AustLit

'Telling stories in verse is older than telling stories in prose, but narrative fiction in prose is what most readers expect from a novel. The verse novel, however, is increasingly visible in contemporary narrative fiction, arguably because of more titles written and published or better search devices making titles easier to identify and locate. Examining seven verse novels published between1945 and2007, this essay argues that ‘monumentalism’ may be a fitting description of the way that the specific matter at issue in these fictional works, individuals who are challenged by historical forces beyond their control, merges with the general attention-enhancing manner of verse composition.' (Author's abstract)

'This article explores how postcolonial literatures engage in critical negotiations of monumentalism and, more specifically, contest the generic conventions of the epic, which is often considered the monumental genre par excellence. Postcolonial uses of the epic examine and challenge the ideological premises of monumental forms of remembrance, while they also exploit the epic’s symbolic value for their own political and poetic agenda. The interpretations of Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) and Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune (1998) reveal that monumentalism in postcolonial literatures is punctuated by selfreflexive, ironic and non-essentialist forms, which bear witness to both the persistence and the mutability of cultural traditions. The self-reflexive monumentalism of these postcolonial writings is not only a key aesthetic strategy employed to foreground cultural difference and localize meaning but also establishes transcultural connections between seemingly diverse cultures. It is by means of the complexity of the form that the texts evoke the multivocal network of entangled histories.' (Author's abstract)