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Emily Potter Emily Potter i(A102939 works by)
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 Settler Belonging in Crisis : Non-Indigenous Australian Literary Climate Fiction and the Challenge of “The New” Jack Kirne , Emily Potter , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: ISLE : Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment , Winter vol. 30 no. 4 2023; (p. 952–971)
1 Australian Regional Literary History : Rethinking Limits and Boundaries Brigid Magner , Emily Potter , Jo Jones , Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , 10 August vol. 23 no. 1 2023;

'This paper emerges from a panel discussion at the ‘Texts and Their Limits’ conference (2021) between four scholars in the field of Australian regional literary history to consider its current concerns, practices and relationship to the frameworks of Australian literary studies. The panel flagged a renewal of regional literary scholarship in Australia through exploration of the panelists’ own projects and collaborations in regional and rural Victorian and Western Australian communities. Drawing on their reflections on the doing of regional literary history, the conversation canvassed the distinct qualities of contemporary regional Australian literary scholarship; the role of place, situated practice and community engagement in this field; and the implications for the regional literary studies of the always unsettled boundaries and status of the ‘region’ in Australian life.  Following the original panel event, this paper discusses questions such as: what is regional literary history, where is it going, and what are limits? ' (Publication abstract)

1 Seeking Greener Pages : An Analysis of Reader Response to Australian Eco- Crime Fiction Rachel Fetherston , Emily Potter , Kelly Miller , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , May no. 71 2023;
'IN THEIR WORK ON HOW NARRATIVE MAY HELP AUDIENCES THINK DIFFERENTLY ABOUT other species, Wojciech Malecki et al. refer to the ‘narrative turn’ within academia and its proliferation of research that addresses how ‘moral intuitions often yield to narrative persuasion’ (2). In other words, many scholars are currently asking whether narratives can persuade readers to reflect on and perhaps reconsider their own moral beliefs. The research presented in this paper follows a similar trajectory in its discussion of the results and possible implications of a reader response study that investigated how Australian readers respond to works of Australian eco-crime fiction that portray non-humans and global ecological issues such as climate change in a local Australian context. Resonant with ‘narrative persuasion’—the idea amongst social scientists that ‘a narrative is a catalyst for perspective change’ (Hamby et al. 114)—we consider the capacity of such texts to possibly engage readers with the plight of non-humans in Australia under the impacts of climate change.' (Introduction)
1 The Regional Novel in Australia Emily Potter , Brigid Magner , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel 2023;
1 Extractivist Imaginaries in Australia's Latrobe Valley : Slow Violence and True Crime in Chloe Hooper's The Arsonist and Tom Doig's Hazelwood Emily Potter , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Ariel : A Review of International English Literature , January vol. 54 no. 1 2023; (p. 27-54)

'This essay consider the active legacies of Australia's colonial extractivist imaginaries in the context of the nation's refusal to adequately acknowledge the current climate crisis. It explores these legacies through two recent works of Australian narrative non-fiction writing, Chloe Hooper's The Arsonist (2018) and Tom Doig's Hazelwood (2020), both of which address major fire events in the Latrobe Valley, a region in south-eastern Australia profoundly shaped by mining and other extractivist practices. While histories of genocide and dispossession are commonly disconnected from the discourse of Australia's current environmental crisis, Hooper's and Doig's texts connect climate crisis to manifestations of colonial-capitalist violence and examine the contemporary experiences of a community living in the midst of extractivism's material realities. Hooper and Doig present the fires and their consequences as true crime accounts of extraordinary events in which the site of culpability seems initially apparent. Through narrative strategies that bring the reader close to what happened, however, Hooper and Doig suggest that, in the face of extractivist colonial legacies, the answer to "who did it?" becomes much less clear. These texts ultimately ask us to consider our complicity in these crimes and the environmental imaginaries that inform them, while pointing to the possibility of alternative imaginaries that co-exist in the shadows of extractivism's continued dominance.' (Publication abstract)

1 Imagining Mallee Readers : Literary Infrastructures of a Regional Community Brigid Magner , Emily Potter , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , vol. 35 no. 1 2021; (p. 233-250)

'Regional readers in Australia face real and ongoing challenges when it comes to obtaining the reading matter they truly desire. As scholars, we contend with the related difficulty of tracking and mapping historical reading life in the regions without access to records that are either absent or carefully protected. Navigating this territory, we seek in this article to provide a suggestive account of literary activities in a region much more associated with the hardships of agricultural labor than with reading. Our specific focus is on readers in the Mallee region of northwest Victoria and what we term the “literary infrastructures” made available to them over time, since the early years of colonization. These infrastructures that enable, promote, and support reading publics have offered a surprisingly diverse but also highly uneven access to books and reading cultures in the Mallee. Our study reveals the specificity of the Mallee as a site of institutional and community interest that mobilized specific visions and assumptions of what Mallee people need and want. We illuminate the ways in which external actors and organizations constructed an image of the Mallee as suffering, ravaged, and worthy of pity, leading to charity drives and mobile library services that sought to compensate for the lack of available reading materials. This article shows how readers were imagined, solicited, and serviced by literary infrastructures. Although the Mallee may not have identified as a literary community in the early twentieth century, it did regard itself as a reading community, albeit one shaped by isolation.' (Publication abstract)

