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'In the tradition of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879), and Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), feminine desire for self-transformation, or "becoming," features as a recurrent theme across several twenty-first-century "suburbia" novels by Generation X Australian women writers. Joanna Murray-Smith's Sunnyside (2005), Georgia Blain's Too Close to Home (2011), Peggy Frew's House of Sticks (2011), and Anita Heiss's Tiddas (2014) all share the character of a "suburban mother" desperate for some kind of metamorphosis—or, as one of the characters in Sunnyside quips, "a radical shift in her life map" (Murray-Smith 305). Although flight from suburbia dominates as a mode of becoming in Australian fiction (McCann 56), these novels explore alternative conduits to feminine reinvention. ' (Introduction)
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Last amended 6 Jan 2017 10:54:44
