AustLit

'Investigates how the critical uptake of genre-based cinema has been incorporated into the cultural and industrial rubric of Australian national cinema. The thesis offers, in part, a revaluation of theoretically under-emphasized texts (as well as texts that have been the subject of much higher levels of scrutiny), in order to establish recurrent threads within Australian cinema. In doing this, the thesis offers new and original knowledge in the form of developing a perspective for a revised critical and theoretical analysis of genre cinema within Australian cinema, challenging the presumption of the kinds of texts that can be seen as articulating the nation. The groups of films examined herein form nodes through which a network of important and divergent ideas about nation, national identity and social organization come together in the form of narrative and thematic undercurrents.'