1 ‘A Talented Daughter of the Mallee’ : Myra Morris Meets Regional Readers Brigid Magner , Emily Potter , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October vol. 36 no. 3 2021;

'Myra Morris (1893–1966) was a prolific author of poems, short stories, novels and children’s books. Best known for her short stories, which were published in a wide array of Australian periodicals, Morris’ novels have been less celebrated. This article considers The Wind on the Water (1938) set at the ‘Four Mile’ hotel near ‘Brown’s Town’ in the Mallee region, which was serialised in the Australian Women’s Weekly and as a popular ABC radio broadcast after publication. Due to its generic romance elements, the novel’s quietly radical critique of the cruel subjection of women and animals has been largely overlooked. When discussed with book groups in the Mallee region, the novel offered a springboard for discussion of womens’ intimate relationships, class dynamics in small towns and considerations of inheritance. Although it was over ninety years old at the time of these sessions, readers of different genders and ages tended to identify closely with the novel’s protagonist and her thwarted efforts to find fulfilment and create a better future for her children. We argue that Morris’ novel might be regarded as a crucial antecedent of a number of contemporary novels about sensitive women seeking beauty in small Mallee towns. Her own early experiences in country towns may have contributed to her understanding of the lot of rural women who slaved to maintain their households in precarious conditions. The more complex renderings of the Mallee offered by Morris’ novel, along with the readers’ response to it, show how places are continually being made by the stories told and read about them.' (Publication abstract)

1 Recognizing the Mallee : Reading Groups and the Making of Literary Knowledge in Regional Australia Brigid Magner , Emily Potter , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture , vol. 12 no. 1 2021;

'Drawing on fieldwork in the Victorian Mallee region of Australia, this article explores the ways in which reading groups can elicit rich information about the relationship between literature, reading, and place. The study found that book group participants “recognized” the Mallee in the texts under discussion and engaged in their own forms of place knowledge and “history‑telling” in response, making corrections to, and even rejecting, literary representations of their area. We argue that the resources for enhancing literary infrastructure exist, both in the broad history and diversity of Mallee writing, and in the social infrastructure of the Mallee. Readers’ knowledge, captured through book‑related discussion in community spaces, offers the potential for enhancing existing literary resources in rural and remote regions.'

Source: Abstract.

1 ‘Brothers and Sisters of the Mallee’ : Book Talk between Isolated Readers across Time Brigid Magner , Emily Potter , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: Westerly , vol. 65 no. 2 2020; (p. 18-35)
'The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated the significance of books and reading in people’s lives. In lockdown, or ‘iso’, as the ubiquitous experience of home isolation is now almost fondly referred to, bookrelated activities are thriving. A survey taken in the United Kingdom during May 2020 showed that during the pandemic, time spent reading had doubled on average amongst respondents, with genre fiction, particularly thriller and crime, topping the list of favoured books (Flood). Around the world, online book discussion forums are booming, through platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and the iconic medium of this time, Zoom (Hunt). Literary festivals have gone online; reading events (meet the author, book launches, public readings), usually staged in physical spaces to local audiences, are now virtual, and theoretically accessible to all, across time zones and oceans. Bookshops, forced to close or to heavily constrain their opening times, are busily sending out online sales, while libraries have introduced home delivery services where restrictions allow.' (Introduction)
1 1 y separately published work icon Writing Belonging at the Millennium : Notes from the Field on Settler-Colonial Place Emily Potter , Bristol Chicago : Intellect , 2019 18882857 2019 multi chapter work criticism

'Writing Belonging at the Millennium brings together two pressing and interrelated matters: the global environmental impacts of post-industrial economies and the politics of place in settler-colonial societies. It focuses on Australia at the millennium, when the legacies of colonization intersected with intensifying environmental challenges in a climate of anxiety surrounding settler-colonial belonging. The question of what “belonging means is central to the discussion of the unfolding politics of place in Australia and beyond.

'In this book, Emily Potter negotiates the meaning of belonging in a settler-colonial field and considers the role of literary texts in feeding and contesting these legacies and anxieties. Its intention is to interrogate the assumption that non-indigenous Australians' increasingly unsustainable environmental practices represent a failure on their part to adequately belong in the country. Writing Belonging at the Millennium explores the idea of unsettled non-indigenous belonging as context for the emergence of potentially decolonized relations with place in a time of heightened global environmental concern.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

1 Kurangk/Coorong Atmospheres : Postcolonial Stories and Regional Futures Emily Potter , Brigid Magner , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs , October vol. 23 no. 2 2019;
'This paper proposes an atmospheric understanding of regional writing, and considers a critical methodology for assembling a literary history of the Kurangk/Coorong region of South Australia. In opposition to literary history guided by national forms, this methodology works from within the shifting entanglements of postcolonial place and its many stories, recognising the material impacts of poetic practice on more-than-human environments. The future of the Kurangk/Coorong is caught up in how this place has, and continues to be, imagined and narrated.' (Publication abstract)
 
