AustLit

'Definitions of myth, from accounts of creation to religious creeds, from Freud's Oedipus complex to today's media "legends," are as diverse as their makers. They do have one common denominator, however; all of them tell a "made-up" story, and also in the popular use of the word to mean a lie. Peter Carey challenges that usage directly by calling his novel a True History of the Kelly Gang. Simmons examines the truthfulness of myth with specific reference to Carey's mythopoeic fiction. Since Carey's narrative voice is that of Ned Kelly himself, Carey focuses particularly on the hero, or "man-myth."' (Publication summary)

'Although most of Michael Wilding's short stories are set in Australia, some take place in his native England, and a few are scattered among Europe, North Africa, and the US. Of the American stories one of the best is "An Afternoon for Political Dissidents in Texas." Neglected by critics, the story deserves to be better known. Graham examines Wilding's "An Afternoon for Political Dissidents in Texas," a splendid example of what Wilding called a "process story" as it combines narrative inventiveness with familiar Wilding themes.' (Publication summary)

'Sheckels suggests that John Marsden's popular, multiple award-winning "Tomorrow" series of seven books–primarily but certainly not exclusively for young readers–has this very Escher-like quality. They possess a double-voicedness much in the spirit of what Bakhtin suggests in his study of Dostoevsky, offering a–much in John Schilb's or Stanley Fish's terms–resisting reading and then, perhaps, a disconcerting rhetorical flip back upon itself. The texts then are rhetorically interesting, but so is the way in which the texts serve as an example of what Bakhtin implies about double-voicing but perhaps fails to make sufficiently clear because of his tendency to list and offer misleading generalizations.' (Publication summary)

'Duthie examines various characterizations of espionage in the novels of Christopher Koch. Throughout Koch's work, it is continually emphasized that the examination of espionage is the examination of doubleness. Koch thereby offers a layered approach largely unexamined by many British writers in this field and one that is fitting for an Australian author not displacing the writing of an ancestral country but crisscrossing and doubling the spy genres of Britain with alternate perspectives.' (Publication summary)

'In an interview, producer Emile Sherman and script writer Louise Fox talked about the process of adapting Dead Europe to the big screen. Sherman shared that novels are very different from films, and often very good novels–literary novels–don't make good films because films essentially need story. However, in the case of Dead Europe, he felt like it was making a really quite bold statement about how the past is so pressed against the present, and what lies beneath the surface of contemporary Europe, and on the fringes of contemporary Europe. He thought that finding something that is a little bit extraordinary is the key.' (Publication summary)

'Edgecombe examines the novels Solid Mandala by Patrick White and Blechtrommel by Gunter Grass. He argues that Arthur's dance in Solid Mandala has been inspired by Die Blechtrommel, a novel that most emphatically does mix the documentary and the fantastical. He shares that White has borrowed the procedure but managed to escape its consequences.' (Publication summary)

'Edgecombe examines Patrick White's novels The Eye of the Storm and The Vivisector and its connection with the works of French novelist Victor Hugo and German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The French novel that suggests itself in connection with The Eye of the Storm would naturally be La Chatreuse de Parme, but there are also several points of the narrative that reveal a debt to Hugo's Les Travailleurs de la Mer. The first relates to the "skiapod" of Odilon Redon, which itself seems to have derived from Hugo's account of the King of the Auxcriniers. In the Eye, White stresses the liminal nature of this world, emblematized by an intermediate light that effaces temporal divisions.' (Publication abstract)