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Issue Details: First known date: 2009... 2009 'The Poetry of the Earth is Never Dead' : Australia's Road Writing
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This article discusses the process of editing The Australian Book of the Road. It uses William Hay's 'An Australian Rip Van Winkle' as an exemplary Australian road text. With its diffuse sense of hauntedness, multiple time-warps, and eerie appropriation of northern hemisphere literary texts, Hay's story offers a suggestive frame for reflecting on our relationship with the road in Australia and the way it is figured in our writing; to consider the road not only as a material artefact represented by our road texts but a set of cultural traditions and tropes. Its layered hauntings offer paths to unpacking of the odd sense of unease that permeates so many of these road stories. Using 'road writing' (my own term) as a strategic generic category through which disparate works can be interpreted, this paper will consider them as instances of 'spatial history', following Paul Carter, opposed to more triumphalist literary traditions. It will also, finally, consider the Australian road within a global context; in particular, the strategic ways in which these stories play with strategies of adaptation.

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    y separately published work icon JASAL Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature; Australian Literature in a Global World Special Issue Antonio Jose Simoes Da Silva (editor), Wenche Ommundsen (editor), 2009 Z1605155 2009 periodical issue This Special Issue of JASAL is based on the 2008 ASAL conference 'Australian Literature in a Global World' held at the University of Wollongong. The conference aimed to 'explore the effects, on the national literature, of different aspects of globalisation: transnational flows of people, ideas and cultural forms; globalisation in the publishing and education industries; the global marketplace for cultural production'. (Editor's introduction.) 2009
Last amended 9 Aug 2010 13:53:09
http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-63067-20090910-1633-www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/859/1749.html 'The Poetry of the Earth is Never Dead' : Australia's Road Writingsmall AustLit logo JASAL
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