Suchergebnisse

This article explores the possibility of renewing the comparative study of Canadian and Australian literatures through an alertness to parallel developments in mid-range magazines and middlebrow print cultures in Canada and Australia in the early- to mid-twentieth century. While scoping the possibilities of full-fledged comparative studies, its focus is a case study of the Australian magazine BP: a well-capitalized, plush upmarket publication published by the Australian steamship company Burns Philp. The BP Magazine promoted travel between 1928 and 1942 as the nation underwent a transition from settler colonialism to vernacular modernity. The magazine lays bare tensions between literary aspiration and commodity culture, sophistication and escapism, edification and entertainment, and modernity and primitiveness. The aim of this case study is to raise questions that might be asked of both national literary cultures about the role of travel, modern consumer culture, magazines, and nationhood as the scales of literary values changed during the development of local middlebrow values and tastes.

Unlike the scholarly interest in Arab-American fiction, Arab-Australian literature has not received as much attention from literary critics, Australian-based or otherwise. Increased interest in Arab-American literature has been explained and often contextualized through the United States' long-standing interference in the Arab world, as well as the tense relations between Arabs and Americans within the US. But these issues are not unique to America—like the US, Australia has not shied away from intervening in the region and also has its own troubled relations with Arab immigrant communities. And yet, despite these similar circumstances, no study of how Arab­Australian literature might apprehend or dramatize these particular relations has been undertaken. This paper provides some insights into the albeit nascent but growing field of Arab-Australian fiction. It explores how and in what ways Arab-Australian literature can be categorized as a form of Australian writing, and be seen as part of a transnational network of Arab diaspora fiction.
Cover image: Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies

Requiem for a Beast: A Work for Image, Word and Music by Matt Ottley (2007) is an Australian mixed-media text for young adults that intertwines the myth of Theseus with the story of a boy's coming of age in the Australian Outback. Told through paintings, fragments of graphic novel, diary entry, spoken memories, dreams, and song cycle, it takes young readers into a series of physical, emotional, and historical labyrinths. Physically, the labyrinths appear in the Australian landscape, a place of sweeping beauty but also hot, bare, and threatening (to non-Indigenous people). Emotionally, the labyrinths appear in the boy's backstory: a troubled childhood and a broken relationship with his father. They also appear in the complex history of Australian colonization and the damage done to the Indigenous peoples of the country by colonial settlers and governments. As the boy goes into those labyrinths, he becomes a modern Theseus. He encounters a Minotaur formed by generations of trauma: the trauma visited on the Australian Aborigines and the generational guilt of settlers' descendants. The boy (who as an everyman figure remains unnamed in the book) must face the Minotaur and conquer it in order to begin the process of healing the wounds of the past: his own, his father's, and those of the Aboriginal figures in the book - an elderly Bundjalung woman who was stolen from her parents as a child (through a system of institutionalized racism) and an Aboriginal teenager who was killed in a moment of casual cruelty by a friend of the boy's father. The connected stories of different generations of White and Black Australians interweave with the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur to form a politically charged and deeply felt work, showing the power of young adult fiction to take on difficult subjects and to help young readers negotiate labyrinths of their own.

A wealth of scholarly works were written about Marjorie Barnard following the acclaim greeting the republication, in 1973, of The Persimmon Tree. That same year Louise E Rorabacher wrote a book-length study-Marjorie Barnard and M Barnard Eldershaw, after agreeing not to write about Barnard's private life. This led to many studies of the pair's joint literary output and short biographical studies and much misinformation, from scholars beguiled into believing Barnard's stories which were often deliberately disseminated to protect the secrecy of the affair that dominated her life between 1934 and 1942.A re-examination of her life and work is now necessary because there have been huge misunderstandings about other aspects of Barnard's life, too. Her habit of telling imaginary stories denigrating her father, led to him being maligned by his daughter's interviewers. Marjorie's commonest accusation was of her father's meanness, starting with her student allowance, but if the changing value of money is taken into account, her allowance (for pocket money) was extremely generous compared to wages of the time. In 1935, when Marjorie, as a middle-aged woman, gave up work to write full time, Oswald doubled her allowance and, because she never did earn enough from writing to provide her own pocket money, he kept on paying her that allowance until he died. This surely is evidence of both his generosity and his interest in helping his daughter pursue her ambitions. There is also the matter of him privately publishing her first book, a collection of her schoolgirl stories.Barnard left no diaries, and her letters and interviews were often designed to conceal. It is time that Barnard's life is shown more accurately in its setting, within a comfortable home in middle-class Sydney during a large part of the 20th century. This biography offers a fuller, more accurate, and comprehensive investigation into her life and the wide variety of her work-from novels and short stories to history and critical literary studies and political pamphlets, and also her constant efforts to have Australian writing recognised as adistinct and important part of a separate Australian culture.

