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'In this, the first collection of ecocritical essays devoted to Australian contexts and their writers, Australian and US scholars explore the transliteration of land and sea through the works of Australian authors and through their own experiences. The littoral zone is the starting point in this fresh approach to reading literature organised around the natural environment - rainforest, desert, mountains, coast, islands, Antarctica. There's the beach, where sexual and spiritual crises occur; the Western Australian wheatbelt; deserts, camel trekking, and the transformation of a salt flat into an inland island; New Age literature that 'appropriates' Aboriginal culture as the healing poultice for an ailing West; a re-examination of pastoralism; an inquiry into whether Judith Wright's work can "persuade us to rejoice" in the world; the Limestone Plains, home of the bush capital and the bogong moth; tropical North Queensland; national parks where "the mountains meet the sea"; temperate islands, with their history of sealing, Soldier Settlement, and sea country pastoral; and Antarctica, where a utopian vision gives way to an emphasis on its 'timeless' icescape as minimalist backdrop for human dramas. The author-terrain includes poets, playwrights, novelists, and non-fiction writers across the range of contexts constituting the littoral zone of 'Australia'.'
Source: Rodopi website, http://www.rodopi.nl
Sighted: 28/08/2007
Notes
-
Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
* Contents derived from the
Amsterdam,
c
Netherlands,c
Western Europe,
Europe,:Rodopi
, 2007 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.-
A Beach Somewhere : The Australian Littoral Imagination at Play,
single work
criticism
(p. 31-44)A remarkable array of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Australian novelists and short story writers have presented images of West Australian beaches and coastlines. These authors include Robert Drewe, Jack Davis, Randolph Stow, Peter Cowan, Dorothy Hewett, and Tim Winton. Their human dramas have a peculiar poignancy when played out against the natural elements of these Western coasts. Sexual, emotional, or spiritual crises occur in maritime settings that both enhance their memorability and reveal humanity's fragile hold on the continent. (abstract taken from The Littoral Zone)
-
The Shadow on the Field : Literature and Ecology in the Western Australian Wheatbelt,
single work
criticism
(p. 45-69)Satellite images show a sharp line marking the end (or beginning) of the country cleared for farming in south-western Australia. It is the most visible clearance line on the planet and demarcates an area the size of Scotland from which, in the space of two generations, the native vegetation was almost entirely stripped. This chapter attempts to trace this far-reaching ecological event in the creative literatures of those generations, focussing on the inter-war years. (abstract taken from The Littoral Zone)
-
Literature in the Arid Zone,
single work
criticism
(p. 70-92)This chapter surveys and assesses from an ecocentric perspective some representative literary portrayals of the Australian deserts. Generally, it contrasts works that portray the desert as an alien, hostile, and undifferentiated void with works that recognise and value the biological particularities of specific desert places. It explores the literature of three dominant cultural orientations to the deserts: pastoralism, mining, and traversal. It concludes with a consideration of several multi-voiced and/or multi-genred bioregionally informed works that suggests fruitful directions for more ecocentric literary approaches. (abstract taken from The Littoral Zone)
-
Under the Mountains and Beside a Creek : Robert Gray and the Shepherding of Antipodean Being,
single work
criticism
(p. 123-143)This chapter explores the agricultural and literary metaphors of pastoralism; it takes a traditional ecocritical approach, focussing on how the land has affected the poet and his writing. In Australia, whose economy has so long depended on the pastoral industry, there has developed a different kind of pastoral poetry, exemplified by the poetry of Robert Gray. Drawing on his experience of the North Coat of New South Wales, Grays poetry has matured as he has become an exemplar of what Martin Heidegger terms the 'shepherd of being'. from The Littoral Zone.
-
The Poetry of Judith Wright and Ways of Rejoicing in the World,
single work
criticism
(p. 145-152)Poetry, as W. H. Auden said, 'makes nothing happen'. But it can alter our ways of seeing and thus of being in the world. The poetry of Judith Wright, for example, can 'persuade us to rejoice' in the world - another task of poetry as Auden sees it - thus helping us to fulfil the essential task of people in a relatively new settler society like Australia to learn to dwell in rather than merely build on the land. From the beginning of her career she set herself to this task, challenging the 'masculine' separation of self and world to explore a deeper 'feminine' relationship with it, setting the self within the larger life of the universe and celebrating its beauty and terror.
