AustLit

'Imagined Landscapes teams geocritical analysis with digital visualization techniques to map and interrogate films, novels, and plays in which space and place figure prominently. Drawing upon A Cultural Atlas of Australia, a database-driven interactive digital map that can be used to identify patterns of representation in Australia’s cultural landscape, the book presents an integrated perspective on the translation of space across narrative forms and pioneers new ways of seeing and understanding landscape. It offers fresh insights on cultural topography and spatial history by examining the technical and conceptual challenges of georeferencing fictional and fictionalized places in narratives. Among the items discussed are Wake in Fright, a novel by Kenneth Cook, adapted iconically to the screen and recently onto the stage; the Australian North as a mythic space; spatial and temporal narrative shifts in retellings of the story of Alexander Pearce, a convict who gained notoriety for resorting to cannibalism after escaping from a remote Tasmanian penal colony; travel narratives and road movies set in Western Australia; and the challenges and spatial politics of mapping spaces for which there are no coordinates.' (Publication summary)

'The twelve essays collected in Pockets of Change locate adaptation within a framework of two overlapping, if not simultaneous, creative processes: on the one hand, adaptation is to be understood as an acknowledged transposition of an existing source-that is, the process of adapting from; on the other hand, adaption is also a process of purposeful shifting and evolving of creative practices in response to external factors, including but not limited to other creative works-in other words, the process of adapting to. This book explores adaptation, then, as an active practice of repetition and as a reactive process of development or evolution. The essays also extend beyond the production, transformation, and interpretation of texts to interrogate the values and practices at work in cultural transition and transformation during periods of social and historical change. Collectively, the papers theorize adaptation by taking on three tasks: first, to examine the conditions under which the two processes of adaptation operate; second, to give an account of the space and moment in which the processes unfold (the 'pockets' of the title); and finally, to examine what emerges from pockets of adaptation. While adapting from and adapting to are both processes that appear to preclude innovation in the way that they acknowledge and depend on external sources, Pockets of Change demonstrates that adaptation is productive. It not only references prior texts, attitudes, practices and media, but it also invites us to re-visit the past and to re-think the present in new ways, potentially giving narrative space to muted or occluded voices. This book therefore brings together an innovative and varied range of approaches to, interpretations and uses of adaptation, challenging the assumption that an adaptation is simply either a 're-make' or the act of turning one medium into another. Adaptation, then, names not only the means by which texts are transformed, but also the space in which that transformation takes place. This anthology highlights the processes of adaptation and transition rather than simply focusing on the relationship between beginning and end products. In identifying these pockets of change this anthology both claims and opens up new spaces in this critical field and mode of textual analysis. ' (Back Cover)

'This article explores how the imaginative use of the landscape in Baz Luhrmann's Australia (2008) intersects with the fantasy of Australianness that the film constructs. We argue that the fictional Never-Never Land through which the film's characters travel is an, albeit problematic, ‘indigenizing’ space that can be entered imaginatively through cultural texts including poetry, literature and film, or through cultural practices including touristic pilgrimages to landmarks such as Katherine Gorge (Nitmiluk), Uluru and Kakadu National Park. These actual and virtual journeys to the Never-Never have broader implications in terms of fostering a sense of belonging and legitimating white presence in the land through affect, nostalgia and the invocation of an imagined sense of solidarity and community. The heterotopic concept of the Never-Never functions to create an ahistorical, inclusive space that grounds diverse conceptions of Australianness in a shared sense of belonging and home that is as mythical, contradictory and wondrous as the idea of the Never-Never itself. The representations of this landscape and the story of the characters that traverse it self-consciously construct a relationship to past events and to film history, as well as constructing a comfortable subject position for contemporary Australians to occupy in relation to the land, the colonial past and the present.'

Source: Abstract.