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Alice Mills Alice Mills i(A19558 works by)
Born: Established: 1946 ;
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 Heart Strings and Hip Pocket : Garth Nix’s Writings for Children, Young Adults and Adults Alice Mills , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Sold by the Millions : Australia's Bestsellers 2012; (p. 67-81) 'In any Australian bookshop oriented to the general public, as in Britain and the USA, fantasy books for children and young adults have gained huge increase in shelf space over the past decade; enough fantasy books for these age groups have been published each year in Australia to begin to justify a division on the shelves between realist and fantasy (and, more recently, another division between fantasy and the paranormal) Australian fiction. Fantasy for these age groups ia a major selling category, and the categories for the Aurealis Awards (the premier Australian award for speculative fiction) have been progressively expanded, in the case of children's literature, to five. Fantasy for these age groups is thus a major sector of the Australian market. The ferocity of competition for substantial awards, both monetary and in terms of literary prizes, perhaps explains why some fantasy authors for children and young adults are in the forefront of Australian literary marketing in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Garth Nix being among the most successful in the field. (Authors introduction 67)
1 Nights at the Airport Alice Mills , 2009 single work short story
— Appears in: Nebula , June vol. 6 no. 2 2009;
1 For Little Australians : Australian Children's Literature Alice Mills , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: Reading Down Under : Australian Literary Studies Reader 2009; (p. 447-453) An overview of Australian children's writing and its major authors.
1 Forms of Death in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea, and Garth Nix's Old Kingdom Novels Alice Mills , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: Literature and Aesthetics , December vol. 19 no. 2 2009; (p. 92-104)

