AustLit

Focusing on Carey's and Drewe's representations of the Ned Kelly legend, the article explores the issues of memory, cultural myths and postcolonial fiction. Huggan argues that the two novels 'illustrate the importance of the literary text in structuring the individual/collective memory process', drawing attention to the ways in which memory is dependent on metaphor, particularly metaphors of the body, to actualise remembered experience. Both works 'are postcolonial renderings, not just of one of Australia's most powerful national narratives, but also one of its most enduring and yet paradoxiacally amnesiac cultural myths. In remembering Ned Kelly, both writers draw attention to alternative histories inscribed upon the wild colonial body, through which tha nation's chequered past can be creatively transformed and its present critically reassessed.' The article concludes with reflections on the malleability and current fashionability of the Kelly legend, assessing its implications for 'a Wester ex-settler society whose own thriving memory industry bears so many of the contradictory signs of the nation's colonial past'.

In paying tribute to Dorothy Green, Sheridan recalls the generation of women writers and artists who emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, their social visions and their contributions to progressive cultural politics and artistic achievements during the Cold War years.

Discusses the representation of feminist activism in some contemporary women's autobiographies, focussing on Susan Ryan's Catching the Waves (1999), Wendy McCarthy's Don't Fence Me In (2000), and Anne Summer's Ducks on the Pond (1999). The article concludes with a ficto-critical piece of experimental autobiography, a 'brief, episodic, fragmentary autograph of soundtracks and wordtracks'.

An overview of recent poetry and prose of Asian-Australian writers as they perform an artistic 'about-face' to reflect on racialised depictions of minority ethnicities.

Uses John Morrison's work as an exemplary case for examining the British dissenting tradition in shaping Australian radicalism. Argues that the strength of the reception of Morrison's writing in Australia as contributing to the tradition of radical nationalism in which he wrote shows that this tradition, like the Labor movement to which it was allied, owed much to British working-class Protestantism and its sense of duty, solidarity and egalitarianism.

Goodwin's investigation of Kendall's religious persuations takes as a starting point a suggestion by Douglas Sladen (in A Century of Australian Song,1888) that Kendall was something of an outsider in social and literary circles in so far as he was a Roman Catholic 'in a secular, or at best an undenominational community'. The article examines the available evidence on Kendall's religion and the question whether being a Catholic at the time was really something of a social liability, and discusses contemporary social attitudes towards religious groups, particularly Catholicism. The author concludes that Sladen was wrong in considering Kendall to be a Catholic, and that, on the whole, Sydney society at the time was not intolerant of Catholics but was rather a society increasingly tolerant of all religious differences, including secularism and irreligion.

The article discusses the critical reception of the work of Brian Castro, especially the responses to his use of critical theory in his novels. In analysing theory and authority in Castro's novel Double-Wolf, Barker discovers a shift in his approach to theory and argues that it is Double-Wolf which, unlike the earlier novels, gives Freud and Freudian theory a leading role and foregrounds theory in an entirely different way from his other novels. She discusses these and other issues with Brian Castro in an interview published in the same issue of Australian Literary Studies.