Settler Romances and the Australian Girl


Book Description

Incisive readings of popular late 19th and early 20th century settler adventure romance unmask a deep-seated anxiety about the stability of concepts of whiteness and femininity in colonial Australia. It considers in detail Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career and Catherine Martin's An Australian Girl.




Victorian Narratives of Failed Emigration


Book Description

In her study of the unsuccessful nineteenth-century emigrant, Tamara S. Wagner argues that failed emigration and return drive nineteenth-century writing in English in unexpected, culturally revealing ways. Wagner highlights the hitherto unexplored subgenre of anti-emigration writing that emerged as an important counter-current to a pervasive emigration propaganda machine that was pressing popular fiction into its service. The exportation of characters at the end of a novel indisputably formed a convenient narrative solution that at once mirrored and exaggerated public policies about so-called 'superfluous' or 'redundant' parts of society. Yet the very convenience of such pat endings was increasingly called into question. New starts overseas might not be so easily realizable; emigration destinations failed to live up to the inflated promises of pro-emigration rhetoric; the 'unwanted' might make a surprising reappearance. Wagner juxtaposes representations of emigration in the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Frances Trollope, and Charlotte Yonge with Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian settler fiction by Elizabeth Murray, Clara Cheeseman, and Susanna Moodie, offering a new literary history not just of nineteenth-century migration, but also of transoceanic exchanges and genre formation.




Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand


Book Description

Colonial domestic literature has been largely overlooked and is due for a reassessment. This essay collection explores attitudes to colonialism, imperialism and race, as well as important developments in girlhood and the concept of the New Woman.




The Australian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience


Book Description

The Australian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience offers a detailed analysis of the experience and the image of Australian country girlhood. In Australia, 'country girl' names a field of experiences and life-stories by girls and women who have grown up outside of the demographically dominant urban centres. But it also names a set of ideas about Australia that is surprisingly consistent across the long twentieth century despite also working as an index of changing times. For a long period in Australian history, well before Federation and long after it, public and popular culture openly equated 'Australian character' with rural life. This image of Australian-ness sometimes went by the name of the 'bush man', now a staple of Australian history. This has been counterbalanced post World War II and increased immigration, by an image of sophisticated Australian modernity located in multicultural cities. These images of Australia balance rather than contradict one another in many ways and the more cosmopolitan image of Australia is often in dialogue with that preceding image of 'the bush'. This book does not offer a corrective to the story of Australian national identity but rather a fresh perspective on this history and a new focus on the ever-changing experience of Australian rural life. It argues that the country girl has not only been a long-standing counterpart to the Australian bush man she has, more importantly, figured as a point of dialogue between the country and the city for popular culture and for public sphere narratives about Australian society and identity.




Beyond Gold and Diamonds


Book Description

Beyond Gold and Diamonds demonstrates the importance of southern Africa to British literature from the 1880s to the 1920s, from the rise of the systematic exploitation of the region's mineral wealth to the aftermath of World War I. It focuses on fiction by the colonial-born Olive Schreiner, southern Africa's first literary celebrity, as well as by H. Rider Haggard, Gertrude Page, and John Buchan, its most influential authorial informants, British authors who spent significant time in the region and wrote about it as insiders. Tracing the ways in which generic innovation enabled these writers to negotiate cultural and political concerns through a uniquely British South African lens, Melissa Free argues that British South African literature constitutes a distinct field, one that overlaps with but also exists apart from both a national South African literary tradition and a tradition of South African literature in English. The various genres that British South African novelists introduced—the New Woman novel, the female colonial romance, the Rhodesian settler romance, and the modern spy thriller—anticipated metropolitan literary developments while consolidating Britain's sense of its own dominion in a time of increasing opposition.




