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Issue Details: First known date: 1979... 1979 The Novelist and the New World : Patrick White's "Voss"
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

The story of Voss has epical implications, is ‘doctrinal to the nation.’ Voss is a public man, his task being to discover and open up for the whole people the meaning of this new continent to which he is drawn. Like Moby-Dick and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with which it challenges comparison in the American tradition, Voss is about the search for new kinds of value, about the tension between the individual will and the collective order. Like these works, the story of Voss arises from an experience of ‘imaginative desocialization,’ the experience from which Quentin Anderson argues, the heroic quest of the new world takes its beginning. Voss is an outsider, alienated from the world from which he came as well as in the new world society where he feels himself awkward, unable to accommodate himself. He is drawn to Australia as if to his destiny, to prove possibilities within himself that depend not on the old world question, ‘what role shall I be given?’ but on the new world question, ‘what world am I to possess.’ (Extract from article.)

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Works about this Work

Mediation at Work : Tim Winton's Fiction in Italian Denise Maree Formica , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Long Paddock , vol. 71 no. 1 2011;
'Australian literary production reflects those nation-specific values and discourses that have been historically constrained and enabled by a complex system of institutions, individuals, practices and values. However, upon entering a foreign literary market through translation, Australian literary narratives are subjected to further constraints imposed by similar agencies within that culture which mediate the processes of selection, translation and critical reception. My analysis of Tim Winton's Dirt Music (2001) enables a greater understanding of how the writer's use of landscape positions him within that post-Romantic tradition of Australian literature that incorporates major Australian writers of prose and poetry such as Randolph Stow, Patrick White, Judith Wright and Les Murray...' (Author's introduction p. 1)
Mediation at Work : Tim Winton's Fiction in Italian Denise Maree Formica , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Long Paddock , vol. 71 no. 1 2011;
'Australian literary production reflects those nation-specific values and discourses that have been historically constrained and enabled by a complex system of institutions, individuals, practices and values. However, upon entering a foreign literary market through translation, Australian literary narratives are subjected to further constraints imposed by similar agencies within that culture which mediate the processes of selection, translation and critical reception. My analysis of Tim Winton's Dirt Music (2001) enables a greater understanding of how the writer's use of landscape positions him within that post-Romantic tradition of Australian literature that incorporates major Australian writers of prose and poetry such as Randolph Stow, Patrick White, Judith Wright and Les Murray...' (Author's introduction p. 1)
Last amended 13 Dec 2013 08:11:33
169-185 The Novelist and the New World : Patrick White's "Voss"small AustLit logo Texas Studies in Literature and Language
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