Issue Details: First known date: 2016... 2016 The Topos of Australia in Contemporary Serbian Language Writing of First-generation Serbian Migrants to Australia
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Focusing on contemporary writing of first-generation Serbian migrants to Australia who write in the Serbian language, this paper addresses two distinct albeit related issues which arise from different meanings of the term topos. Australia, as represented in Serbian migrant writing, is firstly discussed as "a place"-both as a particular physical space or geographical location and as a place of the mind. Various literary conventions are then identified - such as the prevalence of a particular genre, motifs or figures of speech-and their implications further analysed in terms of their pertinence to the perception of Australia in the creative writing of first-generation Serbian migrant writers who write in Serbian. As a particular physical space, Australia is unmistakably situated by way of the North-South binary opposition, with the "Southern Sky" becoming a commonplace (topos) of Serbian migrant literature. Also, it is a place surrounded by the South Seas which serves to "drown all hopes." Thus Australia as a place of the mind emerges as one of loneliness, solitude, isolation and suffering. The elegy, with its topos of comparison of the past and present, proves to be the dominant genre in the poetry which laments the loss of homeland, youth, friends, and love. An invocation of nature (as expounded by Ernst Robert Curtius in his European Literatures and the Latin Middle Ages) is deployed with the topoi such as the autumn-spring binary or the metaphors and poetic images of grey clouds, cobwebs, lost bees, cold skies, foreign flowers, marooned ships and lost anchors. Strikingly, the homeland is imagined as a loving mother whereas Australia, by implication, becomes a cruel foster parent whose actions of "taming" (i.e. assimilating) have to be resisted, making Serbs along with the Greeks and Italians "slow assimilators" as observed by Donald Horne in The Lucky Country.'

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Journal of the European Association for Studies on Australia Australia as Topos: The Transformation of Australian Studies vol. 7 no. 2 2016 11045885 2016 periodical issue

    'The new issue of JEASA partly thematizes the 2015 EASA conference organized by the University of Pannonia in Veszprém, Hungary. The theme of the conference, "Australia as Topos: The Transformation of Australian Studies," is reflected in several articles in this issue, particularly in those centered on mediating Australia for European audience and/or on "European" and transnational readings of contemporary Australian literature. ' (Martina Horakova Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia (JEASA), Vol.7 No.2, 2016.)

    2016
    pg. 70-83
Last amended 19 Apr 2017 09:27:28
70-83 http://www.easa-australianstudies.net/node/441 The Topos of Australia in Contemporary Serbian Language Writing of First-generation Serbian Migrants to Australiasmall AustLit logo Journal of the European Association for Studies on Australia
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X