Phil Fitzsimmons (International) assertion Phil Fitzsimmons i(10470315 works by)
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1 'In Need of Vitamin Sea': The Emergence of Australian Identity through the Eyes and Thirst of Kirsty Eager’s [Eagar’s] Vampires Phil Fitzsimmons , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Global Vampire : Essays on the Undead in Popular Culture Around the World 2019; (p. 177-186)
This essay seeks to unpack the nature and associated symbolic meanings of the vampires in Kirsty Eager's Saltwater Vampires (2010). Eager's text still remains a bestselling text for young adults in Australia, roughly corresponding to a time period in which it became increasingly clear that this country's meta-narrative was itself in a state of flux. As a vampire narrative its emphasis is naturally linked to "the symbolics of blood" is already located in a "liminal position" (Stephanou 2014, 5). However, this Young Adult fiction is even more so in that it also lies between several intersecting urtexts related to the Australian context and its underpinning history. In particular Eager has used the destruction of the Dutch East India trading vessel the Batavia, which ran aground off the coast of Western Australia on the fourth of June 1629 as an entree and mimetic foundation for her vampire narrative. As is often the case with historical narratives, and in particular vampire accounts, an initial destructive event then "fans forward, ... to become different moments of the one process of sensing" (Taussig 1992, 21). To further elaborate on this process and the context of this essay, "the connection between humans and vampires—whether constructed within fantasy, fiction, fandom or real-life emulation—is a symbiotic one, and one which is sustained by the umbilical cord of memory" (Bacon and Bronk 2013, 2). Wherever blood and memory are comingled in text, understanding the context is an imperative (Gilders, 2004). Therefore, as summarized in ensuing sections, in the Australian socio-historical and literary contexts the linking thread of actuality and memory is "the imperative of blood" (Brisbane 2009,400), of which the Batavia disaster is the first recorded instance.' (Introduction)
 
1 The Mything Link : The Feminine Voice in the Shifting Australian National Myth Phil Fitzsimmons , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Women Versed in Myth : Essays on Modern Poets 2016; (p. 106-113)

'This paper is grounded in the axiom, that if narrative tells the clearest truth about the conscious layers of humanity and the truth a culture holds at a particular time, then it is poetry that provides the clearest revelation of the unconscious lies that a culture clings to as it changes. This is no more evident than in the poetry of the Australian poet, Chris Mansell, and in particular her poems, Where Edges Are and The Good Soldier. Her poetry not only reflects the crisis of national identity Australia is currently embroiled in as it “struggles to free itself from residual colonial ideologies,” (Huggan 2007:ix), but the role of woman in this societal shift and their place in the ‘landscape myth’ of the ‘lucky country’. Up until recently the Australian national myth has at its core a narrative dominated by the laconic outback male ‘cattle drover’, who is able to survive in the desert landscape of the outback through sheer determination and subduing the environment and native inhabitants. His wife also surfaces in this mythic schema as a quiet, intelligent, bored and subjugated partner. However, this ‘outback survival narrative’ is being eroded as Australians begin to contemplate their national identity. This national questioning is reflected in poetry and literature, in which there is a subtextual metaphoric shift from ‘desert isolation’ to a proxemics myth related to the sea. Mansell’s poetry is arguably one of the clearest socio-psychological ‘places of mythic voice’ whereby the actual pain of female liminality as ‘archetypal echo’ in the Australian myth is morphing from out of a ‘belly of the whale’ experience’, into a driving force whereby new “myths, metaphors, symbols, rituals and philosophic systems” (Deardorff 2004:13) are being generated. Through Mansell’s poetry and mythic imagery, a lie is changing into a potential for living.' (Publication abstract)

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