Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures

2 total works

Writing Woman, Writing Place

by Sue Kossew

Published 1 January 2003

Contemporary women writers in these two societies are still writing about similar issues as did earlier generations of women, such as exclusions from discourses of nation, a problematic relationship to place and belonging, relations with indigenous people and the way in which women's subjectivity has been constructed through national stereotypes and representations. This book describes and analyses some contemporary responses to 'writing woman, writing place' through close readings of particular texts that explore these issues. Three main strands run through the readings offered in Writing Woman, Writing Place - the theme of violence and the violence of representational practice itself, the revisioning of history, and the writers' consciousness of their own paradoxical subject-position within the nation as both privileged and excluded. Texts by established writers from both Australia and South Africa are examined in this context, including international prize-winning novelists Kate Grenville and Thea Astley from Australia and Nadine Gordimer from South Africa, as well as those by newly-emerging and younger writers.
This book will be of essential interest to students and academics within the fields of Postcolonial Literature and Women's Writing.

Rethinking the Victim

by Anne Brewster and Sue Kossew

Published 18 February 2019

This book is the first to examine gender and violence in Australian literature. It argues that literary texts by Australian women writers offer unique ways of understanding the social problem of gendered violence, bringing this often private and suppressed issue into the public sphere. It draws on the international field of violence studies to investigate how Australian women writers challenge the victim paradigm and figure women’s agencies. In doing so, it provides a theoretical context for the increasing number of contemporary literary works by Australian women writers that directly address gendered violence, an issue that has taken on urgent social and political currency.

By analysing Australian women’s literary representations of gendered violence, this book rethinks victimhood and agency, particularly from a feminist perspective. One of its major innovations is that it examines mainstream Australian women’s writing alongside that of Indigenous and minoritised women. In doing so it provides insights into the interconnectedness of Australia’s diverse settler, Indigenous and diasporic histories in chapters that examine intimate partner violence, violence against Indigenous women and girls, family violence and violence against children, and the war and political violence.