Apocryphal and Literary Influences on Galway Diasporic History


Book Description

Apocryphal and Literary Influences on Galway Diasporic History establishes that apocryphal stories, in all their transformations, contribute to collective memory. Common characteristics frame their analysis: irreducible and enduring elements, often embedded in archetypal drama; lack of historical verification; establishment in collective memory; revivals after periods of dormancy; subjection to political and economic manipulation; implicit speculation; and literary transformations. This book contextualises Unsettled, an Australian novel about a convict play, derived from the Irish apocryphal story of The Magistrate of Galway, and documents previously unpublished primary material, including apocryphal stories passed through generations of descendents of settlers, Martin and Maria Lynch, and The Hibernian Father, a play by Irish convict, Edward Geoghegan. It puts forward new hypotheses: that the Irish hero Cuchulain may have provided a template for the archetypal and apocryphal story of the Magistrate of Galway; that disgraced Trinity College medical student and aspiring writer, Edward Geoghegan, enacted and recounted the same father-son archetypal conflict when he was transported to Botany Bay in 1839, and wrote the The Hibernian Father based on the Magistrate of Galway; that working-class Irish families were marginalised in South-east South Australian historical records; that oral apocryphal Lynch stories may be true; that Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2006) offers an alternative history of the Hawkesbury River settlement, by some definitions apocryphal. The mystery of Geoghegan’s disappearance is solved, and knowledge about his life increased. French theorist Gerard Genette’s notion, advanced in Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1997), of all novels being transtextual, provides a model for the analysis of relationships between these key apocryphal texts.




A World of Fiction


Book Description

During the 19th century, throughout the Anglophone world, most fiction was first published in periodicals. In Australia, newspapers were not only the main source of periodical fiction, but the main source of fiction in general. Because of their importance as fiction publishers, and because they provided Australian readers with access to stories from around the world—from Britain, America and Australia, as well as Austria, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, and beyond—Australian newspapers represent an important record of the transnational circulation and reception of fiction in this period. Investigating almost 10,000 works of fiction in the world’s largest collection of mass-digitized historical newspapers (the National Library of Australia’s Trove database), A World of Fiction reconceptualizes how fiction traveled globally, and was received and understood locally, in the 19th century. Katherine Bode’s innovative approach to the new digital collections that are transforming research in the humanities are a model of how digital tools can transform how we understand digital collections and interpret literatures in the past.




Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave


Book Description

Nick Cave is now widely recognized as a songwriter, musician, novelist, screenwriter, curator, critic, actor and performer. From the band, The Boys Next Door (1976-1980), to the spoken-word recording, The Secret Life of the Love Song (1998), to the recently acclaimed screenplay of The Proposition (2005) and the Grinderman project (2008), Cave's career spans thirty years and has produced a comprehensive (and sometimes controversial) body of work that has shaped contemporary alternative culture. Despite intense media interest in Cave, there have been remarkably few comprehensive appraisals of his work, its significance and its impact on understandings of popular culture. In addressing this absence, the present volume is both timely and necessary. Cultural Seeds brings together an international range of scholars and practitioners, each of whom is uniquely placed to comment on an aspect of Cave's career. The essays collected here not only generate new ways of seeing and understanding Cave's contributions to contemporary culture, but set up a dialogue between fields all-too-often separated in the academy and in the media. Topics include Cave and the Presley myth; the aberrant masculinity projected by The Birthday Party; the postcolonial Australian-ness of his humour; his interventions in film and his erotics of the sacred. These essays offer compelling insights and provocative arguments about the fluidity of contemporary artistic practice.




Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony


Book Description

Violence and intimacy were critically intertwined at all stages of the settler colonial encounter, and yet we know surprisingly little of how they were connected in the shaping of colonial economies. Extending a reading of ‘economies’ as labour relations into new arenas, this innovative collection of essays examines new understandings of the nexus between violence and intimacy in settler colonial economies of the British Pacific Rim. The sites it explores include cross-cultural exchange in sealing and maritime communities, labour relations on the frontier, inside the pastoral station and in the colonial home, and the material and emotional economies of exploration. Following the curious mobility of texts, objects, and frameworks of knowledge, this volume teases out the diversity of ways in which violence and intimacy were expressed in the economies of everyday encounters on the ground. In doing so, it broadens the horizon of debate about the nature of colonial economies and the intercultural encounters that were enmeshed within them.




Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts


Book Description

This hugely popular A-Z guide provides a comprehensive overview of the issues which characterize post-colonialism: explaining what it is, where it is encountered and the crucial part it plays in debates about race, gender, politics, language and identity. For this third edition over thirty new entries have been added including: Cosmopolitanism Development Fundamentalism Nostalgia Post-colonial cinema Sustainability Trafficking World Englishes. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts remains an essential guide for anyone studying this vibrant field.