-
Ecopoetics of the Limestone Plains,
single work
criticism
(p. 153-175)
The Limestone Plains is the name given by British explorers in the 1820s to the area in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, where the city of Canberra would later be built. Watered by the Molonglo, a tributary of the Murrumbidgee, and ringed by wooded hills, this area was a significant meeting place of several Aboriginal tribes, whose fire-stick farming practices had shaped its flora and fauna over the millennia. In the nineteenth century, the Canberra area provided a living for pastoralists and selectors, whose activities altered the local ecology and had a devastating impact on Indigenous people. The city that was founded on the Limestone Plains in 1913 in turn displaced this rural way of life, although remnants of pastoralism persisted beyond the urban fringe into the twenty-first century. Canberra's 'bush capital' was conceived as a city in and of the landscape, and it remains a place where town and country interpenetrate to a remarkable degree. As well as providing something of a haven for wildlife, Canberra and its surrounds have also nurtured numerous writers. In this essay, I will investigate the ways in which explorers and settlers construed the Limestone Plains as a locus of pastoral dwelling, before proceeding to consider how some more recent writers have responded to this place in literary form by attending to the more-than-human world that persists both within and beyond the city. (from The Littoral Zone)
-
Hugging the Shore : The Green Mountains of South-East Queensland,
single work
criticism
(p. 176-197)Extrapolating from their observations of the relationship between the Blue Mountains and the New South Wales coastline, David Foster and Martin Thomas have concluded that the sea and the mountains represent a 'fundamental divide in the mental geography of Australia'. The south-east Queensland coast presents a different experience of the relationship between sea and mountains. Here, from northern New South Wales to Noosa, north of Brisbane, the mountains, clearly visible from ocean, bay, and shore, are an intrinsic part of the coastal experience. This chapter looks at some writing about two of the coastal mountains with substantial national park areas: Lamington and Tamborine. It considers how writing about these areas reflects on the process of engagement with the natural world, the process by which settlers become dwellers, and the particular understanding of our place in the world that can evolve out of the experience of 'the frontiers between the wild and the cultivated'. (from The Littoral Zone)
- Tales of the Austral Tropics : North Queensland in Australian Literature, single work criticism (p. 199-218)
-
Islands,
single work
criticism
(p. 219-260)This chapter investigates the impact of literary tropes on island topography. The survey approach of island literature is abandoned in favour of ecocritical praxis, examining instead the literature of selected temperate islands (with populations varying from 2 to 20,000). Cattle farming, ideological disjunction, and mortality are explored in two settler autobiographies set in 'paradise' (Three Hummock Island); 'descent with modification' is traced in the text and the farming practices (sealing, Soldier Settlement pastoral, and salvage) in a work of fiction based in 'Eden' (King Island); and in the final work (indigenous autobiography and myth set on North Stradbroke Island), the politics of the 'land ethic' and land rights confront a sea country pastoral. (from The Littoral Zone)
-
'A Place of Ideals in Conflict' : Images of Antarctica in Australian Literature,
single work
criticism
(p. 261-290)This chapter examines Australian literature (poetry, fiction, and plays) dealing with Antarctica, focussing on each text's engagement with the Antarctic environment and the debates surrounding it. Beginning with two late nineteenth-century Antarctic utopias, the survey moves through the work of well-known writers such as Douglas Stewart and Thomas Keneally in the mid-century to more recent writing by Dorothy Porter, Les Murray, Caroline Caddy, and others. Less familiar material, such as poetry by Antarctic expeditioners themselves, is also discussed. The essay traces a rough progression in Australian representation of the far southern environment, from an initial utopian approach to an emphasis on its stark, 'timeless' icescape as a minimalist backdrop for human dramas to an appreciation of its changeability, complexity and fragility. (from The Littoral Zone)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
-
Finding a Spiritual Home in the Australian Environment : Katharine Susannah Prichard and Vance Palmer in the 1920s
2013
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology , no. 3 2013; 'Eco-centric ideologies recognise humans as an interdependent part of a larger biotic community and the biophysical systems that support them. Constructions and narratives of one’s ‘spiritual home’ in the environment by authors and critics can challenge colonial and postcolonial understandings, of — in this instance — Australia. Vance Palmer, Australia’s leading man of letters of the inter-war period, claimed his was a generation seeking to find ‘harmony’ with the environment; Nettie Palmer believed that writers’ powers depended on their capacity to find a spiritual home in place. Without the literary imagination, people and places appear ‘uncanny and ghostlike’, and Nettie evolved a schema in and through language to help others learn how to dwell in the land. In a time of rapid environmental change, this essay re-visits these writers, that is, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Katharine Susannah Prichard and others of their generation, and it investigates their important initiatives in challenging dominant and habitual ways of understanding and seeing the natural environment. Often as a result of their beliefs they sought out remote country locations and ‘wilderness areas’ in which to live and write about. Two key texts, Working Bullocks (1926) by Prichard and The Man Hamilton (1928) by Palmer, can be explored in context of recent discourses on ecological sensibilities, identities of place and transnational cosmopolitanism, home and homecoming in the literary imagination, and rapid change through climate change. Building on earlier literary critiques and gender analysis, very different readings of the environmental imagination at play in these texts are possible.' (Publication abstract) -
