AustLit

Lydia Saleh Rofail's essay 'apprehends literary depictions of filth in urban as well as suburban topographies. The Tax Inspec-tor is a novel about thwarted aspirations and the domestic traps of the every-day. Quotidian objects can include bodies as well as urban and suburban spaces and structures of meaning within everyday cultural spaces. They are defined as prosaic counterpoints to phantasmagoric and imaginative objects. This essay analyzes contrasts between desolate outer suburbs that frame opulent cities and the everyday dysfunctional lives haunted by historical trauma. Saleh Rofail reads these objects "As metonyms for Australian identity with their uneasy interplay of imaginary and prosaic." This everyday with its attendant seemingly unrelated objects and domestic spaces, traces not only the complex, psychologically traumatized inner working of the characters, but also symbolizes the contradictions at the heart of modern Australian identity. This identity is conflicted, constrained and expansive, at once prosaic and imaginary, parochial and global.' (Introduction xiv-xv)