AustLit

'Listening and reading literature. These two activities are maybe counter-intuitive partners. In sensual terms, one mostly concerns the ear, the other the eye. When we listen, it is, usually, mostly to sound, to resonance, physical vibration—although composer and sound theorist John Cage tells us we can also listen to silence. When we read, it is a silent activity. Of course, we can listen to words, to a reading or an audiobook, and we can listen to poetry. But often, perhaps mostly, we read in silence.' (Introduction)

'This article argues the final and arguably most permeable frontier Patrick White’s Voss sets out across is the material. Informed by the environmental and material turn in the humanities and turning away from the purely psychological and ‘country of the mind’ readings of White’s novel, I explore Voss’s engagement with various non-realist traditions to open questions on how literature and the text might materialise new sources of intimacy and interconnection with the mineral realm. Tracking a journey through stone and rock to dust, I connect Voss’s material poetics to larger themes and the wider question of the texts relationship to the Australian environment. I argue that in White’s novel a confrontation occurs between an inherited European literary aesthetics, connected to humanist ideals, and the dry and uniquely Australian material environments of the interior. Whereas colonial Sydney seeks stability and impermeability through their relation to stone and the material world, the journey inland will fracture and fissure established forms. The ultimate triumph of Voss’s material poetics, manifested largely through Laura, is to discover not simply fear in a handful of dust, as in T.S. Eliot’s famous line from The Waste Land, but love.' (Publication abstract)

'Early in the Constance Garnett translation of Anna Karenina a few lines appear that suggest something more historically significant than Anna’s emotional turmoil. Anna is travelling back from Moscow to her husband and son in St Petersburg, just after a ball where her romance with Vronsky begins. She has been in Moscow to help repair her brother’s marriage; now her own is at risk. “Moments of doubt were continually coming upon her, when she was uncertain whether the train were going forwards or backwards, or were standing still altogether . . . ‘What’s that on the arm of the chair, a fur cloak or some beast? And what am I myself? Myself or some other woman?’” A cloak is protective. It can be fashionable. A beast is a dangerous monstrosity; terrifying and unknowable. The same object flickers between these poles, and the viewer, herself in a state of extreme personal uncertainty, must stabilise her vision, for the object cannot be both things. At the same time there is some confusion about the actual progress of the train. Is it going forward? Is it going backwards? Is it going nowhere? This dire uncertainty also applies to Soviet Russia, which at one time seemed socially protective, progressive, indeed fashionable to many outsiders, before Stalin’s monstrosity came into full view. Some of these outsiders, Katherine Susannah Prichard included, never really emerged from under Stalin’s cloak.' 

(Introduction)

'Michelle Cahill’s Daisy & Woolf is a novel that centres on Daisy Simmons, the “dark, adorably pretty” marginal character with whom Peter Walsh declares himself in love in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (Woolf 172). The story unfolds via a compilation of letters and diary-entry-style chapters shifting between the 1920s (Daisy’s experiences) and the late 2010s—where writer Mina reflects on the process of telling Daisy’s story. First and foremost, Daisy & Woolf is interested in examining and challenging “Anglo-centric histories and fictions” through its engagement with Woolf’s novel and characters, but much like its characters, the story roams far beyond this central focus in numerous directions. Cahill ruminates on writing and publishing, sexuality, gender, motherhood, technology, the passage of time and mental health—a list that overlaps significantly with the concerns of Woolf’s work (see Showalter).' (Introduction) 

'This study provides an engaging and persuasive exploration of the myths and realities of “Sydney’s connection to its waterway” through a close examination of five novels from the 1930s and 40s written by female authors (7). Each chapter offers a case study that considers how these novels explore the complexities of urban modernity alongside a wide range of literary, cultural and social “currents” of the interwar period. Across this study as a whole, Meg Brayshaw eloquently argues for the value of more regional or localised studies of modernism that facilitate understandings of modernity “as a phenomenon that is both situated and transcalar, conceptual and embodied” (15).' (Introduction) 

'Roger Osborne’s The Life of Such Is Life lives up to its title. After finishing this book, it’s hard to disagree with that descriptor of Furphy’s novel. It is alive. That inert object we have on our bookshelves is a living entity, and possibly more than most literary texts, the history of the origin of that physical text shows many similarities to the evolution of a species under selective pressure, to use some of the terminology Furphy would have been familiar with from his reading of Darwin. Moreover, for us in the twenty-first century, hypersensitive to the insights of ecology, we can see that the physical evolution of the printed text depended on the physical ecologies of the publishing and printing industries of Australia, Great Britain, and the United States of America, as well as the metaphysical environment of the “ecology of minds” (to use Gregory Bateson’s term) of the readers whose recorded and unrecorded readings over the past 120 years have created the text(s) (we have to include Rigby’s Romance and The Buln-buln and the Brolga) as we know them today. Osborne gives us a comprehensive account of the physical and metaphysical milieux which produced the phenomenon of Furphy’s grand opus in both its trinitarian and singular manifestations. If that sounds somewhat theological, it might not be out of place, given the number of claims that Such Is Life is our foundational literary narrative, akin to Don Quixote or Moby Dick, claims that surface regularly in the various attempts to keep Such Is Life in print, as Osborne shows.' (Introduction) 

'Part history, part theory, and part examination of children’s literature focused on Indigenous experience, Indigenous Cultural Capital explores efforts to bring First Nations life and culture into the mainstream through books aimed at young readers. Xu Daozhi begins her work with this assertion: “The representations of Aboriginal life and cultures in Australian children’s books, throughout much of Australia’s post-contact history, have been plagued by racial stereotypes and prejudice” (1). (The author includes Torres Strait Islanders under the term “Aboriginal.”) To develop her ideas, she employs Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital”: “Cultural capital, in such forms as knowledge, skills, and educational qualifications, refers to cognitive acquisition and competence in deciphering cultural codes” (13). Family, to Bourdieu, is the foundational point for such capital; children from middle- or upper-class families enter the educational system with resources that ready them to acquire cultural capital successfully and thus achieve “scholastic success” (13) and an adult life of power and privilege. She identifies the longstanding absence of Indigenous knowledge and cultures from Australian education as a key factor in enduring racial discrimination in schools and society at large and “the widening gap between Aboriginal and nonAboriginal students in academic performance” (17). Introducing the concept of “Indigenous cultural capital” and applying it to children’s literature, the author contends that the dissemination of narratives to young readers centred on the Aboriginal experience and the corresponding apparatus of curricular changes, prizes, reviews, and appropriate paratextual matter has the potential to transform Australian society. Indigenous cultural capital can shape young readers’ “worldview, opinions, and behaviour” (18) and guide them toward a more racially inclusive social structure.' 

(Introduction)