AustLit
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'In our twenty-first century context, we tell stories through the foods we eat, the images we share, the people we follow on social media, the shows we watch and the music we listen to. From film to television, from Twitter accounts to the latest fandom trend, popular culture provides us with channels through which our narratives of everyday can transform from immaterial notions to very material and tangible objects of consumption. At the centre of our ways of storytelling lies the formation of our identities. This editorial introduces a Special Issue of the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture that is focused on exploring the many complex intersections between storytelling, identity and popular culture.' (Lorna Piatti-Farnell; Gwyneth Peaty; Ashleigh Prosser : Editorial introduction)
Notes
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Only literary material within AustLit's scope individually indexed. Other material in this issue includes:
The me you see: The creative identity as constructed in music documentaries by Angelique Nairn
The autosomamediality of neurodivergent folks’ Facebook pages by Threasa Meads
Othering the ‘bag-lady’: Examining stereotypes of vulnerable and homeless women in popular culture by Sue Smith and Jo Coghlan
Renters: Disgust, judgement and marginalization of the dirty poor by Jo Anna Burn
Pop art meets pop culture: A semiotic reading of Bephen Bahana’s The Curry Bunch by Lindsay Neill and Lavanya Basnet
Sons, husbands, brothers: The Gothic worlds of Thai men in the films of Kongkiat Khomsiri by Katarzyna Ancuta
Sexy, slimy, monstrous: Infection as collaboration in Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth and Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia by Catherine Lord
Review of: Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene, Jodey Castricano (2021) by Tof Eklund
Review of: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Aoife Mary Dempsey (2022) by Matthew Thompson
Painfully Neurotypical: A Review of Love on the Spectrum, Cian O'Clery (Dir.) (2019–21), Australia: Northern Pictures by Chloe T. Rattray
Contents
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The Legend of the ‘Gentlemen of the Flashing Blade’ : The Canecutter in the Australian Imagination,
single work
criticism
(p. 45-61)
'The ‘gentlemen of the flashing blade’ laboured in an occupation that no longer exists in Australia: canecutting. It was a hard job done by hard men, and its iconic figure – the canecutter – survives as a Queensland legend, so extensively romanticized in the popular culture of the time as to constitute a subgenre characterized by subject matter and motifs particular to the pre-mechanization sugar country culture. Yet, it may seem like the only canecutters immortalized in the arts are Summer of the Seventeenth Doll’s Roo and Barney. To show the breadth and diversity of this subgenre, and the legend of the canecutter and sugar country culture, this article reviews a selection of novels, memoirs, plays, short stories, cartoons, verse, song, film, television, radio and children’s books. These works address the racial, cultural and industrial politics of the sugar industry and its influence on the economic and social development of Queensland. The parts played by the nineteenth-century communities of indentured South Sea Islanders and the European immigrants who followed are represented along with those of the itinerant Anglos. These works depict, and celebrate, a colourful, often brutal, part of Queensland’s past and an Australian icon comparable with the swaggie or the shearer.' (Publication abstract)
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Australian Women Writers’ Popular Non-fiction Prose in the Pre-war Period : Exploring Their Motivations,
single work
criticism
(p. 63-80)'Since the 1970s, feminist scholars have undertaken important critical work on Australian women’s writing of earlier eras, profiling and promoting their fiction. Less attention has been afforded to the popular non-fiction produced by Australian women writers and, in particular, to that produced before the Second World War. Yet this writing is important for several reasons. First, the non-fiction writing of Australian women was voluminous and popular with readers. Second, this popular work critically engaged with a tumultuous political, social and moral landscape in which, as women’s rights were increasingly realized through legislation, the subjectivity of women themselves was fluid and contested. Third, as many of these women were also, or principally, fiction writers, their non-fiction can be shown to have informed and influenced many of their fictional interests, themes and characters. Lastly, and critically, popular non-fiction publication helped to financially sustain many of these writers. In proposing a conceptual framework informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu to analyse examples of this body of work, this article not only suggests that important connections exist between popular and mainstream non-fiction works – newspaper and magazine articles, essays, pamphlets and speeches – and the fictional publications of Australian women writers of the early twentieth century but also suggests that these connections may represent an Australian literary habitus where writing across genre, form and audience was a professional approach that built and sustained literary careers.' (Publication abstract)
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Breast Augmentation and Artificial Insemination: Monstrous Medicine and the Female Body in Recent Fiction,
single work
criticism
(p. 163-177)
'Recent fiction that depicts medical intervention upon the female body as monstrous reveals societal anxiety around aesthetic and reproductive medicine. As biotechnology rapidly advances, the female body continues to be a site on which improvements, efficiencies and controls are imposed. While Kristeva’s abject and Creed’s ‘monstrous-feminine’ explain the capacity of the female body to imbue horror, this literary analysis explores how the experience of the medicalized female body can convey anxiety relating to escalating aesthetic and reproductive demands. Works of fiction by Kawakami, Mazza, Hortle, Booth, Giddings, Gildfind and Taylor are considered in terms of medicine and the female body, with the narratives revealing common themes of monstrosity. Bakhtin’s grotesque and Kristeva’s abject informs the analysis, as does Foucault’s concept of the ‘medical gaze’. Bartky’s ‘fashion-beauty complex’ frames the investigation into depictions of cosmetic surgery, while the impact of capitalism is considered in relation to reproductive technologies and medical experimentation. The power structures that medicine operates within are considered and the article argues that the representation of medicine as monstrous in relation to the female body expresses collective unease about the increasingly unstable boundaries of the human body itself.' (Publication abstract)
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Australian Radio Listeners and Television Viewers : Historical Perspectives, Bridget Griffen-Foley (2020),
single work
review
— Review of Australian Radio Listeners and Television Viewers : Historical Perspectives 2020 multi chapter work criticism ;(p. 195-198)'I was excited to review this book after using Bridget Griffen-Foley’s Changing Stations: The Story of Australian Commercial Radio (2009) in my own research on women in Australian radio. Griffen-Foley is a major researcher of Australian media history and Changing Stations presents a thorough history of Australian radio from the 1920s to the introduction of digital radio in 2009. Her new book, Australian Radio Listeners and Television Viewers: Historical Perspectives (2020), builds on and extends this important work and will be of major interest to popular culture researchers in terms of both its content and methodology.' (Introduction)