The Transnational Fantasy : The Case of James Cowan
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 26 no. 1 2012; (p. 67-73) 'Recent criticism has seen the rise of an approach to literature that views texts as products of 'transnationalism,' a move that arises from a growing sense that, in a global age, authors should not be bounded by the traditional limits of national culture. In her book Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2006), for instance, Rebecca Walkowitz looks at how this trend has evolved in world Anglophone literature, extending from canonical writers like Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf to such contemporary authors as Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and W.G. Sebald. In the field of Australian literature, the question of transnationalism is often linked to issues of postcolonialism, as reflected in recent critical works like Graham Huggan's Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism (2007) and Nathanael O'Reilly's edited collection Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature (2010), both of which examine how Australian literature and culture have metamorphosed in the new global context. While there is little doubt that world literature has been affected in important ways by this broadening of literary stage, there seems to be a widespread conflation between two similar but different terms: the transnational and transcultural. For while it is true that the culture of many countries arises from a cosmopolitan and diverse assortment of influences, this loosening of cultural boundaries between nations is far from being simultaneous with the decline of the state.' (Author's introduction)
-
Speaking Personally
2011
single work
review
— Appears in: Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies , Fall vol. 17 no. 2 2011; (p. 93-101)
— Review of A Revealed Life : Australian Writers and Their Journeys in Memoir 2007 anthology autobiography ; Creative Lives : Personal Papers of Australian Writers and Artists 2009 selected work biography ; The Littoral Zone : Australian Contexts and Their Writers 2007 anthology criticism ; The Well in the Shadow : A Writer's Journey through Australian Literature 2010 selected work criticism -
‘Singing Up’ the Silences : Australian Nature Writing as Disruption and Invocation
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology , Summer vol. 1 no. 2011; 'There is a strong, though not uncontested view, that a tradition of 'place' or 'nature' writing has, until relatively recently, been largely absent in Australia. This essay examines the veracity of this claim, and suggests reasons for this alleged gap or 'silence' in our literature. It also considers the distinctive characteristics of Australian place writing as it has emerged over more recent decades and the ways in which this writing disrupts early representations of the continent as 'empty', particularly of Indigenous presence, but also of sound, of speech, of agency. This essay also suggests the potential for Australian nature writing to function contrapuntally, as both a form of response to this lively and expressive land, and as a means by which this same land may be invoked or 'sung' into the communicative space.' (Author's abstract)
-
‘A Heart That Could be Strong and True’ : Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright as Queer Interior
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue vol. 11 no. 1 2011; (p. 1-15) 'In ' "A heart that could be strong and true": Kenneth Cook's Wake in Fright as queer interior' Monique Rooney presents a compelling reading of the complicated relations between self and other, interior and exterior, in the iconic, troubling text of Wake in Fright. Her discussion focuses on the play of aurality and lyricism in the novel's account of outsider relations, and proposes a reading that draws on Michael Snediker's 'emphasis on a potentially joyful Freud' in classic accounts of queer melancholy in order to attend to what she determines is a 'critique of processes of masculinist dis-identification' in the novel. This important discussion works to reanimate critical consideration not only of a significant and neglected text, but also of broader debates around the reach and nature of metropolitan subjectivities in post- WWII literature in Australia.' (Source: Introduction : Archive Madness, p. 3)
-
The Problematic Pastoral : Ecocriticism in Australia
2007
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , August no. 42 2007;
— Review of The Littoral Zone : Australian Contexts and Their Writers 2007 anthology criticism -
A Glimpse inside the Littoral
2008
single work
review
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 22 no. 1 2008; (p. 83-84)
— Review of The Littoral Zone : Australian Contexts and Their Writers 2007 anthology criticism -
Untitled
2008
single work
review
— Appears in: JASAL , no. 8 2008; (p. 152-155)
— Review of The Littoral Zone : Australian Contexts and Their Writers 2007 anthology criticism -
Green of Greed?
