AustLit

'In Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's "Disability and Representation," the feminist disability studies scholar comments that disabled or "unusually embodied" characters "have fired the imagination and underwritten the metaphors of classic Western literature" (523). Garland-Thomson suggests that nonnormative embodiment is not only fundamental to the telos of literary narrative and character development but seldom treated as a mundane (and inevitable) fact of human existence. Instead, impairments often serve as expedient markers of a character's moral failings, as Ato Quayson puts it, an "ethical background to the actions of other characters" (36). Or, as Maren Tova Linett asserts, they serve as a broader statement on the ways that normalcy, personhood, bodiliness, and difference have been understood in various cultures across time (4–5). Clare Barker and Stuart Murray observe that "it is rare to encounter an account of [disability] … that does not extend to a comment on what that body does or, crucially, means" (2). And it is predominantly the literary-aesthetic domain, for Quayson, that not only reflects but refracts "multivalent attitudes toward disability"; the dissemination of such attitudes in society can have important consequences for the lived experience of people with disabilities depending on whether they are "enlightened and progressive" or, what is more often the case, reductive and stigmatizing (36).' (Introduction)

'Non-human animals feature prominently in Alexis Wright's novel, The Swan Book. In addition to the avian creatures of the novel's title, The Swan Book includes representations of fish, owls, mynas, brolgas, rats, cats, dogs, and snakes. Building on previous scholarship into the novel's focus on non-human species, this article explores the centrality of multi-species being and interconnectedness within an Indigenous cosmological framework. The Swan Book demonstrates the pivotal role of non-human animals in communicating the ancestral stories and historical knowledge of Aboriginal nations. As a result, an Indigenous worldview centred on the notion of Country is presented as a potential solution to current environmental challenges in our world. The article also draws attention to the muteness of Oblivia, the central character of Wright's novel. Employing concepts from disability studies and critical animal studies, the article finds that Oblivia's muteness demonstrates the interlocking discourses of racism, ableism, and anthropocentrism at work in Western colonialism. As a result, the character's muteness indicates how the category of ‘animal’ has been discursively employed to justify the dual exclusion of Indigenous and disabled people from the category of the human. Oblivia’s embrace of the black swans and her subsequent refusal to communicate in ways that are normatively acceptable to hearing people is an important reminder for readers to orient themselves ethically to others whose embodiments, minds, and ways of life may be (radically) different from their own.'(Publication abstract)

'This article explores historical and literary connections between Australia and Japan through Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013). The novel calls attention to differing military narratives as constructed by aggressor and victimized nations through representing Australian prisoners of war captured by the Imperial Japanese Army to work on the Thai-Burma Railway. The article serves as an exploratory study in how The Narrow Road might be taught in a Japanese university course on Japan-Australia relations through literary texts. Previous scholarship on the novel has not addressed its subject matter in relation to Japan’s continuing equivocations about its activities during the Asia-Pacific War. The article therefore explores how Australian fiction might stimulate discussion among Japanese students about contentious aspects of their nation’s history, and lead to the cultivation of cross-cultural knowledge and empathy through imagining lives that are different from their own.'(Publication abstract)

'The Gothic lends itself to critical examinations of disabled embodiment, yet this genre has ‘hitherto been largely ignored’ by disability studies scholars (Gregory 291). This essay redresses this omission by exploring disability in three Australian Gothic novels: Elizabeth Jolley's The Well (1986), Sarah Kanake's Sing Fox to Me (2016), and Kate Grenville's Lilian’s Story (1985). On initial glance, The Well and Lilian’s Story conform to the use of disability in the Gothic as a metaphor for social and psychological deviance. However, closer inspection of these novels and Sing Fox to Me demonstrates their resistance to the Gothic’s typical use of disability in phobic ways. Hester’s disability in The Well enables her to transcend the gender prescriptions of her patriarchal Australian community, even if it is initially constructed as a physiological sign of her disturbing possessiveness over Katherine. Against the ‘dramatic and unforgiving natural settings’ of the Tasmanian Gothic (Bullock 72), Sing Fox to Me interweaves Samson’s experience of Down syndrome with perennial themes of the genre including familial haunting and the intersection of past and present. Similar to The Well, Lilian’s Story shows the politically transformative nature of disabled embodiment, wherein the titular character’s fatness and ‘madness’ allow her to achieve self-realisation while defying the gender norms of her time. Ultimately, the three novels suggest that the use of disabled characters in some contemporary Australian Gothic narratives is clearing space for less-stereotypical portrayals of corporeal and psychological variation in this genre.' (Publication abstract)

'Christos Tsiolkas has occupied an increasingly central position in the contemporary Australian literary and cultural imagination. Starting with his novel Loaded (1995), Tsiolkas’s fiction engages with subject matter that speaks to his personal experience as both a gay man of Greek heritage and a writer concerned with larger social and political issues affecting a multicultural Australia. Examples of recurring themes in Tsiolkas’s fiction include the irreconcilability of Greek and Australian identity, racial and class intolerance, emergent sexual consciousness, and the conflict between familial obligation and individual expression. In contrast to these arguably “reader-friendly” themes—that is, themes that are accessible to a wide and non-specialist audience—Tsiolkas’s early novels (Loaded; The Jesus Man, 1999; and Dead Europe, 2005) possess a subversive edge in how they explore obscenity and social transgression. However, the publication of Tsiolkas’s fourth novel, The Slap (2008), signalled a new phase in his career, in which the formal rawness of his prose and his uncompromising representation of extreme corporeal states gave way to a simplicity in his written expression that mirrored the growing topicality of his subject matter. This change in purpose mirrors the shift in both the reception of Tsiolkas the writer and of his fiction. Prior to The Slap, Tsiolkas was viewed as a “cult figure” who, though of some critical interest, neither captivated the attention of a mainstream audience nor was celebrated by the literary establishment as an “Australian” writer whose fiction reflected purportedly national interests. However, the critical and commercial success of The Slap has ensured that both Tsiolkas and his subsequent fiction have been (re)cast as pivotal sites of commentary on contemporary Australian class and racial politics. Put another way, Tsiolkas’s “increasing visibility … as a public intellectual, if not a literary celebrity”, has resulted in changes to the form, language and subject matter of his novels, and also the ways critics receive and understand his career.' (Publication abstract)