Australian Literary Studies articles from May 2004

Australian Literary Studies archives from May 2004

'Scorched earth', Washington and the missing manuscript of Christina Stead's I'm Dying Laughing.
May 1, 2004... CHRISTINA Stead was writing her final novel I'm Dying Laughing on and off for nearly thirty years. She began work on the book in the 1940s but when she presented the completed manuscript to her publishers in 1966 she was confronted with a...

Remember love and struggle? Reading Jean Devanny's Sugar Heaven in contemporary Australian contexts.
May 1, 2004... ONE of Australia's best examples of Zhdanovian revolutionary romanticism, (1) Jean Devanny's Sugar Heaven has a strong narrative drive. As a socialist realist novel, its determined teleology pushes the novel towards deep resolution: towards the...

All the way to Cape Grimm: reflections on Carmel Bird's fiction.
May 1, 2004... CARMEL Bird is a great story-teller and a consummate stylist. Her stories--of lost children, of helpless and abused psychiatric patients, of whole groups of people in the grip of strange cults--tap into the deepest levels of human anxiety. Bird...

Conversations at Rochester Road: Carmel Bird discusses her writing with Shirley Walker.(Interview)
May 1, 2004... THE scene is the living room in Carmel Bird's Victorian cottage which, when it was first built, was in the country, among orchards and vineyards. Now part of a streetscape, it is submerged in its own riotous garden: flowering shrubs, wisteria...

'Death and the woman': looking at Francis Webb's 'Lament for St Maria Goretti'.
May 1, 2004... How could one sustain, how could one save the visible, if not by creating the language of absence, of the invisible? Rilke FRANCIS Webb's poetry is most often discussed in terms of its linguistic difficulty, its preoccupation with...

The solitariness of Alex Miller.(Australian novelist)
May 1, 2004... ALTHOUGH it was not the first novel of Alex Miller's to be published, The Tivington Nott (1989) was completed before Watching the Climbers on the Mountain (1988). By the time that they appeared, the author was in his early fifties. There had...

The sun's fish dreaming: the poetry of Andrew Taylor.
May 1, 2004... OCCUPYING nearly forty-five years and receiving only fairly superficial and fragmented critical comment, the writing life of Andrew Taylor awaits a detailed examination. My aim here is only to lay out the elements of that life and to suggest...

Interview with Andrew Taylor.(Interview)
May 1, 2004... J.K.: Andrew, you've lived in Victoria, Adelaide and Perth, as well as spending considerable time overseas. Could you comment on how shifting locations has affected your poetics and world view, in general. A.T.: That's a difficult one,...

'From the lips of a lady': Mrs A.M. Hamilton-Grey's first biography of Henry Kendall.
May 1, 2004... THE 'stupidest writer', says Baruch Mendelssohn in Seven Poor Men of Sydney, 'can remain alive after his death', lamenting that a person like himself 'who talks only, and even becomes warm and radiant in talking, dies with each word as if he...

Excavating a bonanza: Sarah Campion.
May 1, 2004... JEAN Devanny, in Queensland in 1943, enquired of Miles Franklin, 'Do you know how I could locate Sarah Campion? Do you know if she is up here?' (Ferrier 100). Devanny, unless she had noticed the enthusiastic reviews of the first two Burdekin...

Society of Women Writers 1925-1935.
May 1, 2004... THE Society of Women Writers was established in Sydney in 1925 and today continues to operate. Throughout its life, one of its key functions has been to provide a point of contact for women writers. A study of the society's first decade...

Annual bibliography of studies in Australian literature: 2003.(Bibliography)
May 1, 2004... This is the forty-first annual bibliography to be published in Australian Literary Studies. Primarily devoted to substantial commentaries useful to criticism and scholarship, the series aims to provide as complete a listing as possible of books...

Prosthetic Gods: Travel, Representation and Colonial Governance.(Book Review)
May 1, 2004... Prosthetic Gods: Travel, Representation and Colonial Governance, by Robert Dixon. St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2001. Paperback, $30. A popular cliche in the field of postcolonial theory is the observation that the...

A Long and Winding Road: Xavier Herbert's Literary Journey.(Book Review)
May 1, 2004... A Long and Winding Road: Xavier Herbert's Literary Journey, by Scan Monahan. Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 2003. Paperback, $38.95. It is now some thirty years since Poor Fellow My Country was published, twenty since...

Transgressive Itineraries: Postcolonial Hybridizations of Dramatic Realism.(Book Review)
May 1, 2004... Transgressive Itineraries: Postcolonial Hybridizations of Dramatic Realism, by Marc Maufort. Bruxelles: PIE-Peter Lang, 2003. 29.90 [euro]. Realism, as this useful comparative study reminds us, is the most problematical and paradoxical of...

Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature.(Book Review)
May 1, 2004... Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature, by Clare Bradford. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001. Paperback, $34.50. Clare Bradford's already influential study has received several top international honours...

Against the Grain: Beverley Farmer's Writing.(Book Review)
May 1, 2004... Against the Grain: Beverley Farmer's Writing, by Lyn Jacobs. UQP Studies in Australian Literature. St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2001. Paperback, $30. Like Lyn Jacobs I like Beverley Farmer's writing, having followed it...

Convict Words: Language in Early Colonial Australia.(Book Review)
May 1, 2004... Convict Words: Language in Early Colonial Australia, by Amanda Laugesen. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002. Paperback, $34.95. Chain Letters: Narrating Convict Lives, edited by Lucy Frost and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart. Carlton...

Timepieces.(Book Review)
May 1, 2004... Clarke, Marcus. For the Term of His Natural Life. Pymble, NSW: HarperCollins, 2002. Nicholas, Stephen, ed. Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia's Past. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Timepieces, by Drusilla Modjeska. Sydney: Picador,...

Books received.(Brief Article)(Bibliography)
May 1, 2004... Journal of New Zealand Literature 20 (2002). Special issue on 'Settlement Studies'. Co-edited by Alex Calder and Stephen Turner, University of Auckland. Articles by Jonathan Lamb, Paul Monin, Christopher Pinney, and others. Margaret...

Clem Christesen and his legacy.
May 1, 2004... THIS is a task I have been dodging for a long time, I realise as I sit down to write. Clem Christesen was a complex and contradictory individual, and his life-work even more so. The two are hard to separate: for more than three decades, from...