'As soon as fantasy writers make factual statements about the nature of their fictional worlds, limits come into play. If this is a world ruled by one omnipotent deity, it is going to be tricky to introduce the Greek gods later on; if magic works by a certain set of rules, it cannot work by conflicting rules without the need for justification; if ghosts exist, some explanation will be required when the narrator asserts that no-one comes back from the dead. This paper explores and evaluates ways in which three contemporary fantasy writers set up and dissolve such limits with regard to the after life. Each of these writers has produced an extended, multi-volume fantasy opus amply establishing rules and limits for its fictional world or worlds: Ursula Le Guin in her six-volume Earthsea series, Philip Pullman in his trilogy, His Dark Materials, and Garth Nix in his Old Kingdom series of novels (four volumes to date). Each of these writers sets up what I shall term a ‘first death’ and a ‘second death’; the second death is presented in their fictions as a final stage of being while the first death, although it may initially seem permanent, turns out to be transitional. Each of these fictions ultimately dissolves the limits that seem to have been set up in the first death, but their strategies of release are arguably not always as liberatory as claimed.' (Introduction)
1 Behind the Bum : A Psychoanalytic Reading of Andy Griffiths' Bum Trilogy Alice Mills , 2008 single work criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , December vol. 18 no. 2 2008; (p. 78-84) In this paper Mills considers 'the trilogy's fondness for anal jokes and bums from three perspectives, those of Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva and Sigmund Freud' (78). While the texts comply with Kristeva's concept of abjection and Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque to a certain extent, it is Freud's theory of childhood psychosexual development that Mills finds is the most useful. She tracks the stages of Freud's Oedipal complex through the trilogy and based upon her analysis of 'the bum fighting adventures of Zack and his allies' (81), concludes that 'behind the bum adventures lies a far more terrifying psychological terrain' (84).
1 Haunting the Borders of Sword and Sorcery : Garth Nix's The Seventh Tower Alice Mills , 2008 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Gothic in Children's Literature : Haunting the Borders 2008; (p. 145-155)
1 Australian Children's Literature Alice Mills , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900 2007; (p. 417-428)
1 The Theme of Premature Burial in Garth Nix's Early Novels Alice Mills , 2006 single work criticism
— Appears in: Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature , May vol. 16 no. 1 2006; (p. 51-57) This article looks at three early novels by Garth Nix, The Ragwitch (1990), Sabriel (1995), Shade's Children (1997) through the context of Freud's 'uncanny' and Carl Jung's work on rebirth and individuation. Tracing the theme of premature burial through the texts, Mills draws together the pessimistic Freudian view of the 'uncanny' and the more positive and heroic path of individuation which Jung put forward, to demonstrate how Nix incoporates these two different understandings of the human psyche into his narratives and manages to attain a level of balance between them both. In terms of premature burial, both Freud and Jung 'agree that the tomb is symbolically the domain of the monstrous mother' and the site where monstrous rebirths occur as well as a site of repression. Mills argues that Nix's novels succeed in blending together two world views and create a truly successful hero, capable of entering the underworld (tomb) and at the same time escaping the paralysis and distintergation of identity that premature burial engenders. (pp.56-57).
1 The Uncanny Lurch in Shaun Tan's The Viewer and The Lost Thing Alice Mills , 2006 single work criticism
— Appears in: CREArTA : Journal of the Centre for Research and Education in the Arts , vol. 6 no. 2006; (p. 64-74)
1 Neurolinguistic Programming and the Teaching of Creative Writing Alice Mills , 2004 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs , October vol. 8 no. 2 2004;
1 The Paradoxes of History in Crew and Woolman's Tagged and Crew and Tan's Memorial Alice Mills , 2002 single work criticism
— Appears in: Rethinking History : The Journal of Theory and Practice , vol. 6 no. 3 2002; (p. 331-343) 'The publication of two illustrated books with verbal text by the Australian writer Gary Crew provides an opportunity to compare the presentation of war memories in picture story book and graphic novel format. Gary Crew and Shaun Tan's Memorial (1999) is a thought-provoking picture story book, while Crew and Steven Woolman's Tagged (1997) is an idiosyncratic graphic novel. The picture story book illustrations depict the commemorative tree as more real, more present than the book's human beings. The verbal text asserts that memory will live on through generations of the war veterans' family, as in the tree, but the illustrations of the cutting down of the tree and the verbal text revealing a veteran's self-censorship reveal these claims to be at best tenuous, at worst, false. Nevertheless, despite the current town council's disrespect for the commemorative tree, the Anzac Day ceremony remains a socially sanctioned rite of remembering war. The illustrations to Tagged represent a war veteran's confused mind and his compulsive reliving of his past as confusing visual images with a lack of clear cues for the reader's eye to follow, as the boy observer moves more deeply into the labyrinthine building where the man hides. While Memorial's war memorials are complete, public, in good condition and easily accessible, the bewildering passages and openings of Tagged's building suggest the man's stuck memories, the boy's problems with interpreting war images and also a society's not altogether successful attempt to repress collective acknowledgement of its war past. In contrast with Memorial, Tagged is a memorial to the unknown solder, offering a different kind of historical truth to any official, public, empty tomb.'
2 A Psychoanalytic Reading of Gary Crew and Peter Goldthorpe's First Light Alice Mills , 2001 single work criticism
— Appears in: Children's Literature Matters : Proceedings of the 3rd Australian Children's Literature Association for Research Conference 2001;
1 Fixity and Flow in Garth Nix's Sabriel Alice Mills , 2001 single work criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , December vol. 11 no. 3 2001; (p. 15-23) Mill's reads Garth Nix's fantasy novel Sabriel using Frued's notion of the 'uncanny' to explore the contradictory and paradoxical use of water as a metaphor for life and death in the novel. Mill's maps out how the novel subverts the typical pattern of the quest narrative in a number of ways, however she argues that while the imagery 'is not reducible to binary opposites', essentially 'the world of Sabriel is morally simple' (p.19). Furthermore, she states that in this novel, the return of the repressed signifies the 'uncanny return of the father' while the underlying pattern is one of 'daughters assuming the father's functions' and as such, the representation of women in the text works to reinforce the 'inherently ancillary role' alloctaed to women in a male-dominated culture. (pp.15,19).
1 A Taste of Venice Alice Mills , 2000 single work short story
— Appears in: Meanjin : Fine Writing & Provocative Ideas , vol. 59 no. 3 2000; (p. 92-96)
1 Writing on the Edge: Gary Crew's Fiction Alice Mills , 1998 single work criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , December vol. 8 no. 3 1998; (p. 25-35) Mills gives an overview of Australian author Gary Crew's work, which she describes as 'characterized by doubt' and offering endings which remain unresolved rather than the formulaic 'happy endings' which permeate conventional children's stories (25). Crew has won many literary awards for his children's fiction, however his stories are decidely ambiguous and post-modern in their 'celebration of doubt' (34), which attracts criticism on the grounds that the texts are too 'difficult and demanding for young children' (25). Mills offers a succinct and insightful discussion which explores how Crew's narratives of child-adolescent maturation play with the conventions of the gothic-horror genre by refusing 'the guarantee of a revelation to come' (34). Mills says 'At his strongest, he brings to the reader's notice the human need to make sense of the world. The power of his fiction derives not from him meeting such needs but from playing upon them' (25).
1 y separately published work icon Favourite Bedtime Stories Alice Mills (editor), New South Wales : Random House Australia , 1998 Z834802 1998 single work children's
1 1 y separately published work icon The Random House Children's Treasury Gift Set Alice Mills (editor), Milsons Point : Random House Australia , 1998 Z834751 1998 selected work poetry children's A selection of nonsense literature, tongue twisters and poems for children.
1 2 y separately published work icon The Random House Children's Treasury : Fairy Tales, Nursery Rhymes and Nonsense Verse Alice Mills (editor), Milsons Point : Random House , 1997 Z1066571 1997 anthology single work short story
1 Separation Anxiety in Three of Gillian Rubinstein's Collaborative Picture Story Books Alice Mills , 1997 single work criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , December vol. 7 no. 3 1997; (p. 5-9)

Mills examines three of Rubinstein's children's books, Keep Me Company (1992), Jake and Pete (1995), and Jake and Pete and the Stray Dogs (1997), in the light of psychiatrist John Bowlby's writing on Attachment Theory and Separation Anxiety, arguing that despite offering a helpful context for reading the texts, 'aspects of the picture story books[s] remain outside his theoretical framework (7). Bowlby is notably silent regarding Freud's Oedipus complex, nor does he 'theorize the body' in any detail and Mills looks at the texts in relation to the gaps between the the two approaches (7). She extends the reading beyond the Bowlbian paradigm for mother-child separation anxiety revealing a much darker message regarding anxiety, loss and death, in the texts, stating that, 'In so far as the books explore a child's separation anxiety by way of animals' troubles, the happy endings are a fragile fiction' (9).

1 Aphrodite in a Blue Dress Alice Mills , 1996 single work criticism
— Appears in: Writing the Australian Child : Texts and Contexts in Fictions for Children 1996; (p. 76-91)
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