As a schoolboy in suburban Sydney in 1952, Tom Keneally was a Romantic. He had visions of following in his hero Chatterton's poetic footsteps. He dreamt of triumphing on the running track or rugby field. He had hopes of winning the heart of the beautiful but aloof Bernadette Curran. The one role he did not foresee himself playing was priest, until the momentous day when Bernadette announced her intention of becoming a nun. In this memoir, Keneally conjures up his youthful self and those who infl...
"Creme de la Phlegm: Unforgettable Australian Reviews" is a landmark collection of the famous and the infamous Australian reviews which range across literature, theatre, the visual arts and film. In an eloquent and biting essay, Angela Bennie looks to the wholeheartedly negative review over the last 50 years: and the motives of reviewers who proclaim a critical flop. Beginning with A.D. Hope's seminal 'fanging' of Patrick White in 1956, Bennie casts light on the quest for a national identity, th...
Laughing at Boundaries (Working Papers in Australian Studies, #99)
by Lenore Coltheart
Lazy Bottersnikes in outback rubbish tips, Sir Pronoun's dilemma about standing in Miss Noun's place and the story of how Jack built a house, a hut or a shack are all to be found in this treasury of Australian children's books. Exploring everything from schooldays to fantasy worlds, from its nineteenth century beginnings to the twenty-first century, this book is remarkable for its breadth of coverage, encouraging new ways of seeing the Australian child's literary history. ""Bottersnikes, Gumbles...
Peter Carey (Contemporary World Writers)
by Senior Lecturer in English Bruce Woodcock
Telling the Real Story: Genre and New Zealand Literature interrogates the relationships between genre and New Zealand literature. What modes of writing have been deemed more appropriate than others at particular times, and why? Why have some narratives been interpreted as realist when there are significant aspects of them that relate to other genres, such as romance, science fiction and Gothic? What meanings are generated by the meeting points in a text, where one mode meets another? What is at...
Speaking the Earth's Languages brings together for the first time critical discussions of postcolonial poetics from Australia and Chile. The book crosses multiple languages, landscapes, and disciplines, and draws on a wide range of both oral and written poetries, in order to make strong claims about the importance of 'a nomad poetics' - not only for understanding Aboriginal or Mapuche writing practices but, more widely, for the problems confronting contemporary literature and politics in coloniz...
This travel journal traces a personal journey to Antarctica. For over 30 years Jenny Diski was content to leave the question as to whether her mother was alive or dead unanswered. Not knowing the fate of the violent woman she last saw shortly after her father's death in 1966 filled her with a sense of relief rather than of loss. Then, just as Diski is planning a trip to the dream world of ice, her own teenage daughter decides to investigate what had happened to her crazy, missing maternal grandm...
Corporeal Archipelagos: Writing the Body in Francophone Oceanian Women's Literature offers an examination of contemporary literature from the French-speaking Oceanian region through a focus on four of its most prolific women writers and the ways in which these writers negotiate identity construction through one of the most powerful identity markers in the region: the body. The question of the body - how one is to make meaning through corporeality, how one represents the body, and what role the b...
This book is about the mythologies of land exploration, and about space and the colonial enterprise in particular. It is an innovative investigation of the presumptions, aesthetics, and politics of Australian explorers' texts that looks at the journals of John Oxley, Thomas Mitchell, Charles Sturt, and Ludwig Leichhardt and shows that they are not the simple, unadorned observations the authors would have us believe, but, rather, complex networks of tropes. The book argues that contacts with Abor...
When twenty-three-year-old Carrie Prudence Winter caught her first glimpse of Honolulu from aboard the Zealandia in October 1890, she had 'never seen anything so beautiful.' She had been travelling for two months since leaving her family home in Connecticut and was at last only a few miles from her final destination, Kawaiahao Female Seminary, a flourishing boarding school for Hawaiian girls. As the daughter of staunch New England Congregationalists, Winter had dreamed of being a missionary teac...
The full story of the gifted but troubled R. A. K. Mason is told for the first time in this accessible biography. The puzzling reasons after his extraordinary beginning that Mason almost completely stopped writing poetry are investigated. The legendary story of how Mason dumped 200 copies of his first book, The Beggar, into Auckland harbor in disappointment, disgust, or despair because no one would buy it is explored as a symbol of a time—the 1920s and 1930s—when a true, vital, native literature...
