AustLit

'This essay argues that Jennifer Down’s two stories ‘Aokigahara’ and ‘Pulse Points’ point to the limits of referential language in conveying grief, loss and related emotional experiences. Referencing Denise Riley’s theories from The Words of Selves and Impersonal Passion, I use Down’s stories as demonstrative of the concept that word choices do in fact contain emotion and affect and can transmit emotional experiences between the characters, and via characters from author to reader. Nonetheless, very often the referential properties of language are troubled in this process, and Down demonstrates the way in which the writer might convey affect and emotion through the techniques of silence, withholding, miscommunications and also through the unfolding of the narrative itself. Down avoids simplistic notions of closure and mourning by suggesting that the difficulty her characters experience is identifying the appropriate linguistic conventions to describe their emotional states, perhaps because there are none that can fully contain them. However, in the unfolding of these stories, difficult emotions and affects can be gestured towards, even outlined. Through this paradox, emotion and affect can indeed be ‘held’ not just in language, but in story, and this is particularly so when it moves away from signifying emotions in symbolic terms and represents them in a narrative sequence through an embodied narrator.' (Introduction)

'This essay explores Briohny Doyle’s dystopian climate fiction novel The Island Will Sink (2016), which dramatises the failure of responding ethically to climate change, as protagonists create a sensationalist aesthetic spectacle out of environmental disaster. The ubiquitous narrative of awaiting the ‘final apocalypse’ takes centre stage, as the Pacific island of Pitcairn is in the process of sinking with sea-level rise, an event that is anxiously anticipated in various media. Although awaiting the apocalypse has become a magnetic trope of the climate fiction genre, and is often satirised, this novel merits critical attention because it highlights an important dimension of climate change: the fact that it is always mediated. Because climate change can only be experienced partially, we rely on mediation for understanding the phenomenon as a whole. The Island Will Sink, however, depicts the aesthetic exploitation of climate catastrophe in various media; through the ‘emotional overwhelm’ of immersive cinema, the producers aim to capitalise on apocalyptic experience and premediate trauma. The essay argues that The Island Will Sink exposes the dangers of individual and collective memory that is divorced from the environment, as it favours simulacra over an engagement with lived experience in a particular ecosystem – in this case Pitcairn. In this way, the novel stages the perils of an over-abundance of dystopian affects and narratives: while they may hold the potential to warn and shock, they can also paralyse individuals’ responses to climate change. Though the novel presents what I call a ‘negative cosmology’ with no way out, this essay draws attention to the recent ecocritical turn towards formerly neglected affects and genres, such as pleasure, humour and survival.' (Introduction)

'One of Patrick White’s working notebooks, acquired by the National Library of Australia in 2006, is almost exclusively devoted to material related to his breakthrough novel Voss (1957), which marks a new departure in his career. It is a historical novel set in Australia’s colonial period, though with thematic connections to White’s earlier works. Close attention to Notebook 5 shows how extensively White researched its historical background and how he absorbed that research, sometimes transposing details verbatim into Voss. While certain material deals with Ludwig Leichhardt and his expeditions into the interior (for example Daniel Bunce’s Travels with Dr Leichhardt in Australia [1859] and Alec H. Chisholm’s Strange New World [1941]), it is apparent that White is more interested in details of Leichhardt’s various journeys than in debates about the man himself. He read other explorers, notably Edward John Eyre, and settlers of whom John Dunmore Lang is prominent, his notes revealing a particular interest in Aboriginal people. A second strand of White’s research informs those sections of Voss set in Sydney in the 1840s, and a third involves theological and philosophical speculations about the nature of faith that are reflected in the musings of Laura Trevelyan and others. In addition, there are fragments of draft of both Voss and Riders in the Chariot (1961), indicating that White was already incubating the later novel as he was completing Voss. It appears too that he undertook major restructuring of Voss at a late stage.' (Introduction)

'This essay examines the evolving discourses of settler indigenisation and Indigenous extinction in South Australia through the two markedly different editions of William Anderson Cawthorne’s poem Kuperree, a major work of nineteenth-century Australian ethnographic verse published in 1858 and 1885. With reference to archival material on the life of William Cawthorne, this essay first offers a corrective account of the publication history of Kuperree, which has been a point of confusion for scholars of nineteenth-century Australian literary history.' (Introduction)

'Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture by Paul Giles is an erudite and perceptive account of how the literature of Australia and New Zealand entwine with the key texts and ideas of literary and artistic modernism. Its particular value is how it shows, with satisfying weight, the value of both the antipodes and its literature on the global stage.' (Introduction)

'This critical edition of The Broad Arrow: Being Passages from the History of Maida Gwynnham, A Lifer, produced by Jenna Mead, is a comprehensive study of the material and textual form of the well-known colonial Australian narrative written by Caroline Woolmer Leakey under the pseudonym Oliné Keese. In many ways this edition is an extension of Mead’s extant and significant work on Leakey’s life, body, and editorial and authorial practice through The Broad Arrow. While some of these conclusions are reiterated in this critical edition of Leakey’s novel, Mead offers significant new insights that push histories of colonial Australian literary practices and cultures in new directions and offers a nuanced understanding of the interplay of genres in colonial Australian fiction. To this end, Mead offers scholars and enthusiasts of colonial Australian fiction a rare opportunity: to read – and thus probably to rediscover – The Broad Arrow in conversation with all its known versions.'  (Introduction)

'Notwithstanding criticism of the project or process of reconciliation, literary scholars have continued to use it as a productive framework for analysing (mostly) non-Indigenous authored novels of the 1990s and 2000s. This monograph also embraces reconciliation as a framework, though it expands that frame in two ways. First, it looks beyond the novel to also incorporate an eclectic range of memoirs, poetry and fictional and non-fictional stories within a more broadly defined ‘reconciliatory literature’. Second, Indigenous-authored texts are also examined here as reconciliatory. The author sees an empowering role for literature in seeking to explore ‘how creative writing can “do” reconciliation’. Each of the five analytical chapters concentrates on a major ‘trope of reconciliation’ in Australian writing from the period 1990–2010.' (Introduction)