AustLit

'These notes on Alexis Wright’s fiction are about issues within (and beyond) Indigenous intellectual and political life in contemporary Australia that her fiction seems to address in imaginative and narrative ways. They’re predominantly contextual rather than interpretative. In the context of our MLA panel (9 January 2015) on Wright’s ‘(other)worldly’ fiction I offered these contextual considerations, working from the outside in, as intended to assist with reading The Swan Book (2013), particularly for a non-Australian readership; a reading from the inside out would include consideration of Indigenous storytelling modes and their adaptation of dystopian generics, and the thematics of climate theft and ecological racism (see Rose). The Swan Book and Carpentaria (2006) currently circulate as world novels where they have a powerful and distinctive presence as complex literary narratives within transnational Indigenous and, to a lesser degree, non-Indigenous literary circuits (see Osborne and Whitlock). 1 At the same time these fictions emerge out of and address native (and national) historical and political matrices that include deeply contested, volatile ideas about state sovereignty, land rights, the history of settlement, and Indigenous policy. In this connection ‘sovereignty’ is the word I would like to draw attention to. A significant aspect of The Swan Book is the complex and self-reflexive ways in which it addresses the political and social debate about ‘sovereignty,’ although this aspect of Wright’s fiction is not restricted to that novel.' (Publication abstract)

'Enter ‘Carpentaria’ into Yasiv.com and the screen is populated with an ever-expanding constellation of books. This is one way of imagining transits of Alexis Wright’s novel offshore. These are associations, and sometimes seemingly random affiliations driven by the purchases of Amazon customers. There is no quantitative information about book sales here, we cannot derive any historical or conceptual insights or information about curricula or courses that produce these associations. This digital tool launches Carpentaria into a vast network of books that resists orderly associations of canons, traditions, and fields.' (Introduction)

'This essay proposes a narratological framework for Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006). While many critics have commented on the novel’s ‘remarkable’ and ‘magisterial’ narrative voice, no one has sought to describe the narrative structure of the novel. This may be because Wright appears to defy diegetic conventions, making it hard to work out who the narrator/s and narratees are in the text. The clues to unravelling Carpentaria’s narratological puzzle, I suggest, are to be found in considering the sense of orality that Wright seeks to impose on the text. She uses both implicit and explicit strategies aimed at asserting the power and longevity of indigenous oral storytelling and knowledge systems over and against (‘white,’ Western) written systems. The narrative framework assists in this assertion of orality. I argue that the ‘main’ story of Carpentaria needs to be read as an embedded narrative, although this is difficult to recognise because the framing narrative is so minimal; it comprises just two short passages of capitalised text at the beginning of Chapters 1 and 2. The narratee of this framing narrative is a non-Aboriginal Australian, who is then forced to retreat to the edges of this extradiegetic space to ‘listen in’ to the grander tale that follows, the embedded narrative. Here, an altogether different Aboriginal narrator addresses captivated Aboriginal narratees. This framework, possibly unique in postcolonial fiction, allows Wright to position an indigenous oral storyteller at the centre of her story, freed from the constrictions of literary address that indigenous authors often remain captive to.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper explores different readings of Kim Scott’s Miles Franklin award-winning novel That Deadman Dance, which offers a complex portrayal of cross-cultural contact on the so-called ‘Friendly Frontier’ of the southern coast of Western Australia in the early to mid-nineteenth century. This article contrasts academic responses to the novel with those of one of the most significant contemporary literary networks: book club readers. It draws upon Derek Attridge’s distinction between literal and allegorical readings, and Diana Fuss’s work on identification, to explore the extent to which different readers respond to the novel as an unfamiliar literary work in the context of literary sociability. I suggest that book club readings, in their tentative and open-ended uncertainty, pose a challenge to the orthodoxies of academic literary studies.' (Publication abstract)

'This article examines the “Oriental quest” theme and its exotic semiotics in the Filipino Australian writer Merlinda Bobis’s novel Fish-Hair Woman (2012). The Oriental quest narrative typically features Asia as a redemptive locale for white, masculine figures to alleviate their identity crises. In its touristic form, the Oriental quest offers a controlling metaphor of cultural neocolonialism, whereby the white man’s self-analysis is paralleled by his interracial romance with objectified, consumable Asian women. In reading the novel’s metafictional and magical-realistic frame, I argue that Bobis adopts strategic exoticism to ironise the therapeutic promise of an Asian journey and portrays alternative heroines who act upon multiple desires. The novel’s complication of local-global encounters and modes of story-telling enunciates a transnational ethics of otherness based on empathy. This ethics reflects Bobis’s interstitial position as a diasporic-ethnic writer writing within and beyond the Australian literary environment.' (Publication abstract)

'In this paper I will deal with the re-interpretation of the tea-ritual and the sugar metaphors in Nancy Cato’s Brown Sugar from a symbol of exclusion and purity to one of hybridity. In the same way the vehicle speaks of the tenor, so the past in the novel enlightens the present. Moreover, I will start by focusing on Cato’s literary works underlying two of the many important themes unfolded in them; then, I will analyse these themes in Brown Sugar and focus on the situation of South Pacific Islanders and women to unveil the cracks in the myth of the nation or, in other words, what was believed to be a pluralistic and egalitarian society at the time of her writing Brown Sugar. ' (Publication abstract)

'Coming to grips with the literary-historical phenomenon that colonial poet Charles Harpur represents requires a shift in focus and a querying of traditional assumptions about the shape and manifestation of literary careers. The failure to make that shift editorially for Harpur has hindered the efforts of ordinary readers and literary critics for nearly 150 years. Harpur’s poetic works have been accessible only partially or misleadingly, despite some very considerable editorial efforts stretching back to the late 1940s. An explanation of this situation is the principal subject of the essay. It then describes a potential digital-editorial solution that is in preparation: the Charles Harpur Critical Archive.' (Publication abstract)

'This article contends that Dorothy Porter’s verse novel Wild Surmise (2002) is a postmodern elegiac work, which explores the role of unfulfilled desire and mourning. It is through Porter’s paralleled exploration of the ‘incomprehensible wonder’ offered by outer space, alongside the familiarities of domestic life that allow Wild Surmise to explore the grief attached to desire and loss. In order to read Wild Surmise as an elegiac work this paper will predominantly draw from studies of modern and postmodern Anglophone elegies. This approach will allow for a literary-historical account for how the elegiac mode stems from the elegy genre and will reveal how a discussion of elegy conventions may expand upon an understanding of the elegiac mode. This paper is informed by the scholarship of Jahan Ramazani (1994), Karen E. Smythe (1992), David Kennedy (2007) and Tammy Clewell (2009), specifically in relation to their writing of the politics of mourning and consolation within elegiac works. Accordingly, Wild Surmise will be interpreted as a postmodern elegiac work due the ways in which desire, mourning and consolation are depicted throughout the verse novel.' (Publication abstract)

'The essay first locates Temple among Australian authors and this novel among his work. It then explores meaning in the plot and structure of the novel, and next focuses on the charaterisation of the leading police detective in it, Steven Villani. A following section analyses the stylistic and tonal approaches Temple tales in this novel, and finally the essay summarises the meaning and impact of Truth.' (Publication abstract)

'This is important work. It’s a rollick and a good read and, importantly, it takes us where we wouldn’t ordinarily or otherwise be going. It doesn’t necessarily take us the way we’d want to go, but then, which worthwhile book does? The important thing is that the journey is worth making.' (Publication abstract)

'Conor’s Skin Deep offers to critique the textual descriptions and imagery of Aboriginal women found in the colonial archives, and in particular those descriptions and images that were circulated widely through the increasingly industrialised print media. Conor states that the central argument of her book is that ‘colonial racism and gender relations hinge in particular ways and depended on the facility of print to reiterate and thereby entrench meaning as truth’ (38). For Conor the ‘reiteration of those unverified tropes’ (37) that elsewhere she describes as white ‘lies’ (27, 363, 368) mostly produced by ‘white men’ (27), ‘rationalise the colonial project’ (37). Conor seeks to highlight the appalling racism and misogyny evident in many of the representations she scrutinises, and in doing so she hopes to intervene in and disrupt their enduring legacy.' (Introduction)

'Now Professor Emerita at Macquarie University, Jill Roe is well known for her influential work in Australian history and social policy history, and in particular for her biography of Stella Miles Franklin and volume of letters between Franklin and her friends, My Congenials. This latest work is a very readable, sometimes personal, social history of the Eyre Peninsula where she was born and grew up. ‘[W]ritten in later life and with a renewed sense of place,’ as she explains in her Introduction, this book seeks to capture ‘regional experience over time’ (ix).' (Introduction)