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Brigid Rooney Brigid Rooney i(A35625 works by)
Born: Established: 1956 Sydney, New South Wales, ;
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 In A Kind of Confession, Alex Miller Drops the ‘Mask of Fiction’ to Reveal the Intricate Depths of a Writing Life Brigid Rooney , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 12 December 2023;

— Review of A Kind of Confession : The Writer's Private World Alex Miller , 2023 single work autobiography

'Alex Miller’s A Kind of Confession is subtitled “the writer’s private world”. It is comprised of excerpts from his notebooks, diaries and selected letters. Spanning 1961 to 2023, these documents sit at a small but decisive distance from the author, having been curated by his wife, Stephanie Miller.' (Introduction)

1 Helen Garner’s House of Fiction Brigid Rooney , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel 2023; (p. 163-177)

'This chapter considers Helen Garners fiction, assessing the evolution of her work from the scandalous diary-like immediacy of the Monkey Grip (1977) through to her minimalist masterpiece The Children’s Bach (1984). Throughout, it considers the house as a core spatial configuration that changes across Garner’s work.' (Publication abstract)

1 Homemade and Cosmopolitan, the Idiosyncratic Writing of Gerald Murnane Continues to Attract Devotees Brigid Rooney , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 7 September 2023;

— Review of Murnane Emmett Stinson , 2023 single work biography
1 Review of Last Letter to a Reader : Essays, by Gerald Murnane Brigid Rooney , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 2 May vol. 38 no. 1 2023;

— Review of Last Letter to a Reader Gerald Murnane , 2021 selected work criticism essay
'This summer, like others before it, I embarked on a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. It is an odd way to spend time, with satisfactions hard to explain. Is it not the ultimate waste of time? Yet the pointlessness of this activity – its lack of utility – is one of its pleasures. There is, of course, pleasure to be had in slow engagement with the puzzle’s image (I prefer some artwork or other), in paying attention to the picture’s finer calibrations of colour and form and in the slow, sometimes quickening pace of joining up pieces. The pleasure of connection is sweetened by the knowledge that in its solution the puzzle serves no purpose, and that it will be disassembled and put away. There is pleasure, there is flow, there is a type of reward, but is there meaning? What is the use? Does meaning issue from the search for that especially elusive piece of the puzzle, or through the alertness one cultivates for what Gerald Murnane calls, in another context, ‘the detail that winks’?' (Introduction)    
1 Unsettling Archive : Suburbs in Australian Fiction Brigid Rooney , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel 2023;
1 Silent Propinquities : Literary Selfhood and Modernity in A Guide to Berlin Brigid Rooney , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: Inner and Outer Worlds : Gail Jones' Fiction 2022;
1 Stream System, Salient Image and Feeling : Between Barley Patch and Inland Brigid Rooney , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Gerald Murnane : Another World in This One 2020; (p. 63-84)

'In 1988, the year that saw publication of Inland, Gerald Murnane gave a talk to an audience at La Trobe University that was subsequently published as “Stream System”.² The talk opened with a seemingly factual account of its author’s morning walk from his nearby suburban home to the Bundoora campus:

'This morning, in order to reach the place where I am now, I went a little out of my way. I took the shortest route from my house to the place that you people probably know as SOUTH ENTRY. That is to say, I walked from the front gate of of my house due west and downhill to Salt Creek then uphill and still due west from Salt Creek to the watershed between Salt Creek and a nameless creek that runs into Darebin Creek. When I reached the high ground that drains into the nameless creek, I walked north-west until I was standing about thirty metres south-east of the place that is denoted on Page 66A of Edition 18 of the Melway Street Directory of Greater Melbourne by the words STREAM SYSTEM.' (Introduction)

1 4 y separately published work icon Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity Brigid Rooney , London : Anthem Press , 2018 15450833 2018 multi chapter work criticism

'‘Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity’ investigates the interaction between suburbs and suburbia in a century-long series of Australian novels. It puts the often trenchantly anti-suburban rhetoric of Australian fiction in dialogue with its evocative and imaginative rendering of suburban place and time.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

