y separately published work icon Queensland Review periodical issue   peer reviewed assertion
Alternative title: Thea Astley Special Issue
Issue Details: First known date: 2019... vol. 26 no. 2 December 2019 of Queensland Review est. 1994 Queensland Review
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.

Contents

* Contents derived from the , 2019 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Topographies of Reception : Thea Astley, Leigh Dale , single work criticism

'This article is an intervention in debates about the reputation of Australian writers, with specific reference to the career of Thea Astley (and, as a ‘benchmark’, Randolph Stow). It argues that the terrain in which reputations are made and books are valued is complex and uneven, particularly when viewed from regional perspectives. The aim is to shift the focus in ‘reception’ from single fields, such as book sales, literary prizes, critical attention and international recognition, to show a more complex literary ecology within which authors might simultaneously ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ in different ways. The data supporting this claim come from a variety of sources, including newspaper databases, schools and libraries, although the article is ‘preliminary’ in the sense that it does not investigate the substance of the quantitative data compiled — for example, it does not consider in depth the reviews or kinds of stories that were carried in the press. The discussion of reputation aims to keep Astley’s oeuvre and style in view, in order to consider why and how Astley might be ‘neglected’ and how this neglect might be addressed.' (Publication abstract)

(p. 203-216)
Girl with a Monkeyi"Anti-communist propaganda", Kate Cantrell , single work poetry (p. 217)
Double Trouble : The Teacher/Satirist Duality in Thea Astley’s Critical Writings, Kate Cantrell , Lesley Hawkes , single work criticism

'Over a fifty-year period, from 1944 to 1994, Thea Astley published a number of critical writings, including essays, newspaper articles and reviews, and short reflections and meditations on her craft. Despite a renewed interest in Astley’s work, however, most critical interrogations of her oeuvre focus on her novels, and more recently her poetry. As a result, Astley’s critical writing has not been afforded the same breadth and depth of investigation as her fiction. This lacuna is troubling, since Astley’s critical works are important not only for their insight, but for what they reveal about Astley’s self-representation, and in particular the dual identity that she embodied as both a teacher and a satirist. This article argues that these dual roles emerge clearly in Astley’s essays and in fact are inextricable from many of her works. Further, the tensions between these two personae — Astley as teacher and Astley as satirist — reveal natural overlaps with her imaginative writing, and reflect her changing ideas about fiction writing, literature, and education.' (Publication abstract)

(p. 218-231)
Reading the ‘Gold Coast Symphony’ in Thea Astley’s The Acolyte, Alison Bartlett , single work criticism

'Thea Astley is a figure who is strongly associated with music, both in her life interests and in her writing rhythms and allusions; this article investigates the uses of music in her 1972 novel The Acolyte. Drawing on a recent genre of critical musicology that understands music to be a social practice, The Acolyte is read in relation to mid-twentieth-century cultural debates around the development of a distinctive Australian classical music. Centring on the blind pianist turned composer Jack Holberg, The Acolyte is grounded in the Gold Coast hinterland as an inspiring and generative landscape, in contrast with the desolate outback favoured in national mythologies. Holberg’s ‘Gold Coast Symphony’, arguably the turning point of the novel, imaginatively writes this coastal fringe of urban debauchery into the vernacular of classical music through its performance in conservative 1960s Brisbane. In this article, I read The Acolyte as a novel positioned within an Australian musicological history that intersects with the poetics of place, the politics of gender and sexuality, and ongoing national formations through cultural production.' (Publication abstract)

(p. 232-244)
Thea Astley’s Modernism of the ‘Deep North’, or on (un)kindness, Jessica Gildersleeve , single work criticism

'Although she is often perceived as a writer of the local, the rural or the regional, Thea Astley herself notes writing by American modernists as her primary literary influence, and emphasises the ethical value of transnational reading and writing. Similarly, she draws parallels between writing of the American ‘Deep South’ and her own writing of the ‘Deep North’, with a particular focus on the struggles of the racial or cultural outsider. In this article, I pursue Astley’s peculiar blend of these literary genres — modernism, the Gothic and the transnational — as a means of understanding her conceptualisation of kindness and community. Although Astley rejects the necessity of literary community, her writing emphasises instead the value of interpersonal engagement and social responsibility. With a focus on her first novel, Girl with a Monkey (1958), this article considers Astley’s representation of the distinction between community and kindness, particularly for young Catholic women in Queensland in the early twentieth century. In its simultaneous critique of the expectations placed on women and its upholding of the values of kindness and charity, Astley considers our responsibilities in our relations with the Other and with community.' (Publication abstract)

