AustLit
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Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
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Storytelling Permutations in the Performance of Life Narrative Betty Roland’s Caviar for Breakfast,
single work
criticism
Betty Roland (1903-1996), a little-known figure in Australian literary circles, was a prolific storyteller. Whilst there are few zones of literature into which she did not venture between the late 1920s and 1990, Roland is perhaps best remembered as a dramatist. Her Australian outback melodrama, The Touch of Silk, was first performed by the Melbourne Repertory Company in 1928, and is still produced today. Reviewers of the time described the play as ‘a beautiful and abiding piece’ of theatre, and named Roland as Australia’s first genuine playwright. Silk’s bleak twists and far-reaching insights into authoritarian bourgeois morality, helped to make it the first among a number of successful radio serials for Roland and paved the way for later film scripts. Perhaps because she was a playwright rather than a novelist at the time, Roland has never been grouped with Australia’s celebrated women writers of the 1920s and 30s, such as Miles Franklin, Eleanor Dark and Katharine Susannah Prichard. Roland was, however, engaged in a burgeoning cosmopolitan print-culture that extended well beyond those years as well as Australian borders. (Author's introduction)
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‘“How Shall I be Saved?” The Salvation of Mrs Curren in Coetzee’s Age of Iron.,
single work
In announcing the selection of J. M. Coetzee as the Nobel Prize laureate in literature for 2003, the Swedish Academy wrote that Coetzee’s works follow a recurring pattern: an investigation into the ‘the downward spiralling journeys he considers necessary for the salvation of his characters.’ Though salvation is a strong motif in Coetzee’s novels, explicit connection with Christian salvation is avoided in virtually all of his novels, except for one, Age of Iron. Oddly, however, Age of Iron has been viewed from just about every lens but the Christian one. Susan VanZanten Gallagher and others have correctly noted that Mrs Curren, the novel’s central protagonist, serves as a human allegory for the plight of South Africa. VanZanten Gallagher’s analysis notes references to Virgil and ‘the unborn dead,’ Charon, Dante’s boatman at the river Styx, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Tolstoy’s ‘What Men Live By.’ In a later work she includes Age of Iron in the category of South African confessional literature, but provides no analysis and discussion of how the work fits in the genre. Derek Attridge writes that the role of the ‘other’ in Coetzee’s work, particularly Age of Iron, is key to understanding the author’s writing. For Attridge the conjoined interaction of self and the ‘other’ lead to a recognition of perspective. Although he acknowledges that recognition of the ‘other’ in religious work is transcendent, Attridge does not seem to appreciate fully the role of Christian scripture in Age of Iron. Gilbert Yeoh focuses his attention on ‘love,’ with emphasis on such distinctions as ‘agape’ and ‘caritas’ to explore ironies. Acknowledging the Christian apparatus, however, Yeoh connects Mrs Curren’s ordeal to I Corinthians and ignores obvious allusions to the broader Biblical context. Yeoh appropriates the language of Christianity, but is not attentive to what I regard as the predominant Christian imagery contained in the novel. (Author's introduction)
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Fragmentary Introspective Observations : Animals, Emotions and Location in John Kinsella’s Poetry,
single work
essay
— Review of Jam Tree Gully : Poems 2012 selected work poetry ; The Jaguar's Dream : Translations, Adaptations, Versions, Extrapolations, Interpolations, Afters, Takes and Departures 2012 selected work poetry ; - The Last Day of Summer, single work poetry
- Ledai"Faced with a simple truth:", single work poetry
- Age, single work poetry
- Black and White : Thirteen Waysi"Don't look at the galazy. The galaxy sees you.", single work poetry
- Empire of Wivesi"Misshapen Mo Mu -", single work poetry
- The Polar Tenti"Here on the ice we are face to face with blizzards", single work poetry
- Your Funerali"On the morning of your funeral", single work poetry
- Ashita/Tomorrowi"my uni coworker tells me all this bearty makes us think of death.", single work poetry
- Fallen Kouros, Naxosi"Fractured below one knee he lies", single work poetry
- The Great Chinese Lonelinessi"Early morning, the empty door, the echoes somewhere upstairs", single work poetry
- The Measurementi"The measurement of one's life", single work poetry
- Revisiting Trauma : Writing, a ‘Novel’ Approach to Catharsis and Redemption, extract novel
- Tom Trevorrow : A Ngarrindjeri Man of High Degree, single work obituary
- European History, single work autobiography
- The Valley of the Shadow (from: The Makers of Stories and Songs), extract novel
- Dr Shilling, single work short story
- Footnotes, single work short story