1 Interior History, Tempered Selves : David Malouf, Modernism and Imaginative Possession Brigid Rooney , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism : Anglophone Literature, 1950 to the Present 2018; (p. 258-276)
1 'White, Fierce, Shocked, Tearless' : The Watch Tower and the Electric Interior Brigid Rooney , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Elizabeth Harrower : Critical Essays 2017; (p. 86-100)
In Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower (1966), Clare Vaizey visits a doctor in Sydney’s Macquarie Street to see about an allergic rash on her neck. She assures the doctor that the rash appears nowhere else on her body and yet – ominously – he requires her to take off all her clothes. She obeys. The doctor’s motives are opaque, his expression impassive, his manner clinical. His tenth-floor surgery sits high in a cliff-like row of buildings, its windows staring down on the harbour and the “barbered greenness” of the Botanical Gardens.2 The doctor’s office resembles, it seems, a “watch tower”. It is uncertain whether the surgery is a malignant space of punishing surveillance or benign, illuminating perspective. The view the surgery commands recalls the watch tower that is Clare’s own suburban bedroom in the Neutral Bay house where she lives with her sister Laura, and with Laura’s husband, Felix Shaw, the novel’s Bluebeard. With its view of the world outside, of glittering blue harbour and suburban streets, Clare’s bedroom is, on the one hand, a space of retreat from the more threatening communal areas of the Shaw house. On the other hand, the bedroom is uneasy, occupied territory; it is cheerless, blank and exposed, clinical and impersonal like a doctor’s surgery. In both locations Clare must submit to the intrusive gaze of a dominant male figure. Naked but for her high heels, Clare gazes upon the dazzling landscape of garden and harbour while the doctor circles her body. She practises detachment, shielding her private self as her pearly white flesh is exposed. She maintains composure under inspection. But at the moment of parting, an intense, wordless exchange takes place, the import of which is not directly stated: the doctor looks at Clare deeply and she returns his gaze. In that moment, “an invisible rocket sped between them, rocked the room, shocking and enlightening her to the very tips of her high-heeled shoes” (Introduction)
1 The Novel in Australia from the 1950s Brigid Rooney , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Oxford History of the Novel in English : The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific Since 1950 2017; (p. 81-96)
1 Christina Stead’s 'Kelly File' : Politics, Possession and the Writing of Cotters’ England Brigid Rooney , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 8 December vol. 31 no. 6 2016;

'Critics who value Christina Stead’s radical politics often find the passionate excess and the spectral and ambiguous qualities that attend her fiction harder to explain. The political dimensions of Stead’s fiction are further complicated by a scene of writing – most dramatically described in Rowley’s 1993 biography – in which the author draws her material from the lives of close family and friends. The problem is framed in this paper as follows: how can qualities of excess, ambiguity and desire in Stead’s fiction (intimately connected to this scene of writing) be understood in relation to its politics? A substantial notebook acquired in 2007 by the National Library of Australia, dated from mid 1949 to early 1950 and internally designated as the ‘Kelly file’, illuminates Stead’s ten-month process of documenting, researching and transforming raw materials for the novel that was eventually published as Cotters’ England (1967). The notebook sheds new light on Stead’s creative process as one that involved, in Susan Lever’s phrase, ‘living inside the fictions she was making’ (Lever 2003). Patiently observing and capturing her characters, Stead allowed herself to be caught up with them. This paper identifies Stead’s notion of ‘possession’, a doubled and spectral dynamic, as integral to her creative modus operandi. On the one hand this involves the writer in taking possession by means of naturalist observation and classification, and on the other hand it entails being possessed. This is a dynamic that thrives on projection, paranoia, and the willed forgetting of investments. Stead’s theory of ‘spectral England’ – her own political explanation of what ails England – emerges from deep inside a creative process that returns to haunt the finished novel.'

Source: Abstract.

1 Introduction Brigid Rooney , Fiona Morrison , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 8 December vol. 31 no. 6 2016;
1 The View from Above from Below : Novel, Suburb, Cosmos Brigid Rooney , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , November no. 60 2016;
1 'Time and Its Fellow Conspirator Space' : Patrick White's A Fringe of Leaves Brigid Rooney , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: Patrick White beyond the Grave : New Critical Perspectives 2015; (p. 163-177)
'...Brigid Rooney explores what she refers to as the 'chronotopic system' of the narative in White's A Fringe of Leaves (1976). (Introduction 9)
1 Brigid Rooney, of David Carter, Always Almost Modern: Australian Print Cultures and Modernity Brigid Rooney , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 75 no. 1 2015; (p. 174-181)

— Review of Always Almost Modern : Australian Print Cultures and Modernity David Carter , 2013 multi chapter work criticism
1 Serial Cities : Australian Literary Cities and the Rhetoric of Scale Brigid Rooney , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Cultural Studies Review , March vol. 21 no. 1 2015; (p. 262–282)

— Review of Cities 2009 series - publisher prose
1 Introduction : Australian Literature / World Literature : Borders, Skins, Mappings Brigid Rooney , Brigitta Olubas , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 15 no. 3 2015;

The essays in this issue of JASAL were developed from selected papers presented at the 2014 annual ASAL conference ‘Worlds Within’ held at the University of Sydney.

1 'No-one Had Thought of Looking Close to Home' : Reading the Province in The Bay of Noon Brigid Rooney , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: Shirley Hazzard : New Critical Essays 2014; (p. 41-54)
1 From the Sublime to the Uncanny in Tim Winton’s Breath Brigid Rooney , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: Tim Winton : Critical Essays 2014; (p. 241-262)

In this essay, Brigid Rooney 'takes up the questions of sublimity - an the literary limits of representing it' - in Tim Winton's Breath. (8)

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