AustLit
Texts
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y
The Secret River
Melbourne
:
Text Publishing
,
2005
Z1194031
2005
single work
novel
historical fiction
(taught in 69 units)
'In 1806 William Thornhill, a man of quick temper and deep feelings, is transported from the slums of London to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. With his wife Sal and their children he arrives in a harsh land he cannot understand.
'But the colony can turn a convict into a free man. Eight years later Thornhill sails up the Hawkesbury to claim a hundred acres for himself.
'Aboriginal people already live on that river. And other recent arrivals - Thomas Blackwood, Smasher Sullivan and Mrs Herring - are finding their own ways to respond to them.
'Thornhill, a man neither better nor worse than most, soon has to make the most difficult choice of his life.
'Inspired by research into her own family history, Kate Grenville vividly creates the reality of settler life, its longings, dangers and dilemmas. The Secret River is a brilliantly written book, a groundbreaking story about identity, belonging and ownership.' (From the publisher's website.)
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A Passage to India, Forster
Breath Eyes Memory, Danticat
Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys
The Whale Rider, Witi
In the Castle of My Skin, Lamming
Beginning Postcolonialismm Mcleod
Description
Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1979) and the onset of the culture wars, history wars, and battles of identity politics at the end of the twentieth century, postcolonialism has ballooned as an academic field of study and as a cultural field of struggle. While many of the cultural debates incited by postcolonialism as an academic field and cultural practice are complex, this course introduces several key issues related to approachable texts: place, race, home, nation, culture, story, and history. This broad approach to the field will enable students to enter these debates on their own, drawing from and contributing to the subject's focus on central concerns of postcolonialism as they are related to colonial and postcolonial historical texts, contexts, and literary theory.
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