AustLit

'In Amanda Lohrey’s ‘Primates’, the first story in the collection Reading Madame Bovary, the unnamed corporation for which the first-person narrator works is undergoing a dreaded ‘restructure’. Her manager, Winton, is attempting to introduce Theory Z, the Japanese business equivalent of a Danish lifestyle trend. It promises to get rid of ‘hierarchies’ and bureaucracies’ in favour of a ‘clan’ mentality with ‘a high state of consistency in their internal culture’. The Theory Z idea turns colleagues into ‘intimates’ and sparks debate between adherents – ‘give them total loyalty, and they find a place for you’ – and opponents – ‘But they own you. It’s all about creating the corporate personality. You become an automaton.’' (Introduction)

'Within twentieth-century Australian fiction, suburbia has long been trivialised, satirised, or ignored as a site incompatible with a narrative of transformation, a location from which to flee. However, little critical attention has been directed on contemporary realist tales of the female protagonist located within the confines of suburbia—an increasingly contested yet arguably still feminine/feminised zone. This chapter examines contemporary representations and narrative trajectories of the suburban female protagonist in twenty-first-century fiction. Drawing on “postfeminist” literary theory and emerging reappraisals of the “everyday” and “home”, the chapter presents evidence of intra-suburban narratives of feminine transformation, which contradict second-wave feminist flight trajectories, thereby reclaiming and elevating fictional suburbia as a critical space in which Australian women writers may locate their stories.'

Source: Abstract.