In the mid-1970s the Australian government began to stimulate departments of English at various European universities to include in their curricula the teaching of Australian literature. Literature Board of the Australia Council helped organize vari­ ous seminars and conferences, it provided some basic text-books and literary works, and also financially supported Australian university professors to give lectures at these institutions. The Department of English at the University of Ljubljana showed interest in developing these relations and Bernard Hickey was one of the first Australian guests at our university. ; Bernard Hickey je bil dve desetletji profesor za književnost Commonwealtha na univezi Ca'Foscari v Benetkah (1968-1988) in nato profesor za angleško književnost na univerzi v Lecceju, Italija. Od sredine sedemdesetih let dvajsetega stoletja je imel tudi občasna predavanja na Oddelku za germanistiko (sedaj Oddelku za anglistiko in amerikanistiko) Filozofske fakultete v Ljubljani. S svojimi nasveti nam je pomagal pri nabavi knjig za našo oddelčno knjižnico, ki jih je prispeval odbor za književnost pri Avstralskem svetu (Australia Council). Zaradi svojega velikega poznavanja avstralske književnosti, svoje duhovitosti in osebnega šarma je bil Bernard Hickey priljubljen ne le pri učiteljih, temveč tudi pri slušateljih na Oddelku za anglistiko in amerikanistiko Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani. Zlasti bomo pogrešali njegovo veliko prip­ ravljenost za sodelovanje in še posebej njegovo prijateljstvo.

On Our Selection is a series of stories by Steele Rudd, the pen name of Arthur Hoey Davis. The stories portray elements of small 'selector' farming in federation-era Australia and represent a significant body of literature originating in or 'about' the 'bush', the 'outback', the 'never-never' – unspecific appellations attached to regions of non-urban Australia. The stories detail the Rudd family's experiences after taking up a 'selection' in the Australian bush – the arduous processes of early clearing through to their relative prosperity. 'Dad Rudd' has been described as 'Australia's Everyman', and his pugnacious attitude of opposition to the 'squattocracy' and the cities resonated with audiences. The sketches, periodicals, radio plays, theatre productions and, eventually, films that continued the Rudd legacy made these stories a significant voice in the creation of Australian national identity – or at least the 'bush' identity. However, an attempt to update the representation to the 1970s in a television series was unsuccessful. This article considers the interaction between the legislative creation of 'selection' of land and the depictions of life on a selection in the creation of the Australian national identity. It then considers the media and social changes that contextualise the failure of the television series.

«This sophisticated and empathetic study explores a suite of important Australian literary works from the Chinese diaspora. Using memory studies to trace connections and contiguities, Dr Chen maps an emotionally charged literary network that is compelled by the past to confront the future. The result is a richly revealing exploration of transnational literary identity and complex forms of belonging and attachment across time and place.»(Professor Nicole Moore, UNSW Canberra)«If memory is the broken mirror of history, diasporic memories are intricate mosaics of multitudinous pasts: personal, collective, national, cosmopolitan, cultural and political. Reading Chinese Australian literature as a mimesis of memory, Beibei Chen offers invaluable insights into the entanglement of past and present and its effect on diasporic identity.»(Professor Wenche Ommundsen, University of Wollongong)Inspired by the «transnational turn» in global literature, this book explores the significance of transnational memory and identity in Chinese-Australian literature by closely examining representations of these two concepts in selected texts. By attending to diverse forms of memory such as collective memory, individual memory, cosmopolitan memory and transgenerational memory, this book offers unique observations on how different types of memory exert influence on the formation of identity in Chinese diasporic writings and tackles the complexity of reading literary texts in light of theories of memory, sociological studies and psychological analysis.

Australian literature; Aboriginals; 20th century history; History; Australia

Although Australian indigenous poetry is often overtly polemical and politically committed, any reading which analyses it as merely propaganda provides only a small window on it. By presenting the verse of Alf Taylor collected in Singer Songwriter (1992) and Winds (1994) and discussing it in the context of the wider social and cultural rnilieu of the author, my essay aims to show its thematic richness of indigenous poetic expression. Indigenous poets have, on the one hand, undertaken the re­ sponsibility to strive for social and political equality, as is generally believed, while on the other, they have produced powerful self-revelatory accounts of their own mental and emotional interior, which urges us to see their careers in a perspective much wider than that of social chroniclers and rebels. ; Izhajajoč iz trditve, da avstralska staroselska poezija ni samo družbeno in politično angažirana, ampak tudi osebno izpovedna, avtorica članka podrobno pred­ stavi vrsto pesmi sodobnega avstralskega staroselskega pesnika in pisatelja Alfa Taylorja in opozori na tematsko raznolikost njegovega pesniškega ustvarjanja. Poleg kritičnega opazovanja avstralske socialne in politične scene in smelega razgaljanja njenih napak in krivic, ki jih je pesnik boleče izkusil na lastni koži, Taylorjevo po­ ezijo namreč zaznamujeta tenkočuten pogled v človekove duševne tokove in z njim povezano iskanje medsebojnih čustvenih povezav, kar ji daje pečat individualnosti, pa tudi splošne veljavnosti.