Patrick White : (Auto) Biography - A Veiled Confession?JessicaGeva,
2012single work criticism — Appears in:
Antipodes,Junevol.
26no.
12012;'...White's recourse to two particular autobiographical labels and modes (self-portrait and memoir) requires an appreciation of the complexity of these various models of life writing. In this essay, however, I shall be primarily concerned with White's technology of foreclosure of the confessional option.' (From author's introduction)
The Solid Mandala and Patrick White’s Late ModernityNicholasBirns,
2011single work criticism — Appears in:
Transnational Literature,Novembervol.
4no.
12011;'This essay contends that the Australian novelist Patrick White (1912-1990) presents, in his novel The Solid Mandala (1966), a prototypical evocation of late modernity that indicates precisely why and how it was different from the neoliberal and postmodern era that succeeded it. Late modernity is currently emerging as a historical period, though still a nascent and contested one. Robert Hassan speaks of the 1950-1970 era as a period which, in its 'Fordist' mode of production maintained a certain conformity yet held off the commoditisation of later neoliberalism's 'network-driven capitalism'. This anchors the sense of 'late modernity,' that will operate in this essay, though my sense of the period also follows on definitions of the term established, in very different contexts, by Edward Lucie-Smith and Tyrus Miller.' (Author's introduction)
‘Shapely Experience’ and the Limits of ‘Late Colonial Transcendentalism’ : The Portrait of the Artist as Soldier in Roger McDonald’s 1915ChristopherLee,
2011single work criticism — Appears in:
JASAL,vol.
11no.
22011;'This essay argues that Roger McDonald's debut novel 1915 represents a form of literary modernism which rejects the easy aesthetic comforts of 'late colonial transcendentalism' (17). McDonald presents an intricate -- we might even say ritualised -- pattern of subversive counterpoint to 'reveal and dramatise the failure of the subject to escape its own limits, and hence its own history' (McCann 155). The result is a highly self-conscious literary novel that seeks to reconcile the art of high modernism with a postcolonial practice interested in the consequences of public memory.' (Author's abstract)
