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'The central argument of this essay is that Peter Cowan's modernist experiments in fiction have not received due acknowledgment. A complex and conflicted personality, Cowan emerged in the 1940s as a writer under the sponsorship of the Angry Penguins in Melbourne but has become identified with Western Australia, where he was born and lived almost all his life. This essay, which discusses his love-hate relationship with the place, attempts to counter the limiting view that he is a regional writer. Drawing attention to the extraordinary contrast been his modernist fiction and his old-fashioned historical chronicles of his colonial forbears, it reveals him as a man psychically wounded by his family's past, whose overriding concern in his fiction was to match in words the emotional immediacy that the Angry Penguins achieved in paint.' (Publication abstract)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
- The Hills of Apollo Bay 1989 single work novel
- Mobiles 1979 single work short story
- Like Nothing on This Earth : A Literary History of the Wheatbelt 2017 multi chapter work criticism
- A Unique Position : A Biography of Edith Dircksey Cowan, 1861-1932 1978 single work
- A Faithful Picture : The Letters of Eliza and Thomas Brown at York in the Swan River Colony 1841-1852 1977 anthology correspondence prose
- Western Australia,