1 In the Grip of Melbourne : Revisiting Monkey Grip Emily Potter , Kirsten Seale , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , December 2018;

'Text’s new edition of Helen Garner’s 1977 novel Monkey Grip is an opportunity to revisit the book’s influence on Melbourne. In addition to being widely considered a classic of Australian fiction, Monkey Grip is frequently referred to as an iconic ‘Melbourne’ novel. Certainly, it is a novel absolutely grounded in and shaped by place. Monkey Grip exhibits an intimacy with place that is built through local knowledge and the regular, routine movement through the spaces of one’s life. The city is much more than a backdrop to action. For Nora, the narrator and protagonist, it is the locus of the social encounter and emotional intensity on which the book’s narrative depends...'  (Introduction)

1 Murray-Mallee Imaginaries : Towards a Literary History of a Region Emily Potter , Brigid Magner , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 1 no. 18 2018;
1 Australian Literature and Place-Making Emily Potter , Brigid Magner , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 1 no. 18 2018;

'This special issue showcases the diverse ways in which Australian literature and place-making are brought together in contemporary literary scholarship. The seven essays, as well as the creative work by artist and scholar Ross Gibson, illuminate place as intimately constituted by narrative practice, and reflexively, show how geographies and environments inform literary forms, modes and, to use Jennifer Hamilton’s productive term, ‘tones.’ Poetics and placemaking are closely bound. This is of particular consequence in our national context, where ongoing cultures of colonisation, and the political potential of decolonising practices, are both enabled by the kinds of stories we tell both about and through our occupation of place. Storytelling is never neutral, nor is it dematerial. It is always, profoundly, active and has effects on the composition of the world; it is also collaborative, and not always with other human actors. Thinking about a potentially decolonised place requires an interrogation of what enables the enduring capacity of space to exclude and dispossess. It means understanding how words ‘do’ work. The essays included here understand this work in a range of ways and through distinct frames.' (1)

1 ‘No Nails New under the Sun’ : Creativity, Climate Change, and the Challenge to Literary Narrative in Thea Astley’s Drylands Emily Potter , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT Special Issue Website Series , no. 40 2017;
'Thea Astley’s millennial novel Drylands, a self-declared ‘book for the world’s last reader’ (1999, title page), offers an opportunity to reappraise literary narrative and creative experimentation in a time of climate change. This essay takes this up by reading Astley’s text as a paradoxical account of literature’s failings to either nourish or repair a drought-ridden, economically, environmentally and empathically beleaguered town in regional Australia. Astley’s vision is ostensibly declentionist, wherein the only hope for the future seems to lie in the inevitable ruins of the present. Within these ruins lies the fate of particular, historical creative forms, most notably the literary novel, which, as an expression of Western epistemology, is now evacuated of meaning. On the one hand, Astley seems to offer no reversed fortune for her characters or the textual practice that ironically brings them to life; however, the essay offers a further, dissonant reading of the text through a perspective of distributed agency which, as climate change unfolds, is where possibilities for literary work may lie.' (Publication abstract)
1 The Gathering Storm : Adelaide's Olive Trees in a Changing Climate Emily Potter , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Griffith Review , no. 55 2017; (p. 225-232)
'Adelaide's west terrace Cemetery has its share of famous residents, not all of them human. The sell-out release of the cemetery's own boutique olive oil, grown on site, has drawn attention to the established groves of olive trees that populate the grounds of the city's most visible burial place. These trees, like the cemetery itself, date from the mid-nineteenth century, a time when death was not something to hide but was incorporated into the everyday lives of the living. The siting of a cemetery on a prime arterial road of the growing city suggested to its citizens that the past would remain visible, but in a settled, eulogistic form. The olive trees, in turn, spoke of the future, with their potential to live for thousands of years. They flower and fruit, and flower and fruit, on and on, silent sentinels over the dead.' (Publication abstract)
1 Southern Extremes Emily Potter , 2008 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , March no. 44 2008; (p. 121-124)

— Review of Slicing the Silence : Voyaging to Antarctica Tom Griffiths , 2007 single work prose
1 Beyond the Rabbit-Proof Fence: Audience Response and an Ethic of Care Kay Schaffer , Emily Potter , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australia : Who Cares? 2007; (p. 187-202)
1 1 Andrew McGahan's The White Earth and the Ecological Poetics of Memory Emily Potter , 2006 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , December vol. 20 no. 2 2006; (p. 177-182)
Emily Potter argues that Andrew McGahan's The White Earth exhibits a 'poetic of memory' whereby 'subjects, events and effects' cross-pollinate. This she terms 'an ecological poetics of memory' and suggests that ecology, rather than chronology, offers 'a different poetics to temporal relations', one that refuses 'the silence that has settled over postcolonial negotiations' in Australia.
1 Vision Splendid Kirsten Heysen , Emily Potter , 2006 single work column
— Appears in: The Adelaide Magazine , March-April no. 3 2006; (p. 28--30)
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