AustLit
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Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
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Exploration or Espionage? Flinders and the French,
single work
criticism
(p. 14-23)'The heroic status of Matthew Flinders as the maritime explorer who circumnavigated the Great South Land and gave it the name Australia has deflected attention from allegations against him of spying. During Flinders’s return voyage to England in 1803, he was forced to land at Isle de France (Mauritius) where he was detained for over six years as a spy. This article shows that the high-flown rhetoric of French and British authorities about the objectivity and neutrality of scientific voyages sometimes camouflaged more pressing demands for military intelligence and espionage.' Source: Brice Bennett.
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Indigenous Literature in European Contexts : Aspects of the Marketing of the Indigenous Literatures of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand in German and Dutch-Speaking Countries,
single work
criticism
(p. 47-69)'The development of the presence of translated Indigenous Australian and New Zealand literature in continental European-markets exhibits striking similarities: they both emerged at roughly the same time and have often been published by the same European presses. Drawing on bibliographical data, this study seeks to explore a vital aspect of the translation histories of both types of literature - the ways publishers have promoted the respective translations. The present analysis focuses on the most immediate marketing point – dustcovers - and encompasses German- and Dutchspeaking countries.' Source: Oliver Haag.
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The Bush and the Garden in the Writing of Drusilla Modjeska and Kate Llewellyn,
single work
criticism
(p. 70-81)'Through the gardens depicted in their Blue Mountains texts of the 1980s and 1990s, Australian writers Drusilla Modjeska and Kate Llewellyn forge a feminist aesthetic in which the binaries of nature/culture, male/female and bush/city co-exist. These texts depict Australia as a nation that no longer looks predominantly to Britain but is a hybrid and transcultural entity which embraces its rich migrant experience.' Source: Elizabeth Hicks,
- An Interview with Margo Lanagan : 24 June 2008, Pradeep Trikha (interviewer), single work interview (p. 82-88)
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Reading and Re-Reading Indigenous Australian Literature: Kim Scott’s Benang,
single work
criticism
(p. 89-101)'This article is interested in issues of reading and interpreting Indigenous Australian literature with reference to the role played by language in shaping identities throughout novels written by Australian Indigenous writers. In particular, the analysis will focus on excerpts from Kim Scott's Benang: From the Heart (1999). The article's linguistic analysis will be based on the tenets of functionalist approaches and partnership theory. The novel's biographical background further contextualises the analysis of traumatic past experiences and their role in the formation of an 'Indigenous identity'. Source: Chiara Minestrelli.
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Dreamtime Narrative and Postcolonisation: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria as an Antidote to the Discourse of Intervention,
single work
criticism
(p. 102-122)
'On 21st June 2007, Alexis Wright won Australia’s most prestigious literary award, the Miles Franklin Prize, for Carpentaria (2006) and received broad national attention as the first Indigenous Australian to be its sole recipient. This recognition of Indigenous cultural output coincided with the Federal decision to intervene the highly troubled, dysfunctional Aboriginal population in remote communities of the Northern Territory with a military and police task force. This paradox of recognition-repression highlights the tense edges of the Indigenous/non-Indigenous interface in contemporary Australia and reveals the continuing gap between Indigenous fact and fiction, reality and hope for a better future. As a textual locus of Indigenous cultural regeneration, Carpentaria questions the invasive nature of the Federal intervention in several ways. Not only does the novel stand out for bending Western literary genres into an Indigenous story-telling mode, but also for having “Dreamtime Narrative” critically engage with the neo-colonial management of Australian resources and human relations. Mainstream readers are exposed to the “strange cultural survival” (Bhabha 1990: 320) of the Indigenous diaspora that proposes drastic solutions for the devastation wreaked upon the Australian land through capitalism and its cultural corollaries. This article contextualises Wright’s fiction within wider developments in recent Indigenous literature and history, and traces how her awarded novel Carpentaria activates an Aboriginal epistemology of understanding human and country which defies mainstream politics of I/intervention and beckons towards a fresh beginning for Australia through a profound change of paradigm.' Source: Martin Renes.
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'All We Are Saying Is Give Peace a Chance' : The Vietnam War Protest Movement in Australian Women’s Fictions by Janine Burke, Patricia Cornelius, Nuri Maas, and Wendy Scarfe,
single work
criticism
(p. 123-141)'Nearly fifty years ago, the Australian government sent thirty military advisers to South Vietnam, thereby initiating a commitment to a war which was to last for over a decade. Altogether, nearly 47,000 Australians, including 17,500 national servicemen served in Vietnam; 500 died and 2500 were wounded. Almost as disturbing as the results of the battlefield were the shockwaves that reverberated throughout Australian society, for the war years turned out to be one of the most turbulent periods in the nation’s history. The events of these tumultuous years are examined in five little-known Australian women’s fictions—Nuri Maas’s 1971 As Much a Right to Live, Janine Burke’s 1984 Speaking, Wendy Scarfe’s 1984 Neither Here Nor There and her 1988 Laura, My Alter Ego: A Novel of Love, Loyalty and Conscience, and Patricia Cornelius’s 2002 My Sister Jill. Together these texts chronicle the politicization of Australian youth, recount the kinds of overt challenges to the traditional standards of masculinity which had prevailed in Australian society since its inception, and document the emergence of the secondwave feminist movement.' Source: Donna Coates.
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Review,
single work
review
— Review of Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature 2010 anthology criticism ; (p. 142-144) -
"Grammars of Creation” : An Interview with Brian Castro : 24 November 2008,
Marilyne Brun
(interviewer),
single work
interview
Section: 24-46'This interview with contemporary Australian writer Brian Castro addresses a number of themes and concepts that are central to his critical work and fiction. In the interview, Castro discusses his oeuvre as a whole, providing insights into the starting point for his first eight novels. He comments on the concepts of transgression, hybridity, polyphonia, cosmopolitanism and play, underlining the central significance of grammar, ethics and aesthetics in his work. The interview also includes reflections on the development of Asian Australian studies and the importance of translating novels. In the final sections of the interview, Castro discusses the relation between his critical work and his novels and reflects on the common conflation of the novelist and the theorist in much literary criticism.' Source: Marilyne Brun.
