'This article examines ways in which the fiction of the acclaimed Australian writer Amy Witting, dubbed Australia’s Chekov and whom Helen Garner acknowledged as her ‘literary mother,’ interrogates the disempowerment of women in the domestic sphere, asserting that the home is a contested space and conflicted place for women. Witting subverts the notion that a ‘woman’s place is in the home’ by demonstrating that many

women are actually displaced and dispossessed in the inhibiting domestic spaces that are their ‘homes.’ In her fiction, women are isolated and excluded because of gender inequity

in regard to women’s rights and duties in the domestic sphere. Women are also marginalised in regard to inadequate financial rewards for domestic productivity and are affected by circumstances underpinned by discourses of poverty, class conflict and domestic violence. Witting asserts that the disempowerment of women in the home often leads to women appropriating masculinist attitudes and behaviours of oppression towards other women less powerful than themselves. In this article, these concepts are explored with close reference to five of Witting’s novels and interviews conducted with the author.' (Author's abstract)

'The treatment of psychological disorders of all kinds and, more largely, of the deterioration of the mind, gradually made its mark in Australian novels in the early 1970s and gave rise to a series of books concerned with mental health issues. The six narratives I have selected for this study-David Ireland's The Flesheaters (1972), Walter Adamson's The Institution (1976), Peter Kocan's two you-narration novellas The Treatment (1980) and The Cure (1983), Carmel Bird's The White Garden (1995), and Amy Witting's Isobela on the Way to the Corner Shop (1999)-all partake of this new trend. This belated literary awakening to insanity is all the stranger seeing that creativity and madness have often been paired, both being particularly apt at articulating the relationship between freedom and constraint, mental representation and reality, the individual and society.' (Author's introduction)