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y separately published work icon Voss : A Novel single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 1957... 1957 Voss : A Novel
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is the story of the secret passion between an explorer and a naïve young woman. Although they have met only a few times, Voss and Laura are joined by overwhelming, obsessive feelings for each other. Voss sets out to cross the continent. As hardships, mutiny and betrayal whittle away his power to endure and to lead, his attachment to Laura gradually increases. Laura, waiting in Sydney, moves through the months of separation as if they were a dream and Voss the only reality.

'From the careful delineation of Victorian society to the sensitive rendering of hidden love to the stark narrative of adventure in the Australian desert, Patrick White's novel is a work of extraordinary power and virtuosity.'

Source: Random House Books (Sighted 21/09/2012)

Exhibitions

6681414
18005741
18005672

Adaptations

y separately published work icon Voss : Opera in Two Acts After the Novel by Patrick White David Malouf , Richard Meale (composer), Grosvenor Place : Australian Music Centre , 1980-1989 Z272889 1980-1989 single work musical theatre opera

Voss was adapted into an opera by author David Malouf and composer Richard Meale. It was first performed by the Australian Opera in Adelaide, March 1986.

Reading Australia

Reading Australia

This work has Reading Australia teaching resources.

Notes

  • Dedication: For Marie d'Estournelles de Constant
  • In a letter to Hu Wenzhong, White refers to a Russian edition, but this has not been traced.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Eyre and Spottiswoode ,
      1957 .
      image of person or book cover 1200495154397096654.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 478p.
      Reprinted: 1962 , 1968
      Note/s:
      • First published 3 December 1957. Reprinted three times in 1958.
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Viking ,
      1957 .
      person or book cover
      Extent: 442p.
      Reprinted: 1974
      Note/s:
      • First published in August 1957. Reprinted twice.
    • Toronto, Ontario,
      c
      Canada,
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Macmillan ,
      1957 .
      image of person or book cover 4641410290431925726.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 442p.
    • Harmondsworth, Middlesex,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Mitcham, Blackburn - Mitcham - Vermont area, Melbourne - East, Melbourne, Victoria,: Penguin ,
      1960 .
      image of person or book cover 8398269839219201875.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online (Modern Classics reprint)
      Extent: 448p.
      Note/s:
      • Reprinted twenty-one times by 1993.
      • Australian issue 1974.
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Avon Books ,
      1975 .
      Extent: 445p.
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Jonathan Cape ,
      1980 .
      Extent: 478p.
      ISBN: 022401773X
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Vintage UK ,
      1994 .
      person or book cover
      Extent: 478p.
      ISBN: 0099324717
    • Sydney, New South Wales,: Vintage Australia , 2012 .
      person or book cover
      Source: Publisher's website
      Extent: 464p.
      Edition info: Vintage Classic edition
      Note/s:
      • Publication date: 01/10/2012
      ISBN: 9781742756882
Alternative title: Voss : Roman
Language: German
    • Reinbek,
      c
      Germany,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Rowohlt ,
      1973 .
      image of person or book cover 181305573260414968.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 450p.
      ISBN: 3499117606
    • Leipzig,
      c
      Germany,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Reclam ,
      1987 .
      person or book cover
      Extent: 470p.
      ISBN: 3379000892

Other Formats

  • Also braille and sound recording.

Works about this Work

Literary Sources of Patrick White’s Voss : A House Is Built and Think of Stephen Margaret Harris , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 2 May vol. 38 no. 1 2023;

'Many literary sources have been suggested for Patrick White’s fifth novel, Voss, ranging from the surreal symbolism of Rimbaud’s poetry, to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. White himself explicitly acknowledged the influence of two works by Australian women writers in his depiction of colonial society: Ruth Bedford’s family history, Think of Stephen: A Family Chronicle (1954), and M. Barnard Eldershaw’s prizewinning novel A House is Built (1929). Bedford, a granddaughter of Sir Alfred Stephen, Chief Justice of New South Wales from 1844 to 1873, drew on family papers to give a detailed account of the social life of the elite of Sydney from the 1840s to 1880s, commenting on the demands of household management on the women as well as describing picnics, balls, and dinners. Barnard Eldershaw absorbed references to historical events such as the gold rushes and Sydney landmarks like the convict-built Barracks and St Andrew’s Cathedral into their novel. They provide ample detail of architecture, furniture, and clothing in descriptions of the social and domestic life of the Hyde family and associates: sewing, paying formal calls, hosting dinners, concert- and theatregoing. There are resemblances with Voss’s Bonner family, including structural similarities in the contrast of the two principal female characters and their fates. This discussion traces the influence of these works of Bedford and Barnard Eldershaw in Voss.' (Publication abstract)   

