AustLit

'John Hughes’s novel The Dogs has been withdrawn from the longlist for the Miles Franklin Prize after an investigation by The Guardian identified numerous instances of plagiarism. Hughes’s lifting of passages from other books has sparked furious debate and literary detective work – mostly on Twitter – prompting questions about the nature of influences, literary pastiche and the attribution of sources in novels.' (Introduction)

'In 2019, Dan Mallory, book editor turned author of the enormously successful thriller, The Woman in the Window, was exposed as a pathological dissembler. Faking cancer, an Oxford PhD, a prestigious career, and tragic family deaths, Mallory constructed a distressing history in order to gain authority and influence. Examining the complexities of the fraud in relation to other contemporary fakes, this paper contends that impostors expose the value systems of power, especially those situated within gatekeeping institutions that enable grifters to thrive. It asserts that despite humiliating exposure, or the excoriation of outraged readers, the impostor invariably succeeds, perpetuating an exclusive monoculture in which the same voices, both real and imagined, are heard and received. The Mallory controversy emerges within a succession of impostures fixated on crossing boundaries from privilege to disadvantage and trauma, revealing an identity politics located within the commodification of the marketable ‘other’. The hunger for narratives of ‘authentic’ suffering comes to represent a form of literary virtue signalling which exploits ‘otherness’ to satisfy middle-class stereotypes and prejudices. Imbricated with issues of appropriation and theft, the fake treats suffering as an object to be possessed, yet also functions to uncover a sequence of literary and cultural fault-lines.'  (Publication abstract)

'In ‘speaking out’, the final poem of berni m janssen’s fifth collection, between wind and water (in a vulnerable place), a choral cry for resistance is offered, a lyric that insists on the ability of individuals to provoke immense change: ‘one voice small forms fight in strength / one voice strong gains another / i’m with you, go boldly’. In a context of climate strikes and impassioned environmental activism, such lines might be attributed to Greta Thunberg, whose reminder that ‘you are never too small to make a difference’ has become the slogan of protestors worldwide demanding action against an impending ecological crisis.' (Introduction)

'Some say that when a cat adopts that lock-eyed vacuum stare into the impossible space behind you, it can see the ghosts that crawl along ceilings and walls…

'The poems in Alyson Miller’s debut collection are an exploration of the taboo and violence of human nature. From sexuality to the threatening and deadly, these prose poems off new perspectives on the unspeakable, shadowy places of human experience.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This paper examines how Ania Walwicz uses the protean nature of the prose poem as a medium through which to subvert traditional notions of identity, especially in terms of anxieties about gender and sexuality. According to Dominique Hecq (2009), the prose poem is able to negotiate ‘between notions of a public language of prose and a marginal language of poetry, thereby … enacting particularly complex modes of engagement between subjectivity and the world’. This paper argues that it is the slippery and transformative nature of the prose poem that lends itself so neatly to a politics of subversion. As a ‘borderline genre’ (Hecq 2009), the prose poem occupies an ambiguous space – it is self-conscious and critical yet immersive and seductive; a medium that offers a deceptive simplicity, or a shocking confrontation with otherness. Oftentimes, the prose poem is capable of both in the same instance. By exploring the prose poetry of Walwicz, this paper contends that rather than being understood as a ‘disturbing and elusive’ literary oddity (Delville 1998), the prose poem can be seen to contest formal traditions of both narrative and identity.'  (Publication abstract)