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Andrew McCann Andrew McCann i(A26277 works by) (birth name: Andrew Lachlan McCann) (a.k.a. A. L. McCann)
Born: Established: 1966 Adelaide, South Australia, ;
Gender: Male
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Works By

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1 Australian Literature and Everyday Life Andrew McCann , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature 2020;
1 Review of Christos Tsiolkas : The Utopian Vision, by Jessica Gildersleeve Andrew McCann , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , September vol. 32 no. 2 2017;

'I still come across people who find Christos Tsiolkas’s work creepy or off-putting. Usually these people have had a brush with Dead Europe and decided that it is too bleak, too violent, too sexually explicit, or perhaps too explicitly political. They haven’t read on. It strikes me as an odd reaction, or at least one that is trapped in a particular moment, and hence overlooks the trajectory Tsiolkas’s career has taken since the publication of The Slap in 2008. As Jessica Gildersleeve tells us in the acknowledgements to Christos Tsiolkas: The Utopian Vision, she in fact first read The Slap with her mother’s book club. I’m sure the experience isn’t unusual. I’m sometimes in a similar situation: my parents and their reading group friends are very eager to talk to me about Tsiolkas, the television adaptations of his work and the sense of controversy that lingers over him. They might find aspects of the writing creepy or off-putting as well, but they’ve embraced these responses and are eager to understand them. These contexts – domestic, familial, intergenerational – tell us a great deal about the sort of writer Tsiolkas has become, and about his centrality to public discussion. And yet there is still the shadow of the other Tsiolkas: the Tsiolkas whose work haunts and unsettles in ways that don’t quite lend themselves to the reading group format, the family dinner table or chats with Mum.' (Introduction)

1 Middlebrow Media and The Politics of Contemporary Fiction Andrew McCann , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , April / May no. 59 2016;
1 Patrick White's Late Style Andrew McCann , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: Patrick White beyond the Grave : New Critical Perspectives 2015; (p. 117-128)
'...Andrew McCann shows how White's, and our, minor quakes find full expression in Memoirs of Many in One (1986): in hilarity not tragedy. He argues that over the course of his career, White's impulse is towards the farcical collapse of signification which in itself can be figured as a revelatory path to non-revelatory non-understanding. (Introduction 8)
1 2 y separately published work icon Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique : Politics, Obscenity, Celebrity Andrew McCann , New York (City) : Anthem Press , 2015 8798764 2015 selected work criticism

'Christos Tsiolkas is one of the most recognizable and internationally successful literary novelists working in Australia today. He is also one of the country’s most politically engaged writers. These terms – recognition, commercial success, political engagement – suggest a relationship to forms of public discourse that belies the extremely confronting nature of much of Tsiolkas’s fiction and his deliberate attempt to cultivate a literary persona oriented to notions of blasphemy, obscenity and what could broadly be called a pornographic sensibility. ‘Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique’ traces these contradictions against Tsiolkas’s acute sense of the waning of working-class identity, and reads his work as a sustained examination of the ways in which literature might express an opposition to capitalist modernity.' (Publication summary)

1 Un-Australian Fiction : Marion May Campbell's Konkretion Andrew McCann , 2013 single work review
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , April 2013;

— Review of Konkretion Marion Campbell , 2013 single work novella
1 Discrepant Cosmopolitanism and the Contemporary Novel : Reading the Inhuman in Christos Tsiolkas's Dead Europe and Robert Bolano's 2666 Andrew McCann , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , December vol. 24 no. 2 2010; (p. 135-141)
‘When James Clifford coined the phrase ‘Discrepant cosmopolitanisms,’ he had in mind the ‘cultures of displacement and transplantation that are inseparable from specific, often violent, histories of economic, political, and cultural interaction” (108). Because these histories of interaction are frequently the same ones that, at least indirectly, underpin the cosmopolitan freedom and prosperity of affluent metropolitan centers, the study of discrepant cosmopolitanism s often involves an understanding of how different sites in the global economy are related to each other. As Michael Davidson puts it, a bit more bluntly than Clifford, ‘the cosmopolitanism produced through globalization yokes together the elite and the abject, the globe trotting business man or the wealthy tourist, as well as the migrant labourer, sex worker, and political exile’ (735). In this essay I want to think about how contemporary fiction encounters this issue…’ (Author’s introduction p. 135)
1 Henry Kendall's Twofold Life : Sin, Shame and the Experience of Colonial Poetry Andrew McCann , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October vol. 25 no. 3 2010; (p. 20-34)
1 Christos Tsiolkas and the Pornographic Logic of Commodity Capitalism Andrew McCann , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , May vol. 25 no. 1 2010; (p. 31-41)
Putting Tsiolkas's works into a wider context of international writing, the essay is concerned with 'the fictional tradition that either deploys the pornographic, or evokes what might be called a pornographic sensibilty, in order to articulate forms of political and aesthetic radicality' (32).
1 Henry Kendall's 'Aboriginal Man' : Autochthony and Extinction in the Settler Colony Andrew McCann , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Modern Australian Criticism and Theory 2010; (p. 50-60)
'McCann shows how the poet Henry Kendall's dreams of establishing an Australian landscape are haunted at every turn by the indigenous presence...' Source: Modern Australian Criticism and Theory (2010)
1 Australian Gothic Andrew McCann , 2007 single work review
— Appears in: Antipodes , December vol. 21 no. 2 2007; (p. 194-196)

