Reading (in/and) Miranda

"Australian fiction, like that of all nations, is written, published, received and read in the context of a literary canon, both national and transnational. In regards to women's fiction in Australia, this canon is predominantly composed of writers from two particular eras: authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (like Henry Handel Richardson, Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard and Christina Stead) and women writers who came to prominence during the 1980s (like Helen Garner, Kate Grenville, Elizabeth Jolley, Barbara Hanrahan, Jessica Anderson and Beverley Farmer ... The second-wave feminist movement was responsible for the creation of this dual canon: in the first case, due to a desire to recover and reclaim women writers of the past, and in the second, due to a desire to celebrate and explore contemporary Australian women's fiction. Indeed, it is the preoccupation of second-wave feminism with uncovering and celebrating women's occluded stories that underlies the current critical focus on realist and experiential aspects of Australian women's fiction ... Among those whose work has been occluded by the critical attention given to the canonical figures of Australian women's writing, Wendy Scarfe is indicative in various ways.

Reading, Writing, and Re-Visioning the Past: the historical novel in history. (Part I)

Seminario (1 hora de duración) impartido por la dra. Kate Mitchell (Australian National Unviersity)The extraordinary popularity of historical fiction shows no sign of abating. Historical novels have been attempted by most major contemporary novelists; they regularly top bestseller lists and win literary prizes; and the genre is also discussed by a range of scholars, who often distinguish between bodice-rippers, or ‘costume’ novels, and more serious, often revisionist, engagements with the past in fiction. What is the historical novel now? How does it draw on, revise, and extend examples from the 18th and 19th centuries? What role might it play in the telling of national histories and contested pasts? Drawing on examples from Australian and British fiction, this seminar will discuss the history of the historical novel, and consider specific debates that attach to the genre, particularly: who owns the past?Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The Dissenter and Anti-authoritarian Aspects of Australian History and Character that Inform the Moral Ambiguity that Marks Australian Crime Fiction

This thesis consists of two distinct but related parts: a creative component, the contemporary crime novel ‘The Grass Mud Horse’, and an exegesis. Both will attempt to answer the question: How has the moral ambiguity that marks Australian crime fiction been informed and influenced by the dissenter and anti-authoritarian aspects of Australian history and character? It examines how issues usually associated with noir fiction of the twentieth century were present earlier in Australian crime fiction

“Philip McLaren and the Indigenous-Australian Crime Novel”

This paper locates the postcolonial crime novel as a space for disenfranchised groups to write back to the marginalisation inherent in the process of colonisation, and explores the example of Australia. From its inception in the mid-19th century, Australian crime fiction reflected upon the challenging harshness and otherness of the Australian experience for the free and convict settler, expelled from the metropole. It created a series of popular subgenres derived from the convict narrative proper, while more ‘standard’ modes of crime fiction, popularised in and through British and American crime fiction, were late to develop. Whereas Australian crime fiction has given expression to the white experience of the continent in manifold ways, up until recently it made no room for Indigenous voices – with the exception of the classic Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte series written by the prolific Arthur Upfield in the first half of the 20th century. For the longest time, this absence reflected the dispossession, dispersal and disenfranchisement of the colonised Indigenous peoples at large; there were neither Aboriginal voices nor Aboriginal authors, which made the textual space of the Australian crime novel a discursive terra nullius. This paper will look at the only Indigenous-Australian author to date with a substantial body of work in crime fiction, Philip McLaren, and elucidate how his four crime novels break new ground in Australian crime fiction by embedding themselves within a political framework of Aboriginal resilience and resistance to neo/colonialism. Written as of the 1990s, McLaren’s oeuvre is eclectic in that it does not respond to traditional formats of Australian crime fiction, shifts between generic subtypes and makes incursions into other genres. The paper concludes that McLaren’s oeuvre has not been conceived of as the work of a crime writer per se, but rather that its form and content are deeply informed by the racist violence and oppression that still affects Indigenous-Australian society today, the expression of which the crime novel is particularly well geared to

Publishing and Australian literature: crisis, decline or transformation?