I'll Show You Love In a Handful of Dust Samuel J. Cox , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , December vol. 22 no. 2 2022;
'This article argues the final and arguably most permeable frontier Patrick White’s Voss sets out across is the material. Informed by the environmental and material turn in the humanities and turning away from the purely psychological and ‘country of the mind’ readings of White’s novel, I explore Voss’s engagement with various non-realist traditions to open questions on how literature and the text might materialise new sources of intimacy and interconnection with the mineral realm. Tracking a journey through stone and rock to dust, I connect Voss’s material poetics to larger themes and the wider question of the texts relationship to the Australian environment. I argue that in White’s novel a confrontation occurs between an inherited European literary aesthetics, connected to humanist ideals, and the dry and uniquely Australian material environments of the interior. Whereas colonial Sydney seeks stability and impermeability through their relation to stone and the material world, the journey inland will fracture and fissure established forms. The ultimate triumph of Voss’s material poetics, manifested largely through Laura, is to discover not simply fear in a handful of dust, as in T.S. Eliot’s famous line from The Waste Land, but love.' (Publication abstract)
‘The Kingdom of Dust’ : Voss as Planetary Epic Samuel J. Cox , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 11 December vol. 37 no. 3 2022;

'Embracing the environmental, eco-materialist and planetary turn in the humanities, prompted by the Anthropocene, this paper offers a reading of Voss as an environmental and planetary epic. The unique environmental qualities of Patrick White’s writing, and his later-life activism, have perhaps suffered due to a focus on the psychological and spiritual aspects of his biography. Reading Voss as a journey ‘into the dust’ (213), away from colonial Sydney, and associated Eurocentric forms, this paper argues that the very material and elemental nature of the Australian environment emerges as an agentive and subversive presence, suggested by the insidiously small, yet itinerant dust. White’s journey inland, into the ‘kingdom of dust’ (297), shatters, fragments, and erodes the stable, the terran and the fixed, but through that very reduction, the story becomes engrained in elemental and planetary forces. The disruptive aesthetics, connected to the drying of the material environment and the desert, immerses the reader in an errant environment in motion. This paper argues that the epic qualities of the story are imparted through this very contact with the environment, the elemental and the planetary, positioning Voss as a planetary epic.' (Publication abstract) 

Patrick White’s Studies for Voss Margaret Harris , Elizabeth Webby , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 30 September vol. 37 no. 2 2022;

'One of Patrick White’s working notebooks, acquired by the National Library of Australia in 2006, is almost exclusively devoted to material related to his breakthrough novel Voss (1957), which marks a new departure in his career. It is a historical novel set in Australia’s colonial period, though with thematic connections to White’s earlier works. Close attention to Notebook 5 shows how extensively White researched its historical background and how he absorbed that research, sometimes transposing details verbatim into Voss. While certain material deals with Ludwig Leichhardt and his expeditions into the interior (for example Daniel Bunce’s Travels with Dr Leichhardt in Australia [1859] and Alec H. Chisholm’s Strange New World [1941]), it is apparent that White is more interested in details of Leichhardt’s various journeys than in debates about the man himself. He read other explorers, notably Edward John Eyre, and settlers of whom John Dunmore Lang is prominent, his notes revealing a particular interest in Aboriginal people. A second strand of White’s research informs those sections of Voss set in Sydney in the 1840s, and a third involves theological and philosophical speculations about the nature of faith that are reflected in the musings of Laura Trevelyan and others. In addition, there are fragments of draft of both Voss and Riders in the Chariot (1961), indicating that White was already incubating the later novel as he was completing Voss. It appears too that he undertook major restructuring of Voss at a late stage.' (Introduction)

Neo-Victorianism, Settler (post)Colonialism and Domesticity in Patrick White’s Voss Mariadele Boccardi , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Commonwealth Literature , June vol. 57 no. 2 2022; (p. 261–275)

