AustLit

'Australia's official Reconciliation project confronted Australians with the continuous violent dispossession suffered by the country's Indigenous peoples and the pressing need to offer a public apology to them. While trauma became a tool whereby to create paths of empathy and reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, it was also a manipulative strategy to deny the country's shameful history. This book examines Gail Jones's literary contribution to such debates. It examines Gail Jones's questioning of Australia's victimology narratives, and offers an insightful discussion of the transmedia, transnational and multidirectional approach to trauma in the reconciliation-related novels she published during John Howard's vexed Liberal Government (1996-2007)'  (Publication summary)

'Gail Jones’s fiction has received major critical attention due to its engagement with trauma, memory, modernity, the visual arts, and the Australian process of Reconciliation. This article seeks to extend the focus of research on Jones’s work by looking at her little-discussed representation of forced migration. For this purpose, it examines how Jones’s 2013 short story “The Ocean” and 2015 novel A Guide to Berlin respectively tackle the 2001 refugee Tampa affair and the 2013 Lampedusa refugee tragedy. It first offers an overview of the precarity suffered by contemporary asylum seekers and refugees and how this has been explored and fictionalized by contemporary writers. It then analyses and discusses the main narrative and stylistic strategies that Jones uses in order to represent the ties that bind together refugees and non-refugees in mutually dependent relationships, which challenge Australian and European governments’ fostered xenophobia aimed at tightening border controls.' (Publication abstract)

 (Introduction)

'The turn of the century has witnessed a proliferation of the publication of the so-called “sorry novels”, “fictions of reconciliation” and “saying sorry texts” in the Australian literary context. In contrast to the arguments which define these texts as plausible examples of “settler envy”, this article highlights their dissenting and reconciling power in Gail Jones’s Sorry  by offering an in-depth analysis and discussion of the meaning and function of the intertextual allusions to Shakespeare’s Othello and the use of symbols in the novel.' (Introduction)