AustLit

'Communication, culture and media are embedded in our everyday lives in ways we are often unaware of. Whether we wake up and reach for our phone or think carefully about how to phrase a difficult sentence in an email, these multiple forms of communication, culture and media are embedded in our everyday. At conception and the first ultrasound image, a gender designation is ascribed that affects our everyday lives in innumerable ways – from the toys we are given, to sports that we play, to conceptions of self and the life choices available to us. Our gender inflects our everyday experiences and engagements with our bodies and those around us, and this becomes more and more evident as we manoeuvre into public, private and digital spaces. This special issue shares a handful of the papers initially presented at the “Gender and the Everyday: Contemporary Communication, Culture and Media” conference hosted by The Western Australian Communication, Culture and Media group (WACCM) and held at Murdoch University in September 2017.' (Introduction)

'The romance novel—persistently at once one of the most popularly successful genres from the eighteenth century to today, and one of the least critically respected—demonstrates surprising consistencies, and a habitual attention to gender politics that reflect the gendered assumptions and aspirations of the societies out of which it emerges. This paper explores the commonalities between two novels that, despite being produced in different times and places, nevertheless when read together share distinct concerns and tropes, often to a surprising extent. By reading Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) and Loretta Hill’s The Girl in Steel-Capped Boots (2012), and paying close attention to their similarities and differences, this paper demonstrates continuities of convention over more than two centuries. Both novels take young, inexperienced women for their heroines, and through them introduce their readers to daily life in specific, closed communities: respectively, fashionable London of the late-eighteenth-century “Season”, and the fly-in, fly-out mining society of the West Australian Pilbara region. In this study of two novels, one published in Georgian England, and the other in early twenty-first-century Australia, it is possible to recognise the ways in which such fictions are capable of idealising, reproducing and reinforcing gendered stereotypes, and at the same time of revealing the oppressive effects of such stereotypes on the imagined lives of men and women.' (Introduction)