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Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 Urban Imaginaries, Homelessness, and the Literary City : Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book and Janette Turner Hospital’s The Last Magician
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'With urban imaginaries and city-making in mind, and cognisant of the complicity of cities in socio-ecological crises, this paper responds to recent events in Melbourne and Sydney involving the expansion of certain powers to penalise the disadvantaged and homeless, and to clean up city streets. I discern in these events the material and discursive articulations of capitalist-colonial urban imaginaries. I go on to explore fiction’s capacities to resist these articulations and to affect the real, and the capacities in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, and Janette Turner Hospital’s The Last Magician to cultivate readers’ sense of cities as constantly varying, permeable assemblages, rather than as constantly improving, coherent, stable, secure organisms. These novels expand readers’ abilities to transform urban imaginaries and make cities differently.'  (Publication abstract)

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    y separately published work icon JASAL Australian Literature and Place-Making vol. 1 no. 18 2018 14658344 2018 periodical issue

    'Much attention has been given to the representation of place in Australian literature (e.g. Gerster; Darian-Smith, Gunner and Nuttall; Haynes; Cranston and Zeller), but comparably little to this literature’s participation in the production, or making, of place. This special issue brings together scholars working in a field that can be identified by various critical and historical movements in literary and cultural studies which constellate around questions of literature’s intersections with the materiality of place. This field includes literary and cultural geography, psychogeography, critical regionalism, new materialisms, spatial history, and place-making studies. While diverse and dynamic, a commonality across these theoretical and methodological approaches is the understanding of place as an unbounded, non-geographically determined, and relationally constituted, real-world context for practices of living and meaning-making; and the recognition of complex, more than material, and more than human forces, in the ongoing constitution of place.' (Introduction)

    2018
Last amended 21 Sep 2018 10:29:12
https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/12379 Urban Imaginaries, Homelessness, and the Literary City : Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book and Janette Turner Hospital’s The Last Magiciansmall AustLit logo JASAL
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