Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 Violence in Colonial Women's Novels
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'Rachael Weaver has alerted us to the racial violence of colonial short stories, and notes that "[m]any novels also show graphic instances of frontier violence as part of larger and more wide ranging narratives" (fn 1, 33). One sub-genre of the novel form that does this is the carceral novel, such as Caroline Leakey's 'The Broad Arrow' (1859) and Marcus Clarke's 'For the Term of His Natural Life' (1874), which depict the explicit violence of the penal system through convict protagonists. This essay shows that violence abounds in colonial fiction not only in genres that make it explicit, but also where it is embedded - in novels usually categorised in the realist-romance genres (Giles; Dalziell; Thomson). often analysed in terms of gendered inequity (Harris), class relations (Thomson), and colonial representations of "national" identity (Allen; Spender; Gelder and WEAVER), novels by a number of major female novelists from the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War are revisited here through the lens of their treatment and performance of violence.' (Publication abstract) 

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    y separately published work icon Southerly Violence vol. 78 no. 3 December 2018 16857182 2018 periodical issue 'Rarely has Southerly received so much high-quality material than in response to the call for work on the theme of Violence. In fact our poetry editor, Kate Lilley, requested we increase the extent of the issue to accommodate the volume of excellent work; hence this is a large issue that includes a wealth of poetry. The reasons for this abundance are too many. In literary terms, violence provides a readymade drama, an impetus for action and reaction, shock, emotion, transformation; from Milton’s War in heaven to Modernist aesthetics of shock to the contemporary thriller. literature also records more pervasive operations of violence including poverty, colonialism and other socially sanctioned cruelties of lived experience. Writing on violence provides testimony, a necessary record, and may enable catharsis. at the very least it is a mark, a signature of survival in the wake of violent events from an individual encounter to genocide. a deal of the work included also addresses issues of the anthropocene and the relation ships between human and non-human lives.' (Elizabeth McMahon, Editorial introduction) 2018 pg. 35-53
Last amended 26 Jun 2019 13:43:30
35-53 Violence in Colonial Women's Novelssmall AustLit logo Southerly
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