sleep’s Sweet Relief, single work criticism
- Resisting Fixation in Gail Jones’ Sorry and Five Bells, single work criticism
- 'Moving on Metaphorical Silk Roads of Intellectual Trade' : Chinese Aesthetics in Five Bells, single work criticism
- Utopia and Hysteria in A Guide to Berlin, single work criticism
- Silent Propinquities : Literary Selfhood and Modernity in A Guide to Berlin, single work criticism
-
Figures in Geometry : The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones,
single work
essay
'In Gail Jones’ 2018 novel about the life and death of Noah Glass, his ‘vocation’ as an art historian begins when, as a small boy growing up in the remote north of Western Australia, he opens a book about the Great Art Museums of the World. It translates him miraculously from the Mars-orange landscape of the outback to the rarefied, Prussian-blue world of Piero della Francesca: it was a ‘window to elsewhere’ and ‘other worlds and times blazed as portents from the pages’. The significance of this moment is confirmed twenty years later when, as a student in London, Noah discovers Piero’s The Nativity (c. 1470-5) hanging in the National Gallery: ‘Noah walked around the National Gallery, taking meticulous notes, registering line by line his self-improvement’. These are instances of what Peter Wagner calls intermediality: the intertextual use of one medium, such as painting, in another medium, such as prose fiction.' (Introduction)
- Blueness and Light in the Art of Gail Jones, single work criticism
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
-
[Review] Inner and Outer Worlds : Gail Jones’ Fiction
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Journal of Postcolonial Writing , vol. 59 no. 4 2023; (p. 570-571)
— Review of Inner and Outer Worlds : Gail Jones' Fiction 2022 anthology criticism'Anthony Uhlmann’s edited collection, Inner and Outer Worlds, includes ten academic articles about contemporary Australian writer Gail Jones’s novels and their narrative, thematic, and intertextual concerns. As a writer interested in postcolonial and modernist themes, Jones is the author of short stories, novels, and also academic articles. Uhlmann acclaims Jones as “one of Australia’s most philosophical novelists” (76).' (Introduction)
-
Dreams of Communing : The Challenge of Gail Jones’s Fiction
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , August no. 445 2022; (p. 19-20)
— Review of Inner and Outer Worlds : Gail Jones' Fiction 2022 anthology criticism'The novels of Gail Jones present a challenge to would-be critics. Jones being a formidable scholar in her own right, her eight novels to date pose sophisticated philosophical questions within their elegantly structured narratives. Her novels canvass aspects of human experience that are murky and complex: these are often forms of familial or romantic relationship shaped by loss, both personal and historical. The challenge for critics is that the novels are themselves thinking about the potential of fiction to do this kind of philosophical or ethical work. In this sense, Jones might seem to be one step ahead of the scholar who takes her work as their subject. Inner and Outer Worlds, a collection of essays edited by Anthony Uhlmann, steps up to this challenge.' (Introduction)
-
Dreams of Communing : The Challenge of Gail Jones’s Fiction
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , August no. 445 2022; (p. 19-20)
— Review of Inner and Outer Worlds : Gail Jones' Fiction 2022 anthology criticism'The novels of Gail Jones present a challenge to would-be critics. Jones being a formidable scholar in her own right, her eight novels to date pose sophisticated philosophical questions within their elegantly structured narratives. Her novels canvass aspects of human experience that are murky and complex: these are often forms of familial or romantic relationship shaped by loss, both personal and historical. The challenge for critics is that the novels are themselves thinking about the potential of fiction to do this kind of philosophical or ethical work. In this sense, Jones might seem to be one step ahead of the scholar who takes her work as their subject. Inner and Outer Worlds, a collection of essays edited by Anthony Uhlmann, steps up to this challenge.' (Introduction)
-
[Review] Inner and Outer Worlds : Gail Jones’ Fiction
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Journal of Postcolonial Writing , vol. 59 no. 4 2023; (p. 570-571)
— Review of Inner and Outer Worlds : Gail Jones' Fiction 2022 anthology criticism'Anthony Uhlmann’s edited collection, Inner and Outer Worlds, includes ten academic articles about contemporary Australian writer Gail Jones’s novels and their narrative, thematic, and intertextual concerns. As a writer interested in postcolonial and modernist themes, Jones is the author of short stories, novels, and also academic articles. Uhlmann acclaims Jones as “one of Australia’s most philosophical novelists” (76).' (Introduction)