The globalisation and consolidation of book publishing is widely seen as having negative consequences for Australian literature. Some commentators argue that this shift is detrimental to Australian literature as a whole; others identify the growth of multinational publishing conglomerates with a specific decline in Australian literary fiction. I explore both positions, first identifying and investigating trends in Australian novel publication and comparing these to trends in the publication of novels from other countries as well as other Australian-originated literature (specifically, poetry and auto/biography). Following this, I consider the specific case of Australian literary fiction, before looking in detail at the output of large publishers of Australian novels. This analysis reveals a recent decline in Australian novel and poetry titles, but offers a more complex picture of this trend than dominant expressions of nostalgia and alarm about the fate of Australian literature and publishing would suggest

Encountering the other: multiculturalism in Asian Australian women's fiction

In 2003 Tsen Ling Khoo pointed out that a new generation of Asian-Australians would soon be hailed by a body of diasporic texts that would reflect the experience of living in a white society as a minority group (108). What this experience might consist of as white Australia’s attitudes toward race relations have shifted from negative stereotyping to reify racial divisions and propagate a masked racism, a move described as ‘acceptance through difference, inclusion by virtue of otherness’, is both varied and predictable (Ang, 2001 146). In contemporary fiction written by second and third generation migrants contestations of selfhood, origin and identity experienced by hyphenated Asian-Australians, are represented through recurring narrative tropes: incomplete belonging encourages the multiracial protagonist to other the Asian ‘other’ in an attempt to diminish social alienation and difference: but there is also exoticising of such subjects as ’other’ by white Australians; return visits to the original Asian homeland in the hope of redressing the absences and tensions constitutive of migration reinforce the lack of belonging to either place. With reference to novels by authors like Simone Lazaroo, Michelle de Kretser and Alice Pung, read as strategic interventions into identity-based politics, this paper asks how recent Asian-Australian writing maps new cultural coordinates in the national landscape and negotiates interstitial positions between the white Australian present and the Asian heritage

An Interview with Jean-François Vernay

The second edition of Jean-François Vernay’s book A Brief Take on the Australian Novel (Adelaide: Wakefield Press) was released in 2016. This incisive history of Australian fiction is remarkable for a relatively young scholar, both for its ambitious scope and its innovative approach, employing structural techniques derived from the world and language of cinema. It is designed to appeal to the general reader seeking to test their views against Vernay’s, to those new to the area of Australian fiction who might use it as a guide to their reading, and to those engaged in academic study. As has often been noted, Jean-François Vernay’s French-Australian parentage and background give him an unusual and distinctive perspective on Australian writing. Jean-François is also the author of Water from the Moon: Illusion and Reality in the Works of Christopher Koch (New York: Cambria Press, 2007), as well as numerous other critical studies. His book The Seduction of Fiction: A Plea for Putting Emotions Back into Literary Interpretation will be released in August 2016 as part of Palgrave Macmillan’s series Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. He is also a creative writer in his own right, notably of Un doux petit rêveur (2012)

The global reception of post-national literary fiction: the case of Gerald Murnane

This paper considers the situation of the changing global market for Australian literary fiction. In particular it uses the case of Gerld Murnane to examine ways in which these changes might be beneficial to at least some authors as we enter an era of 'post-national' literary fiction.The paper traces the international reception of Murnane's fiction and the subsequently the development of his global reputation. It incorporates Murnane's own observations (drawn from personal correspondence with the author) and suggests that although it has been argued that the impacts of globalisation will be detrimental for Australian literary fiction, there may also be some reasons for optimism

THE REPRESENTATION OF MIGRANTS IN AUSTRALIAN DETECTIVE FICTION

This articles analyses the nexus between crime and migration in the Australian crime novel phenomenon focussing principally on the authors Peter Temple, Shane Maloney, Philip McLaren and Peter Corris. Fiction, which both helps to reflect and to construct our world, provides us with a vision and a version of contemporary Australian. The questions which arise from these novels are: What does it mean to be Australian? Immigrant? Foreigner? What links are there between crime novel and place? Does crime fiction hold up a mirror to society? What role do ethnic groups play in organised crime? Is organised crime involved in the exploitation of immigrants and in illegal immigration? How is the Aboriginal community represented and what role does it play in Australian crime fiction? Reference works which shine a light on true crime in Australia and its links to migration and immigrants include Blood Brothers by Bertil Lintner, Gangland Australia by James Moton and Suzanna Lobez, Leadbelly by John Silvester and Andrew Rule and Gangland Crimes that Shocked Australia by Ian Ferguson