AustLit

'Christos Tsiolkas’s Gothic novel Dead Europe (2005) has been criticised by some for its offensive representation of Jewish characters, and lauded by others as an unflinching interrogation of historical and contemporary anti-Semitism. The Gothic genre more broadly has a difficult history of rendering the marginalised Other as monstrous, and while contemporary writers often experiment with Gothic tropes to challenge and disrupt such representations, as a non-Jewish writer, Tsiolkas uses the figure of the monstrous Jew in problematic ways. This article analyses Dead Europe’s use of the Gothic grotesque in depicting Jewish characters, arguing that the novel engages in an ethical critique of anti-Semitic stereotypes using the grotesque’s ambivalence, overdetermination and ability to compel attention through shock and disgust.' (Publication abstract)

'Across her forty-year writing career, Thea Astley (1925–2004) produced seventeen books, including novels, novellas and short story collections. Early works such as A Descant for Gossips (1960) as well as later ones — It’s Raining in Mango (1987) and Drylands (1999) — have become much-loved Australian classics. Astley was the first writer to win multiple Miles Franklin awards and remains tied with Tim Winton as the only four-time recipients of the prize. As Karen Lamb’s biography — the first book-length treatment of Astley — makes clear, these achievements were no mean feat for a writer struggling to balance the demands of craft with the pressures of motherhood, marriage, work and gendered expectations in a period of shifting social norms.'  (Introduction)

'South East Queensland’s subtropical hinterlands—the mountainous, forested country lying between the cities of the coast and the Great Dividing Range—are sites of a regional variation of Australian Gothic. Hinterland Gothic draws its atmosphere and metaphors from the specificities of regional landscapes, climate, and histories.

'In works by Eleanor Dark, Judith Wright, Janette Turner Hospital, and Inga Simpson, South East Queensland’s Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast hinterlands are represented as Gothic regions “beyond the visible and known” (“Hinterland” in Oxford Dictionaries Online 2019), where the subtropical climate gives rise to an unruly, excessive nature.

'In Gothic literature, excess is related to the unspeakable or the repressed. Bringing Gothic, postcolonial, and ecocritical perspectives to bear on the literature of South East Queensland’s hinterlands reveals a preoccupation with the regions’ repressed histories of colonial violence, which are written on the landscape through Gothic metaphors.'  (Publication abstract)

This article considers the ways contemporary Australian writers Sarah Armstrong (in Salt Rain, 2004) and Jessie Cole (in Darkness of the Edge of Town, 2012) use the Gothic to articulate the uncertainties of the state of being missing, representing the missing person as liminal in Victor Turner's sense, a kind of undead figure who mediates between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead.