AustLit
y
Imagined Australia : Reflections around the Reciprocal Construction of Identity between Australia and Europe
anthology
Imagined Australia : Reflections around the Reciprocal Construction of Identity between Australia and Europe
anthology
Issue Details:
First known date:
2009...
2009
Imagined Australia : Reflections around the Reciprocal Construction of Identity between Australia and Europe
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'From 'Terra Nullius' to Land of Opportunities and Last Frontier, the European dream has constructed and deconstructed Australia to feed its imagination of new societies. At the same time Australia has over the last two centuries forged and re-invented its own liaisons with Europe arguably to carve out its identity. From the arts to social sciences, to society itself, a complex dynamic has grown between the two continents in ways that invite study and discussion.
A transnational research group has begun its collective investigation project of which this first volume is the outcome. The book is a substantial multidisciplinary collection of current research and offers critical perspectives on culture, literature and history around themes at the heart of the 'Imagined Australia' project. The essays instigate reflection, discovery and discussion of how reciprocal imagining between Australia and Europe has articulated itself and ways and dimensions in which a relationship between communities, imagined and not, has unfolded.' -- Publisher's blurb
Notes
-
Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
* Contents derived from the
Berne,
c
Switzerland,c
Western Europe,
Europe,:
New York (City),
New York (State),
c
United States of America (USA),c
Americas,:Peter Lang
, 2009 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.- Dying to Come to Australia : Asylum Seekers, Tourists and Death, single work criticism (p. 57-87)
-
Settler Colonialism and the Formation of Australian National Identity : Praed's 'Bunyip' and Pedley's 'Dot and the Kangaroo',
single work
criticism
(p. 107-121)'This essay discusses stories that performed the task of defining the identity of the white settler community at the turn of twentieth-century Australia. It concentrates on two late nineteenth-century narratives, Rosa Praed's short story 'The Bunyip' (1891) and Ethel C. Pedley's children's book Dot and the Kangaroo (1898) which, in different ways, utilise the mystery and danger of the Australian outback as building blocks for representing experiences that were supposedly familiar to all Australians. These two stories describe their white characters' responses to Aboriginal legends and rituals as seminal moments in their personal growth, implying that first-hand knowledge of Aboriginal traditions was an essential element in the collective experience of Australian settlers.' (p. 109)
-
Australian Landscape as the Language of a New Identity,
single work
criticism
(p. 123-136)'The aim of this paper is to highlight the reasons of the transformation of what is called the ‘Anglo-Australian identity’ through the analysis of films, poetry and plays. Such an hyphenated identity allows the dominance of the ethnic, hybrid group who believes itself to represent the authenticity of the inhabitants of that place.' (pp. 123-124)
-
'"Heaven on Earth" Was a Hell in Reality' : Reflections on William Lane's 'New Australia' in Britain,
single work
criticism
(p. 171-184)'In 1893 one hundred and ninety-nine reformers and bohemians left Sydney in the ship he Royal Tar to establish an ideal community in Paraguay... This chapter scrutinises the origins of the colony and locates its history within the recent literature on a 'British World'.' (171, 172)
-
Mamboing Matilda : Surf-lifestyle T-shirts and Representations of Australian Cultural Identity,
single work
criticism
(p. 201-213)This chapter explores how the many dimensions of Australian national identity, ‘so strongly rooted in the popular culture and representations of a country, function as a set of several signifiers for the narratives of Australianness and for the meanings of ‘being Australian’(Elder 2007)’. It also explores ‘the way an Australian surf lifestyle brand, Mambo, conveys images and representations of Australianness…’ (202)
-
Italy and the Transformation of the Traveller in Robert Dessaix's Night Letters,
single work
criticism
(p. 215-231)This article focuses on 'the representation of Italy in Robert Dessaix's Night Letters (1996.)Trape states that the novel 'adds to a considerable corpus of texts by Australian writers, which are based on their travel experiences' and that Night Letters presents a process of self-knowledge and self-discovery, which unfolds through the discovery of the country.' (216)
-
Looking for/at Australia : Roots and Repulsion in Contemporary Australian Women's Writing,
single work
criticism
(p. 251-263)'No matter how seriously attacked and deranged, identity remains a keyword for contemporaneity. Political agendas and propagandas are packed full with claims and calls for new or old senses of belonging; nations and narrations abound with discourses focussed upon finding ro recuperating personal and collective memories, which might thus safeguard one's dreamy rootedness and secure location in the world. And yet, within these manifestoes lie dispersed and abjected bodies, weak and nomadic subjects which crowd the bitter arena of contemporary philosophical reflections as well as political praxis and 'vernacular' reality (CF. Kreisteva 1982; Vattimo 1999; Butler 1990, 1993; de Lauretis 1990; Bugliese 2007c) Ethnicity is another term one often encounters in the public as well as private spheres, especially in the Anglophone context. It has replaced the previous race markers in general as well as in critical parlance. And yet, it is a term which seems to be still deeply dangerous in its constructing borders of inclusion and exclusion in/out of any given community. In this view, (visible) ethnics exist insofar as they are recognized (and recognize themselves) as such in vertiginous and self-perpetuating but distorted mirror scene. What is obliterated in such positions is the obvious fact that every human being is ethnically located; of course, the term is a useful tool in the hands of mainstream, powerful groups often advocating multi-forms of marginalization (cf Knippling 1996; Yoshino 1999).' (p251)
- Who's a Weird Mob? Imagining Assimilation in Postwar Australia, single work criticism (p. 265-276)
- Images of Australia in Tirra Lirra by the River by Jessica Anderson, single work criticism (p. 293-301)
-
Perceiving Europe and Australia and Constructing an Imagined Australian Identity in The Aunts’ Story by Patrick White.,
single work
criticism
(p. 353-366)'This paper examines Patrick White's novel The Aunt's Story and the way in which it fictionally shows mutual scrutiny and perception between Australia and Europe. Central to the elaboration of this study is the notion of fictional viewpoint, which Leech and Short (1986, p 174) define as 'the slanting of the fictional world towards reality, as apprehended by a particular participant, or set of participants, in the fiction'. Notions of distance of viewpoint from an 'outside' or 'inside' perspective and the way in which they affect construction and perception of places are also instrumental in this analysis.' (353)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
-
Untitled
2011
single work
review
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , March vol. 35 no. 1 2011; (p. 118-119)
— Review of Imagined Australia : Reflections around the Reciprocal Construction of Identity between Australia and Europe 2009 anthology criticism
-
Untitled
2011
single work
review
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , March vol. 35 no. 1 2011; (p. 118-119)
— Review of Imagined Australia : Reflections around the Reciprocal Construction of Identity between Australia and Europe 2009 anthology criticism
Last amended 5 Aug 2010 11:55:25
Export this record
