AustLit

'This essay examines Indigenous Australian writer Alexis Wright’s novels Plains of Promise (1997) and The Swan Book (2013), alongside debates within world literature. These debates prize open the crucial distinction between spatial and temporal understandings of the Earth and the unique agency of literature to make a world. I claim that these debates provide insights compatible with those of Wright’s fiction, which is realist, modernist, and “epical” in its style of connecting contemporary and historical stories to the “ancient literature of this land,” and in performing the interconnection of language with other nonlinguistic forces in her narratives (Wright 2008). Wright’s literature makes a strong case for thinking the material, aesthetic, and political nature of the literary work as a force that opens a world.' (Publication abstract)

'Throughout twentieth-century Australian fiction, suburbia is generally depicted as a feminine domain, set in opposition to the masculine city or bush landscapes. The suburban, domestic setting is trivialized, satirized, or ignored as a site incompatible with a narrative of transformation – a location from which to flee. Traditionally, the male protagonist embarks upon these flight narratives, leaving the female characters to endure dull lives of “domesticated conformity” in the suburbs. Not until second-wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s is the female protagonist liberated from her suburban “cage” by women writers, many of whom identify as feminist. More recently, “postfeminist” scholars such as Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, Mary Vavrus, and Susan J. Douglas observe the rise of a “retreatist” narrative in popular media such as “chick-lit,” television drama, and film. This overtly restorative narrative typically features a female protagonist rejecting the public (assumed masculine) sphere and returning to a more domestic (assumed feminine) domain as the ultimate solution to a problematized state of “incompleteness.” This essay explores contemporary representations and narratives of the female protagonist in domestic, suburban settings in Georgia Blain’s Too Close to Home and Peggy Frew’s House of Sticks, both published in 2011. Of particular interest is evidence supporting rejection, interrogation, or subversion of the retreatist narrative as a viable postfeminist solution, or, alternatively, more creative reimaginings of the suburban setting, which permit “new” narratives of feminine transformation.' (Publication abstract)

'This article explores the emergence of the cyberfeminine within electronic poetry and the ways in which the digital environment can open up new readings and writings of the feminine. Using Shelley Jackson’s 1995 hypertext work Patchwork Girl as the initial model for a form of cyberfemininity that operates through hybridity and excess, this article examines the legacies of “patchwork” digital femininity in the works of Mez Breeze and Stephanie Strickland. Written in the invented language mezangelle, Mez Breeze’s works posit the feminine as fluid, flexible, always cyborgian, and always deeply bodily. Thus, the troubled language of mezangelle reflects these troubled cyberfeminine bodies: simultaneously organic and mechanical, embracing and queering femininity, and invested in an embodied existence that functions, in Elizabeth Grosz’s terms, as a “source of interference in, and danger to, the operations of reason” (5). Breeze’s hypermedia works, which combine visual, aural and textual elements, also directly address this “unreasonable” feminine body and the challenges to liberal humanist subjectivity that cyberfemininity presents. Stephanie Strickland’s sequence “The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot” explores cyberfemininity through the titular character Sand (so named for the silicon that makes up her circuits). Strickland uses hyperlinking to proliferate possible readings and demonstrate the potential complexity and flexibility of a cyberfeminine identity. By comparing Breeze and Strickland’s works, this article identifies the ways in which digital spaces offer a unique opportunity for the exploration of cyberfeminine identities and, potentially, other queer identities beyond the limits of white heteropatriarchy.' (Publication abstract)