AustLit

'This unique book on neurocognitive interpretations of Australian literature covers a wide range of analyses by discussing Australian Literary Studies, Aboriginal literary texts, women writers, ethnic writing, bestsellers, neurodivergence fiction, emerging as well as high profile writers, literary hoaxes and controversies, book culture, LGBTIQA+ authors, to name a few. It eclectically brings together a wide gamut of cognitive concepts and literary genres at the intersection of Australian literary studies and cognitive literary studies in the first single-author volume of its kind. It takes Australian Literary Studies into the age of neuroawareness and provides new pathways in contemporary criticism.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Liborum necesse est se faciat amatorem. Perhaps, as this Latin proverb suggests, it is necessary to fall in love with books, to turn them into lovers. But what happens when this passionate love affair spins out of control? In The Book Thief (2005), Markus Zusak's novel aimed equally at young adult and adult readers, the eponymous protagonist rarely engages with books because they afford stories of enchanting and enchaining interest. Rather, Liesel Meminger seems to hunt and enjoy books for quite different reasons than the delights of storytelling and pure entertainment. I first explore the laws of attraction which make books so beguiling to Liesel, before examining if this impulsive obsession of acquiring books has not become a blatant symptom of bibliomania, and more specifically of bibliokleptomania. After discussing the psychodynamical perception of what is often referred to as book madness, I shall demonstrate these printed works in Markus Zusak's novel are much more than mere storytelling as they fulfil specific functions, all of which challenge the normative way of seeing texts, literary and otherwise.'

Source: Abstract.

'In this paper I argue that Markus Zusak's The Book Thief allows for the personal and collective exculpation of the common or ‘ordinary’ citizens of Germany who lived through the Third Reich. By drawing on the German historian Martin Broszat and his historiographical study of ‘everyday’ life under Nazi rule, I establish that the novel creates a number of contentious themes. First, it suggests that the Nazis were a group who resided on the periphery of German society, and that the rise of Hitler's Third Reich was unpopular among the general German population. Second, while Germans later became victims of Allied bombings and/or Russian invasion, the population was also victim to the nation's political situation. In arguing that German citizens were victims of the Nazis, The Book Thief separates a supposed ‘demonic’ social minority from the ‘everyday’ working class. Depicting the German lower classes as innocent bystanders or victims, the book allows its readers and, in particular, its German readers, to reflect upon this tumultuous historical period with some cultural and social moral fortitude intact. Furthermore, the paper suggests that this novel is just one example of a corpus of Australian texts that have, in recent years, reconfigured traditional literary representations of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust.'

Source: Abstract.