'This article reads Patrick White’s 1957 novel Voss as an early example of Neo-Victorian fiction, a relatively recent but critically well-established category of postwar and contemporary fiction that has not yet been deployed with reference to Voss. I argue that, while seemingly adopting the elements of Australian narratives of exploration and settlement, White’s Neo-Victorian approach in fact contests these narratives, which began to emerge in the nineteenth century that forms the setting of the novel and were still current in the mid-twentieth century when it was written. In so doing, Voss exposes the tensions and contradictions inherent in settler narratives more generally and shows their reliance on social, cultural, and textual models imported from Britain, primary among them rural domesticity and the pastoral. My reading of Voss challenges existing scholarship on White’s novel, which tends to see Voss either as a contribution to the discourse of Australian national identity or as a work interested in ahistorical, mythological self-realization for the two protagonists, Ulrich Voss and Laura Trevelyan.' (Publication abstract)

[Review] Voss Peter Boxall , 2006 single work review
— Appears in: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die 2006; (p. 509)

— Review of Voss : A Novel Patrick White , 1957 single work novel
The Books That Made Us 1995 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 19-20 August 1995; (p. rev 1-2)

— Review of My Brother Jack : A Novel George Johnston , 1964 single work novel ; The Lucky Country Donald Horne , 1964 single work non-fiction ; Joe Wilson and His Mates Henry Lawson , 1901 selected work short story ; My Brilliant Career Miles Franklin , 1901 single work novel ; Monkey Grip Helen Garner , 1977 single work novel ; Voss : A Novel Patrick White , 1957 single work novel ; The Fortunes of Richard Mahony Henry Handel Richardson , 1917 single work novel
Novelists and Conventions Vincent Buckley , 1958 single work review
— Appears in: Prospect , June vol. [1] no. 1 1958; (p. 21-22)

— Review of Seedtime Vance Palmer , 1957 single work novel ; Voss : A Novel Patrick White , 1957 single work novel
'Seedtime' and 'Voss' Marjorie Barnard , 1958 single work review
— Appears in: Meanjin , Autumn vol. 17 no. 1 1958; (p. 94-100)

— Review of Seedtime Vance Palmer , 1957 single work novel ; Voss : A Novel Patrick White , 1957 single work novel
[Review] Voss 1957 single work review
— Appears in: The Times Literary Supplement , 13 December 1957; (p. 753)

— Review of Voss : A Novel Patrick White , 1957 single work novel
The Marriage of the Mind and the Cosmos in Patrick White's Voss : An Indian Perspective K. Chellappan , 2002 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Literary Criterion , vol. 37 no. 2 2002; (p. 44-53)
Inner Struggles Thomas Keneally , 2002-2003 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Bulletin , 17 December-14 January vol. 120 no. 6355 2002-2003; (p. 38-39)
Paradoxes of Non- Existence : Questions of Time, Metaphor and the Materialities of Cultural Traditions in Wilson Harris's Discussions of Australian Literary Texts Brigitta Olubas , 2002 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Cultural History , no. 21 2002; (p. 81-88, notes 122)
Olubas examines the way in which Caribbean writer Wilson Harris's 'account of national traditions and of the national and cultural provenances and imaginitive inheritances of particular writers directs attention ... toward broader, unexpected imaginitive, aesthetic and representational traditions, explicitly colonial, often violent, which yet enhance our readings of the complex high points of national literary traditions and figures ... [and] presents us with other ways to take up the relations between texts, within as well as across (national) cultural traditions' (p. 88).
Containing Continents: The Moralized Landscapes of Conrad, Greene, White and Harris Mark Williams , 1985 single work criticism
— Appears in: Kunapipi , vol. 7 no. 1 1985; (p. 34-45)
y separately published work icon Postcolonial Literature from Three Continents : Tutuola, H. D., Ellison, and White Judith L. Tabron , New York (City) : Peter Lang , 2003 Z1061297 2003 multi chapter work criticism Publisher's abstract: 'How can we read literatures from other cultures? The metaphors of fractal geometry can help us think about the complexity of the cultural situation of a text or an author. Postcolonial Literature from Three Continents identifies four primary themes common to postcolonial texts - technology, memory, language, and geography - and examines them in relationship to four texts from Nigeria, the United States, and Australia so that we see both the colonized and colonizing positions of these works. The quartet of texts are Amos Tutola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard, H. D.'s Helen in Egypt , Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Patrick White's Voss.'
Last amended 29 Aug 2022 16:18:35
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