Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 Feminist Fables and Alexis Wright's Art of the Fabulous in 'The Swan Book'
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'Two recent award-winning Australian novels, both of a dystopian cast of mind, Alexis Wright's 'The Swan Book' (2013) and Charlotte Wood's 'The Natural Way of Things' (2015), employ fable to tell powerful contemporary stories. In both novels the issues explored are so violent and threatening to life itself that fable rather than realist narrative becomes the best vehicle for staging them. Here I begin by comparing these two novels briefly, considering the different meanings and uses that "fable" might have for a novelist dealing with such issues of violence (colonial, patriarchal, ecological). I go on to suggest some connections between the uses of fable made by these two novelists and some important feminist writers of the late twentieth century, most notably Angela Carter. The remainder of the essay is focussed on 'The Swan Book' and the way Wright uses the forms of fable to write a story geared to catastrophic times of climate change, representing country as a living entity and inventing a new fable of the black swan and the swan woman.'  (Publication abstract)

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    y separately published work icon Hecate Excess and Desire vol. 43 no. 1/2 2017 14353243 2017 periodical issue

    'This issue of Hecate prints papers presented at the Excess and Desire conference in February 2017.1 A central topic of many of them is that of gendered corporeality, especially as this is represented in literary and cultural production that comes from a fringe, an edge, a periphery—that often stands (up) for a much larger group. The authors discuss texts from a range of contexts, with approaches to ways of reading that involve innovative practices of recognition, and a critique that evaluates writing that speaks out for silenced majorities, and for those who envisage paths for liberation.' (Carole Ferrier, Editorial introduction)

    2017
    pg. 197-214
Last amended 23 Aug 2018 13:13:11
197-214 Feminist Fables and Alexis Wright's Art of the Fabulous in 'The Swan Book'small AustLit logo Hecate
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