Serial Cities: Australian Literary Cities and the Rhetoric of Scale

A review essay of New South Books' 'City Series': Sophie Cunningham, Melbourne (2011)Matthew Condon, Brisbane (2010)Paul Daley, Canberra (2012)Delia Falconer, Sydney (2010)Kerryn Goldsworthy, Adelaide (2011)Eleanor Hogan, Alice Springs (2012)Tess Lea, Darwin (2014)Peter Timms, In Search of Hobart (2012)David Whish-Wilson, Perth (2013

Introduction

Introduction to From Colony to Transnatio

'A little bit of the real Sydney': Comparing Gender, Socialism and the City in Works by William Lane and Christina Stead

The article compares William Lane's Workingman's Paradise (1892) and Christina Stead's Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1935) as representing the city of Sydney as a gendered political order. It explores how these novels intervene in contemporaneous debates about gender and the 'woman question' in the context of radical socialist thought

Narrative viewpoint and the representation of power in George Orwell’s 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'

This essay considers how ‘perspective’ and ‘choice of language’ in George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, position the reader and contribute to the text’s representation of power, powerplay and people power. The aims of this essay can be restated in the form of two key questions. What specific features of the narrative in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four construct the text’s representation of power, and of powerplay? How do those features position the responder to think and feel about political power and about whether there can be people power

Colonising time, recollecting place: Steven Carroll's reinvention of suburbia

Suburbia is a familiar topos in Australian fiction. Its address to colonisation is mostly oblique, yielded through its focus on the inauthenticity and restlessness of a settler modernity typically sourced in the white Anglo culture of pre 1970s decades. Yet the actual suburbs of postwar Australia are multiplicitous and shifting, always in tension with the imagined terrain of fictional suburbia. My paper explores literary suburbs as constituted by a complex set of orientations towards the real and the imagined. It reads the ways that Steven Carroll’s fictional suburbia indexes real world localities, while simultaneously serving as locus for reinvention of the novel in Australia, through forms of interior consciousness and temporality affiliated with European models of literary modernism. In Spirit of Progress (2011), Carroll's narrative engages with classic Anglo-Australian suburbia as a representational field, working with and against the real of history, even as it mines the seam of suburbia as a site of both colonization and forgetting, and of longing and return

She Casts Herself as Revolutionary: Performance and Performativity in The Man Who Loved Children

This paper explores how Stead's contact with Marxism and her reading of Nietzsche shape the revolutionary subject inThe Man Who Loved Children

Bibliography

18 page(s

Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist, by Brigitta Olubas

Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist, by Brigitta Oluba

A little bit of the real Sydney': gender, socialism and the city in works by William Lane and Christina Stead

8 page(s