Incest in the 1990s: reading Anais Nin's 'Father Story'

In the summer of 1933, diarist, author and critic Anaïs Nin joined her father for a short vacation in France. Nin wrote about the trip in her diary afterwards, referring to it as the ‘Father Story.’ In the story, she details how, aged 30, she embarked upon an affair with her father which would last for several months. Rather than displaying the signs of trauma that we have come to expect from the incest narrative such as dissociation, blame and recrimination, the ‘Father Story’ is more ambiguous in its tone. Part-tribute to the father, part-seduction narrative, part-confession, this is a story that resists categorisation – a resistance that has ethical, critical and formal ramifications for our reading of incest narratives. Upon its publication in the early 1990s, critics responded to the ‘Father Story’ as fantastical, excessive and vulgar. These responses form part of a wider American father story during this period; a story about memory, therapy culture, family values and the concealed rules of testimony. This article reads Anaïs Nin’s narrative as a text which raises fundamental questions about why certain father (and daughter) stories are culturally acceptable and others are not

Competing Life Narratives: Portraits of Vita Sackville-West

This article sets out to examine the fraught, often contested relationship between multiple and competing life narratives, taking as its focus the case of Vita Sackville-West and her infamous love affair with Violet Trefusis. Vita wrote her account of this relationship in a short, autobiographical fragment (1920–21), and this text now forms the basis of nearly all subsequent accounts of her life. By examining how Vita's confession has been appropriated and revised by successive generations of the Nicolson family—in Nigel Nicolson's biography of his parents, Portrait of a Marriage (1973) and Adam Nicolson's recent television documentary, Sissinghurst (2009)—this article will identify the relational structures that exist between texts and across different life-writing genres and media. Contemporary studies of life writing and relationality have emphasised the intratextual connections between subjects. By contrast, the example of Vita Sackville-West highlights the importance of intertextuality. This article explores how intertextual relations—the construction of lives in response to extant accounts; the repetition, revision and accumulation of life narratives—has served to sustain an open-ended industry of life writing

The Aussie, 1918-1931: cartoons, digger remembrance and First World War identity

Feelings of community, cultural definition and memory were kept alive through the soldiers’ mass circulation tabloid, the Aussie, examined here in the light of theorization of memory and representation, applied to both text and cartoons. The publication’s aim for veterans’ values to become shared national values is analysed in the light of its high profile usage of soft cartoon humour and also of nostalgia – highlighting the limitations as well as the effectiveness in terms of Australia’s evolving national identity. When the post-war economic situation worsened, deeper issues of national tension were glossed over by the use of scapegoats such as ‘profiteers’ and ‘lazy workers’. The armed forces were obliged to take on a political role of lobbying for their cause, but the Aussie as ‘cheerful friend’ experienced its own identity crisis that proved to be terminal

Global warming and recurrent mass bleaching of corals

During 2015–2016, record temperatures triggered a pan-tropical episode of coral bleaching, the third global-scale event since mass bleaching was first documented in the 1980s. Here we examine how and why the severity of recurrent major bleaching events has varied at multiple scales, using aerial and underwater surveys of Australian reefs combined with satellite-derived sea surface temperatures. The distinctive geographic footprints of recurrent bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef in 1998, 2002 and 2016 were determined by the spatial pattern of sea temperatures in each year. Water quality and fishing pressure had minimal effect on the unprecedented bleaching in 2016, suggesting that local protection of reefs affords little or no resistance to extreme heat. Similarly, past exposure to bleaching in 1998 and 2002 did not lessen the severity of bleaching in 2016. Consequently, immediate global action to curb future warming is essential to secure a future for coral reefs