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y separately published work icon Meet Me at Lennon's single work   novel  
Alternative title: Garrison Town
Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 Meet Me at Lennon's
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'As university student Olivia Wells sets out on her quest to find an unpublished manuscript by Gloria Graham – a now obscure mid-twentieth century feminist and writer – she unwittingly uncovers details about a young woman found murdered. Strangled with a nylon stocking in the mangroves on the banks of the river in wartime Brisbane, the case soon became known as the river girl murder.

'Olivia’s detective work exposes the sinister side of that city in 1943, flush with greenbacks and nylons, jealousy and violence brewing between the Australian and US soldiers, which eventually boiled over into the infamous Battle of Brisbane. Olivia soon discovers that the diggers didn’t just reserve their anger for the US forces – they also took it out on the women they perceived as traitors, the ones who dared to consort with US soldiers.

'Can Olivia rewrite history to bring justice to the river girl whose life was so brutally taken? Even if the past can’t be changed, is it possible to undo history’s erasure?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Notes

  • Dedication: To my grandmothers who both served

    Audrey May Toomey (1914-1952) WAAAF

    Marjorie Agnus McMinn (1922-1978) AWAS

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Works about this Work

Meet Me at Lennon’s : Historical Biofiction as a Self-conscious Narrative Device in Historiographic Metafiction Melanie Myers , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT Special Issue , no. 66 2022;
'Meet Me at Lennon’s is a self-conscious work of historical fiction or what Linda
Hutcheon (1988) terms “historiographic metafiction”. The novel is structured as a
contemporary frame story in which a series of historical “bio-tales”, set in Brisbane
during the Second World War, are embedded. Though fictional, the bio-tales are based on experiences of real women as recorded in commemorative publications, memoirs, oral and popular histories. Meet Me at Lennon’s uses the contrivance of “faux” historical bio-tales or “microhistories” as a narrative device to expose how authors use textual relics and invention when writing historical biofictions, thereby spotlighting the ethical dilemmas such authors must grapple with when representing the imagined subjectivities of real historical people. The novel aims to re-imagine the Brisbane home front as a site of historical and narrative contention, gendered resistance, collective memory, nostalgia, and place, while exploring both the potential and limitations of historical biofiction as a restorative or correctional narrative device to history’s omissions and misrepresentations. This article discusses the use of the novel’s bio-tales as a narrative device in relation to the goals of both historical biofiction and historiographic metafiction, and in the space where these two genres collude and collide.' 

(Publication abstract)

Books Roundup : The House of Youssef; Pills, Powder and Smoke; Meet Me at Lennon’s Ellen Cregan , Kylie Maslen , Chloe Cooper , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Kill Your Darlings [Online] , September 2019;
Books Roundup : The House of Youssef; Pills, Powder and Smoke; Meet Me at Lennon’s Ellen Cregan , Kylie Maslen , Chloe Cooper , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Kill Your Darlings [Online] , September 2019;
Meet Me at Lennon’s : Historical Biofiction as a Self-conscious Narrative Device in Historiographic Metafiction Melanie Myers , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT Special Issue , no. 66 2022;
'Meet Me at Lennon’s is a self-conscious work of historical fiction or what Linda
Hutcheon (1988) terms “historiographic metafiction”. The novel is structured as a
contemporary frame story in which a series of historical “bio-tales”, set in Brisbane
during the Second World War, are embedded. Though fictional, the bio-tales are based on experiences of real women as recorded in commemorative publications, memoirs, oral and popular histories. Meet Me at Lennon’s uses the contrivance of “faux” historical bio-tales or “microhistories” as a narrative device to expose how authors use textual relics and invention when writing historical biofictions, thereby spotlighting the ethical dilemmas such authors must grapple with when representing the imagined subjectivities of real historical people. The novel aims to re-imagine the Brisbane home front as a site of historical and narrative contention, gendered resistance, collective memory, nostalgia, and place, while exploring both the potential and limitations of historical biofiction as a restorative or correctional narrative device to history’s omissions and misrepresentations. This article discusses the use of the novel’s bio-tales as a narrative device in relation to the goals of both historical biofiction and historiographic metafiction, and in the space where these two genres collude and collide.' 

(Publication abstract)

Last amended 5 Aug 2020 13:26:19
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