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Susan Sheridan Susan Sheridan i(A20554 works by) (a.k.a. Susan Higgins; Sue Sheridan)
Born: Established: 1944 Sydney, New South Wales, ;
Gender: Female
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BiographyHistory

'Susan Sheridan taught in Women's Studies at Flinders University until her retirement in 2006. She convened the 'Feminism and the Humanities' year at the ANU Humanities Research Centre in 1986 and was foundation Reviews Editor of Australian Feminist Studies (1985-2005). Her books include Christina Stead (Harvester (1988), Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women's Writing 1880s to 1930s (Allen & Unwin, 1995), Who Was That Woman? The Australian Women's Weekly in the Postwar Years (UNSW Press, 2002) and Nine Lives: Postwar women writers making their mark (University of Queensland Press, 2011); as editor, Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism (Verso, 1988), Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s (Allen & Unwin 1993, with Sue Rowley and Susan Magarey) and Thea Astley's Fictional Worlds (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006, with Paul Genoni). Susan has been a judge on the Miles Franklin Literary Award. '(Source: The Australian Academy of the Humanities website)

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon The Fiction of Thea Astley Amherst : Cambria Press , 2016 9631871 2016 multi chapter work criticism

'Thea Astley is one of the outstanding Australian fiction writers of the twentieth century. Four of her novels, including her last, Drylands (1999), won the prestigious Miles Franklin prize, and she was awarded numerous literary and civic honors during her lifetime. Always a writer who avoided solemnity and undercut her characters' claims to heroism of any kind, she reveled in the new-found capacity to mock male pretension and assert female rebellion. Perhaps because of this, her late masterpieces have not yet had the proper recognition that is due to them. This book examines Astley's works and reinforces her standing as a major novelist. The main organizing principle in this study of Astley's fiction is her representation of place and power relations, and the innovative work of historicizing place. Continuing threads from chapter to chapter include the modes of irony, humor, and satire; her varying use of point of view; and her characteristic compression of language and narrative. Descriptive accounts of the novels are offered to raise broader issues of interpretation. Over the period 1986 to 1999 she produced six major works which amply demonstrate her capacity to bring together a critical exploration of patriarchal power relations and a postcolonial perspective on race relations. Also important in her later stories is her satire on the worship of unbridled 'development' which dominated Australian economic and social life in this period, especially in Queensland. The currency of such political and moral issues frames her work, yet her lively engagement with them was never merely topical, but grew out of that acute yet compassionate consciousness of human weakness, formed by her Catholic upbringing, and the darkly comic sensibility draws all these elements into relationship in Astley's art. This book, which is in the Cambria Australian Literature Series (general editor: Susan Lever; see http: //www.cambriapress.com/Austlit-series) will encourage readers familiar with Astley's work to revisit it and reconsider her lifelong achievement, and it will also lead a whole new generation of readers to enter her imaginative world, to be moved and informed by it.' (Publication summary)

2016 shortlisted ASAL Awards Walter McRae Russell Award
y separately published work icon Christina Stead Bloomington : Indiana University Press , 1988 Z87041 1988 single work criticism biography
1989 winner ASAL Awards Walter McRae Russell Award
Last amended 11 Apr 2018 16:42:41
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