AustLit

'Critics, historians and Holocaust survivors have argued for decades over whether the Holocaust should be accessible to fiction and, if so, who has the right to write those fictions. "Navigating the Kingdom of Night" addresses such concerns and analyses various literary strategies adopted by authors of Holocaust fiction, including the non-realist narrative techniques used by authors such as Yaffa Eliach, Jonathan Safran Foer and John Boyne and the self-reflexivity of Art Spiegelman. Through the course of the essay I contextualise "End of the Night Girl" by turning my attention to works that raise critical issues of authorial intent and the reader/​writer contract; for example Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird and Helen Darville's The Hand That Signed the Paper. How did I resolve my own concerns? Which texts helped me and why? Together "End of the Night Girl" and "Navigating the Kingdom of Night", one creatively and one critically, explore these complex and controversial questions in a contemporary Australian context.' (Trove record)