AustLit

'This chapter will build on recent work by Elizabeth McMahon and Christos Tsiolkas to situate Australia’s first Nobel Prize winner as a queer modernist with his own distinct political valence. Written by the foremost Chinese scholar of Australian literature, Chen Hong, this chapter explores Whites epochal career. It covers White’s novelistic oeuvre from The Aunt’s Story (1948) through to his late queer masterpiece, The Twyborn Affair (1979).' (Publication abstract)

'Patrick White’s support for green issues, especially in his later life, is well documented; however, relatively little attention has been paid to date to the planetary perspective of his fiction which, as Andrew McCann suggests, hints at “the possibility of a renewed relationship to the ‘earth’ ”. Focusing on what is generally considered to be his “greenest” novel, The Tree of Man, and adopting a broadly eco-materialist approach, this article assesses White’s work in the wake of the recent ecological and planetary turns. What difference does it make to position White, not as a national or an international writer, but as a planetary writer?And what if White’s work, usually looked at for the insights it provides into human subjects and subjectivities, were to be looked at instead in relation to what Jane Bennett calls “the material agency or effectivity of nonhuman or not-quite-human things”?' (Publication abstract)

'In the late 1980s, as the Canadian scholar Robert David Stacey remarks, 'talk of postmodernism was everywhere' (2010, xii). Yet postmodernism certainly took regional forms. Novelists in Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific briefly and tentatively identified under the banner of the postmodern, while writers in Canada took up the cause and title of the postmodern more visibly and actively.'