Bridget Grogan. Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction: An Abject Dictatorship of the Flesh.

Bridget Grogan. Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction: An Abject Dictatorship of the Flesh. single work review

Author:agent Jonathan Dunk

Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 Bridget Grogan. Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction: An Abject Dictatorship of the Flesh.

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'Bridget Grogan’s monograph Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction articulates a welcome challenge to a number of the assumptions of White studies. Her compelling primary thesis is that White doesn’t endorse a dualistic paradigm between spiritual transcendence and corporeal abjection, but rather stages it as an immanent critique of rationalist modernity. This argument draws on the concept of what Grogan calls the “somatic spirituality” which critically diverges from the Platonic and Pauline view of the flesh as the prison of the soul. This is salutary in a number of ways; critics have long recognized the importance of physical abjection in White’s novels, but often in unhelpful and contradictory ways.' (Introduction)

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y Commonwealth : Essays and Studies Revolution(s) vol. 42 no. 1 Autumn 2019 19248450 2019 periodical issue Abstract
'In 2018, the theme for the annual conference of the SAES (Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur), held at Nanterre University, itself a site of student revolution in the past, was “Revolution(s),” a notion which has particular resonance for the New Literatures panel which provided the genesis of many of the articles included in this issue. Previously colonised countries, as diverse and geographically disparate as India, South Africa, Nigeria, Canada, and Australia (to name but these), have all experienced revolutions in various forms, both during the colonial period and after independence. These revolutions, among which the Canadian rebellions of 1837 and 1838, the 1857-8 uprising in India, the New Zealand wars between 1845 and 1872, the first chimurenga (“uprising” in the Shona language) in Zimbabwe (1894-97), the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), and the Biafran war (1967-70) in some cases paved the way for later twentieth-century rebellions which led to independence and, in some cases, to further revolutions.' (Christine Lorre-Johnston and Fiona McCann : Introduction)
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