'This paper examines the ways in which short stories have interacted with different national contexts throughout the history of modern Australia, endorsing and resisting what Fredric Jameson calls the symbolic resolution of narrative, and subsequently considers the processes by which certain critical trends and interpretive emphases can illuminate or obscure that interaction through comparative readings of texts by Henry Lawson and John Kinsella.'
Source: Abstract.
'In 1998 Michelle Grossman’s overview of Indigenous women’s writing explored the significant contribution that life writing had made to the country’s literatures and pondered where younger authors might take Indigenous writing in the twenty-first century. This essay examines the work of one such writer, Ellen van Neerven, whose award-winning collection of stories, Heat and Light (2014), is a work of fiction that draws in part on personal and family stories to offer heterogeneous representations of individuals and families, lovers and friends. Part short story cycle, part long story, part story collection, the text resists easy categorisation. Within its tripartite structure, the sixteen stories are narrated in radically different ways to draw on themes explored before in Australian Aboriginal literature, such as the importance of extended family and belonging, in sometimes new ways, such as through a futuristic vision of Australia. Through a close reading of the text, and discussion that incorporates comments made by Neerven herself, this article suggests that through its varied structures, genres and styles, Heat and Light re-imagines and celebrates the fluid and diverse nature of contemporary Indigeneity.'
Source: Abstract.
'Preconceptions of another country can take hold of an artist’s imagination – as ‘America’ did Kafka’s and Lorca’s – but who knew that D. H. Lawrence developed a comprehensive idea of ‘Australia’ long before his one hundred-day visit? Or how central that was to his later work? The objective of David Game, Honorary Lecturer at the Australian National University, is modestly expressed: to ‘throw new light on the significance of [Lawrence's] overall engagement with Australia – its place in his life and art’ (7). He does much more in a work of major scholarship.'
Source: Abstract.
