AustLit
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Includes
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y
I'm Dying Laughing : The Humourist
R. G. Geering
(editor),
London
:
Virago
,
1986
Z406557
1986
single work
novel
'This last great work by one of the century’s great writers is a large and original novel of betrayal and self-delusion, madness and consuming passions, that recreates to chilling effect the political turbulence of the American Left and the clamor and menace of the McCarthy Right. Not since her classic The Man Who Loved Children has Stead fashioned such willful and memorable characters as Emily Wilks and Stephen Howard. Emily is a woman of enormous but mercurial enthusiasms whose unflagging ebullience masks a darkness that will lead to disaster. Stephen—handsome, clever, spoiled—is a dangerous dreamer, an upper-class dropout playing at radical politics. Together, they mirror the times through which they live: the heady revolutionary fervor of the Depression, the short collaborative effort of wartime America, the fractiousness of the Cold War years.' (Publication summary)
London : Penguin Books , 1989 -
y
The Middle Parts of Fortune : Somme and Ancre, 1916
London
:
Piazza Press
,
1929
Z572961
1929
single work
novel
war literature
'The drumming of the guns continued, with bursts of great intensity. It was as though a gale streamed overhead, piling up great waves of sound, and hurrying them onwards to crash in surf on the enemy entrenchments. The windless air about them, by its very stillness, made that unearthly music more terrible to hear.
'First published anonymously in 1929 because its language was considered far too frank for public circulation, The Middle Parts of Fortune was hailed by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, by Lawrence of Arabia and Ernest Hemingway, as an extraordinary novel. Its author was in fact Frederic Manning, an Australian writer who fought in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and who told his story of men at war from the perspective of an ordinary soldier.' (Publication summary : Text Classics)
New York (City) : Penguin Books , 1990 - y Mittee London : Gollancz , 1951 Z1418756 1951 single work novel First published in 1952, Mittee was an international bestseller. Set in late nineteenth-century Transvaal, it dramatizes the intense, ambiguous love-hate relationship between Selina, a young colored servant girl, and her privileged white mistress, Mittee, and explores the roles forced upon the two women, fierce rivals for the attentions of the same man. Juxtaposing violence and sexuality the author crosses gender and racial boundaries in this powerful exposure of a patriarchal, puritanical and divided society. (Source: The Toby Press's website) London : Penguin Books , 1991
- y The Boy in the Bush London : Martin Secker , 1924 Z370646 1924 single work novel London : Penguin Books , 1996
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y
Kangaroo
New York (City)
:
Thomas Seltzer
,
1923
Z120344
1923
single work
novel
(taught in 2 units)
Kangaroo, set in Australia, is D. H. Lawrence's eighth novel. He wrote the first draft in just forty-five days while living south of Sydney, in 1922, and revised it three months later in New Mexico. The descriptions of the country are among the most vivid and sympathetic ever penned, and the book fuses lightly disguised autobiography with an exploration of political ideas at an immensely personal level. His anxiety about the future of democracy, caught as it was in the turbulent cross currents of fascism and socialism, is only partly appeased by his vision of a new bond of comradeship between men based on their unique separateness. Lawrence's alter ego Richard Somers departs for America to continue his search.
London New York (City) : Penguin , 1997