Cirrus@Austlit

'Taking as a starting point the metaphor of the palimpsest, this essay explores Winton’s sense of being Australian in his 2015 landscape memoir Island Home. Sarah Dillon’s distinction between the palimpsestic and the palimpsestuous, which draws on Foucault’s own differentiation between the workings of archaeology and genealogy respectively, provides the wider frame. A palimpsestic reading of Island Home along the lines of Abraham and Torok’s reflections on mourning and loss, more specifically their theory of the psychic crypt, throws light on Winton’s “inexpressible mourning” (Abraham and Torok 130) for the loss of an unshaken pre-apology Australianness. Complementarily, a palimpsestuous approach to the text evinces the emergence, among the traces of white nationalism, of a new pattern in Winton’s latest additions to his palimpsest of a nation in Island Home. Read horizontally rather than vertically, Winton’s book reveals an interest in what he calls “an emotional deepening” (168), a new sense of relatedness that acknowledges the damage done to the Indigenous population at the same time that it honours the contribution of the rightful inhabitants of Australia to the current national narrative, creating, in this way, possible openings for non-Indigenous belonging.'

Source: Abstract.

'This paper examines the way in which Eva Sallis fictionalises encounters with Europe, Asia and The Middle-East in her three books, Hiam (1998), City of Sealions (2002) and Mahjar (2003). In her narratives, Sallis depicts the migrant experience in Australia and in foreign places to deconstruct definitions of “home”, of being in the world, and construct the space of the cosmopolitan subject that meanders through historical settings and transnational contexts. Thus, Sallis seems to suggest that the relationship between history and literature is intimate, that narrative and history are multiform and bound, respectively acting upon one another, redefining the boundaries of nations and identities. Looking at how Sallis engages with the political realities and tackles the problems of being different to the mainstream, this paper examines the various meanings derived from intercultural encounters, whether such encounters subvert Australia’s settler-history but also its multicultural and post-colonial nature. The novelist’s use of geographic space and displacement as major components of contemporary identity-making, conveys an inclusive approach to otherness and constructs flexible identities out of global and cosmopolitan experiences.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This paper discusses some of the theories proposed in my monograph The Lost Child in Literature and Culture. It looks at the importance of the lost child figure in disrupting established narratives of history and culture. Using Fraillon’s two novels I discuss how the child is at the centre of abuses of power and also look at the author’s use of alternative forms of language and communication to counter this. The article locates Fraillon’s narratives within fairy-tale tropes such as a child’s quest, while arguing that such tales have also embodied endemic cruelty towards children. Ancient oral folk tales are entwined in the same narrative as modern media. The EASA Conference focused on the rise of nationalism, and the connections between Europe and Australia. The figure of the lost child is sadly pervasive in both parts of the world, showing the inter-connectedness of all our stories. The practice of Child Migration, referred to in this article, is an example of how lost children have been forcibly removed from Europe to Australia as one facet of a system of control.'

Source: Abstract.

'The article offers an overview of Stead’s response to the bourgeois social order, with special emphasis on her satiric commentary after the Second World War. In particular, Stead’s interest in covert statement and the role of Lenin’s seminal theses on the rentier class and imperialism are traced in The Little Hotel to reveal Stead’s unrelenting espousal of communism and her apparent certainty that the capitalist order was facing imminent overthrow.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.