Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 The Beach as (Hu)man Limit in Gold Coast Narrative Fiction
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Gold Coast beaches oscillate in the cultural imagination between everyday reality and a tourist's paradise of ‘sun, surf and sex’ (Winchester and Everett 2000: 59). While these narratives of selfhood and becoming, egalitarianism and sexual liberation punctuate the media, Gold Coast literary fictions instead reveal the beach as a site of danger, wholly personifying the unknown. Within Amy Barker's Omega Park, Melissa Lucashenko's Steam Pigs, Georgia Savage's The House Tibet and Matthew Condon's Usher and A Night at the Pink Poodle, the beach is a ‘masculine’ space for testing the limit of the coastline and one's own capacity for survival. This article undertakes a close textual analysis of these novels and surveys other Gold Coast fictions alongside spatial analysis of the Gold Coast coastline. These fictions suggest that the Gold Coast is not simply a holiday world or ‘Crime Capital’ in the cultural imagination, but a mythic space with violent memories, opening out onto an infinite horizon of conflict and estrangement.'

Source: Abstract.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Queensland Review vol. 25 no. 1 June 2018 14226536 2018 periodical issue 2018 pg. 149-162
Last amended 2 Aug 2018 08:18:28
149-162 The Beach as (Hu)man Limit in Gold Coast Narrative Fictionsmall AustLit logo Queensland Review
Subjects:
  • Gold Coast, Queensland,
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