— Review of The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction 2007 anthology short story extract
1 Colonial Nature-Inscription : On Haunted Landscape Andrew McCann , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: Five Emus to the King of Siam: Environment and Empire 2007; (p. 71-83)
1 Professing the Popular : Political Fiction circa 2006 Andrew McCann , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October vol. 23 no. 2 2007; (p. 43-57)
1 The International of Excreta : World Literature and Its Other Andrew McCann , 2007 single work essay
— Appears in: Overland , Autumn no. 186 2007; (p. 20-24)

Andrew McCann suggests that 'Australian literature, for all its cosmopolitanism, does not enter easily, if at all, into the category of what David Damrosch calls 'world literature'. McCann cites a recent example of Henry Lawson's short stories being considered 'too idiosyncratically Australian', and therefore not sufficiently appealing, for an intended international audience of a proposed anthology. McCann enters into the dialogue on issues of nationalism and literature; he views the current notion of a 'world literature' as an abstraction and juxtaposes it with the idea of a 'literature of globalisation'.

McCann uses Juan Goytisolo's novel State of Siege to illustrate his case. He views the novel as 'neither canonical nor consumerist in its orientation'. Rather than placing it 'outside the realm of the marketplace', McCann suggests that Goytisolo's work is in 'a productive (and commercially risky) dialogue with its dominant forms and discourses'. This is not 'world literature', he concludes, 'but its other, and we will only encounter it, and create it, by loosening a sense that discrete national cultures are our only defences against a global culture industry, and by questioning the idea that a term as perpetually mystified as "the popular" necessarily brings us closer to the interests and experiences it purports to represent'.

1 Rosa Praed and the Vampire-Aesthete Andrew McCann , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: Victorian Literature and Culture , March vol. 35 no. 1 2007; (p. 175-187)
Explores the the ways in which Praed's occult-inspired novels deploy the figure of the vampire-aesthete, at the centre of both Affinities and The Soul of Countess Adrian, to introduce a self-reflexive relationship to the different economies of value in which they were embedded. In suggesting that Praed's vampire-aesthetes articulate anxieties about cultural value and influence in an imperial economy, I also want to diversify the provenance of the fin-de-si'ecle vampire.
1 The Literature of Extinction Andrew McCann , 2006 single work criticism
— Appears in: Meanjin , vol. 65 no. 1 2006; (p. 48-54)
'Identifies some disturbing continuities in colonial and postcolonial imaginings of indigenous fates'. (Meanjin)
1 1 The Obstinacy of the Sacred Andrew McCann , 2005 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , December vol. 19 no. 2 2005; (p. 152-157)
Examines contemporary Australian literature with the view that 'the sacred is at once a powerful symptom of postcolonial disquiet and a path of flight that promises to lead beyond this, and beyond history itself'. (p. 157)
1 The Spectres Haunting Dead Europe Andrew McCann , Christen Cornell , Jeff Sparrow , 2005 single work criticism
— Appears in: Overland , Summer no. 181 2005; (p. 26-31)
2 15 y separately published work icon Subtopia Andrew McCann , Carlton North : The Vulgar Press , 2005 Z1214977 2005 single work novel
1 Unknown Australia : Rosa Praed's Vanished Race Andrew McCann , 2005 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , May vol. 22 no. 1 2005; (p. 37-50)
Examines the presentation of colonialism in some of Praed's work, in particular in her novel Fugitive Anne with its fantasy of the lost Lemurians.
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