2010
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , June vol. 25 no. 2 2010; (p. 88-91)
— Review of The Littoral Zone : Australian Contexts and Their Writers 2007 anthology criticism -
Speaking Personally
2011
single work
review
— Appears in: Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies , Fall vol. 17 no. 2 2011; (p. 93-101)
— Review of A Revealed Life : Australian Writers and Their Journeys in Memoir 2007 anthology autobiography ; Creative Lives : Personal Papers of Australian Writers and Artists 2009 selected work biography ; The Littoral Zone : Australian Contexts and Their Writers 2007 anthology criticism ; The Well in the Shadow : A Writer's Journey through Australian Literature 2010 selected work criticism -
Introduction to the Post-Pastoral in Australian Poetry
2009
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Landscapes , Autumn vol. 3 no. 1 2009; (p. 1-17) This essay reflects 'on the notion of a progressive imaginative vision of Australians living with their land, along the way considering a range of Australian poems and literary figures.' Wilson seeks 'realistic, celebratory visions of contemporary Australians living in their home. Specifically...the post-pastoral in Australian poetry.' (p. 1) -
‘A Heart That Could be Strong and True’ : Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright as Queer Interior
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue vol. 11 no. 1 2011; (p. 1-15) 'In ' "A heart that could be strong and true": Kenneth Cook's Wake in Fright as queer interior' Monique Rooney presents a compelling reading of the complicated relations between self and other, interior and exterior, in the iconic, troubling text of Wake in Fright. Her discussion focuses on the play of aurality and lyricism in the novel's account of outsider relations, and proposes a reading that draws on Michael Snediker's 'emphasis on a potentially joyful Freud' in classic accounts of queer melancholy in order to attend to what she determines is a 'critique of processes of masculinist dis-identification' in the novel. This important discussion works to reanimate critical consideration not only of a significant and neglected text, but also of broader debates around the reach and nature of metropolitan subjectivities in post- WWII literature in Australia.' (Source: Introduction : Archive Madness, p. 3)
-
‘Singing Up’ the Silences : Australian Nature Writing as Disruption and Invocation
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology , Summer vol. 1 no. 2011; 'There is a strong, though not uncontested view, that a tradition of 'place' or 'nature' writing has, until relatively recently, been largely absent in Australia. This essay examines the veracity of this claim, and suggests reasons for this alleged gap or 'silence' in our literature. It also considers the distinctive characteristics of Australian place writing as it has emerged over more recent decades and the ways in which this writing disrupts early representations of the continent as 'empty', particularly of Indigenous presence, but also of sound, of speech, of agency. This essay also suggests the potential for Australian nature writing to function contrapuntally, as both a form of response to this lively and expressive land, and as a means by which this same land may be invoked or 'sung' into the communicative space.' (Author's abstract)
-
The Transnational Fantasy : The Case of James Cowan
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 26 no. 1 2012; (p. 67-73) 'Recent criticism has seen the rise of an approach to literature that views texts as products of 'transnationalism,' a move that arises from a growing sense that, in a global age, authors should not be bounded by the traditional limits of national culture. In her book Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2006), for instance, Rebecca Walkowitz looks at how this trend has evolved in world Anglophone literature, extending from canonical writers like Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf to such contemporary authors as Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and W.G. Sebald. In the field of Australian literature, the question of transnationalism is often linked to issues of postcolonialism, as reflected in recent critical works like Graham Huggan's Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism (2007) and Nathanael O'Reilly's edited collection Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature (2010), both of which examine how Australian literature and culture have metamorphosed in the new global context. While there is little doubt that world literature has been affected in important ways by this broadening of literary stage, there seems to be a widespread conflation between two similar but different terms: the transnational and transcultural. For while it is true that the culture of many countries arises from a cosmopolitan and diverse assortment of influences, this loosening of cultural boundaries between nations is far from being simultaneous with the decline of the state.' (Author's introduction)
-
Finding a Spiritual Home in the Australian Environment : Katharine Susannah Prichard and Vance Palmer in the 1920s
2013
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology , no. 3 2013; 'Eco-centric ideologies recognise humans as an interdependent part of a larger biotic community and the biophysical systems that support them. Constructions and narratives of one’s ‘spiritual home’ in the environment by authors and critics can challenge colonial and postcolonial understandings, of — in this instance — Australia. Vance Palmer, Australia’s leading man of letters of the inter-war period, claimed his was a generation seeking to find ‘harmony’ with the environment; Nettie Palmer believed that writers’ powers depended on their capacity to find a spiritual home in place. Without the literary imagination, people and places appear ‘uncanny and ghostlike’, and Nettie evolved a schema in and through language to help others learn how to dwell in the land. In a time of rapid environmental change, this essay re-visits these writers, that is, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Katharine Susannah Prichard and others of their generation, and it investigates their important initiatives in challenging dominant and habitual ways of understanding and seeing the natural environment. Often as a result of their beliefs they sought out remote country locations and ‘wilderness areas’ in which to live and write about. Two key texts, Working Bullocks (1926) by Prichard and The Man Hamilton (1928) by Palmer, can be explored in context of recent discourses on ecological sensibilities, identities of place and transnational cosmopolitanism, home and homecoming in the literary imagination, and rapid change through climate change. Building on earlier literary critiques and gender analysis, very different readings of the environmental imagination at play in these texts are possible.' (Publication abstract)
Last amended 8 Dec 2015 11:48:22
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