AustLit

'This study brings together Hazzard's highly regarded literary fiction and her impassioned, polemical critiques of the United Nations through the rubrics of her humanist thought and her deep commitment to internationalist, cosmopolitan principles. Chapter 1 provides the first critical analysis of Hazzard's public writings, paying particular attention to their rhetorical and poetic structures and their moral appeals. Olubas then works through each of Hazzard's published works of fiction in turn.In chapter 2, she analyses the two collections of short stories through their shared concern with the question of institutions--bureaucracy and marriage--in modern life. Chapter 3 turns to Hazzard's two early novels, both set in Italy, and examines the appeal made in each to Romantic poetry, and to the ways narrative, desire and death play out across the stories of love. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to Hazzard's two great novels, The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire, respectively. The Transit of Venus is analysed as a melodrama, with particular focus on its complex narrative manipulation of concealment and revelation, and the ethical drive of its central love story. The final chapter focuses on the interplay of love and war in The Great Fire, and argues that this novel returns Hazzard's readers to her own journey, her departure from Australia at the pivotal points of post-war Asia: colonial Hong Kong and post-nuclear Hiroshima.' Source: http://www.cambriapress.com/ (Sighted 22/06/2012).