AustLit
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
'Brisbane writers and writing are increasingly represented as important to the city's identity as a site of urban cool, at least in marketing and public relations paradigms. It is therefore remarkable that recent Brisbane fiction clings strongly to a particular relationship to the climatic and built environment that is often located in the past and which seemingly turns away, or at least elides, the 'new' technologically-driven Brisbane. Literary Brisbane is often depicted in the context of nostalgia for the Brisbane that once was—a tropical, timbered, luxuriant city in which sex is associated with heat, and, in particular, sweat. In this writing sweat can produced by adrenaline or heat, but in particular, in Brisbane novels, it is the sweat of sex that characterises the literary city. Given that Brisbane is in fact a subtropical city, it is interesting that metaphors of a tropical climate and vegetation occur so frequently in Brisbane stories (and narratives set in other parts of the state) that writer Thea Astley was prompted at one point to remark that Queensland writing was in danger of developing into a tropical cliché.' Susan Carson.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 1 Aug 2012 13:44:44
45-53
Engaging the Metaphorical City : Brisbane Male Fiction 1975-2007
Subjects:
- Johnno : A Novel 1975 single work novel
- The Third Metropolis : Imagining Brisbane Through Art and Literature, 1940-1970 2007 single work criticism
- True Love and How to Get It 1981 single work novel
- Hotel Bellevue 1986 single work novel
- Praise 1992 single work novel
- Last Drinks 2000 single work novel
- The Dirty Beat 2007 single work novel
- Zigzag Street 1996 single work novel
- Lives on Fire 1993 single work novel
- Feather Man 2007 single work novel
- Brisbane, Queensland,
- 1975-2007
Export this record