(p. 245-255)
The Death of Australian Literature in Thea Astley’s Drylands, Meg Brayshaw , single work criticism

'This article reads Thea Astley’s final novel in the context of rhetoric about the death of Australian literature that has been a mainstay of our national culture almost since its inception. In the early 2000s, a new round of obituarists argued that the global publishing industry, critical trends and changing educational pedagogies were eroding Australia’s literary identity. Drylands, published in 1999, can be considered a slightly prescient participant in this conversation: it is subtitled A Book for the World’s Last Reader, seemingly framing the novel in a polemics of decline. My reading, however, sees the book as the product of two correlated yet combative literary projects: the attempt by its primary narrator, Janet Deakin, to write a book after what she sees as the likely death of reading and writing; and Astley’s more nuanced exploration of the role of literature in settler colonial modernity. Reading across the seven narratives that constitute the book, I argue that Drylands performs the fraught relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the context of writing about the systemic violence of the settler colonial state, questioning literary privilege, exclusivity and complicity in ways that remain relevant to debates regarding Australian literature today.' (Publication abstract)

(p. 256-268)
‘To My Brother’ : Gay Love and Sex in Thea Astley’s Novels and Stories, Cheryl M. Taylor , single work criticism

'Beginning as early as A Descant for Gossips (1960), gay men and gay love come and go in Thea Astley’s prose oeuvre. The responses that these characters and this topic invite shift with point of view and under the impact of varied themes. Astley’s treatment refuses to be contained, either by traditional Catholic doctrines about sex or by Australia’s delay in decriminalising homosexual acts. Driven by love for her gay older brother Philip, whose death from cancer corresponded with her final allusions to gay love in The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996), Astley’s only constant message on this, as on other topics, is humans’ responsibility to treat each other with kindness. This essay draws on Karen Lamb’s biography and on writings and reminiscences by Philip Astley’s family and fellow Jesuits to reveal his significance as his sister sought to resolve through her fiction the conflict between an inculcated Catholic idolisation of purity and her own hard-won understanding and acceptance of gay men.' (Publication abstract)

(p. 269-284)
Karen Lamb, Thea Astley: Inventing Her Own Weather, Emma Doolan , single work review

'Across her forty-year writing career, Thea Astley (1925–2004) produced seventeen books, including novels, novellas and short story collections. Early works such as A Descant for Gossips (1960) as well as later ones — It’s Raining in Mango (1987) and Drylands (1999) — have become much-loved Australian classics. Astley was the first writer to win multiple Miles Franklin awards and remains tied with Tim Winton as the only four-time recipients of the prize. As Karen Lamb’s biography — the first book-length treatment of Astley — makes clear, these achievements were no mean feat for a writer struggling to balance the demands of craft with the pressures of motherhood, marriage, work and gendered expectations in a period of shifting social norms.'  (Introduction)

(p. 285-286)
Susan Sheridan, The Fiction of Thea Astley, Louise Henry , single work review
— Review of The Fiction of Thea Astley Susan Sheridan , 2016 multi chapter work criticism ;

'I had heard the name of Thea Astley long before I ever came to read her words. I knew she had set a significant number of her stories in the region in which I grew up and I was curious to see how she had depicted this place I thought I knew. My introduction to her writing was through her short story collection Hunting the Wild Pineapple (1979), and as I closed the book I wondered why she had focused on the grotesque and extreme elements of the north, and on the strange lives of failing and disappointed people. But the characters burrowed into my psyche, as did the themes and ideas Astley was exploring, and I recognised uncomfortably familiar shapes and echoes of a not-too-distant past.' (Introduction)

(p. 286-287)
Thea Astley, Selected Poems, Edited by Cheryl Taylor, Ariella Van Luyn , single work review
— Review of Thea Astley : Selected Poems Thea Astley , 2017 selected work poetry ;

'Astley’s Selected Poems — many of which are previously unpublished and span her life from childhood to adulthood — does not so much offer a collection of outstanding aesthetic merit, but rather suggests the ways in which the poems resonate with the stylistic qualities and themes of Astley’s later, more widely read and acclaimed fiction. Indeed, the whole collection invites a reading of poetry as the form through which Astley learnt to be a fiction writer.' (Introduction)

(p. 287-290)
X