y separately published work icon Commonwealth : Essays and Studies periodical issue   peer reviewed assertion
Alternative title: Revolution(s)
Issue Details: First known date: 2019... vol. 42 no. 1 Autumn 2019 of Commonwealth est. 1974 Commonwealth : Essays and Studies
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In 2018, the theme for the annual conference of the SAES (Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur), held at Nanterre University, itself a site of student revolution in the past, was “Revolution(s),” a notion which has particular resonance for the New Literatures panel which provided the genesis of many of the articles included in this issue. Previously colonised countries, as diverse and geographically disparate as India, South Africa, Nigeria, Canada, and Australia (to name but these), have all experienced revolutions in various forms, both during the colonial period and after independence. These revolutions, among which the Canadian rebellions of 1837 and 1838, the 1857-8 uprising in India, the New Zealand wars between 1845 and 1872, the first chimurenga (“uprising” in the Shona language) in Zimbabwe (1894-97), the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), and the Biafran war (1967-70) in some cases paved the way for later twentieth-century rebellions which led to independence and, in some cases, to further revolutions.' (Christine Lorre-Johnston and Fiona McCann : Introduction)

Notes

  • Contents indexed selectively.

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2019 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
“The Whole Island Is a Jail and We the Warders” : States of Exception in Tasmanian Historical Fiction, Ellen Turner , single work criticism

'Looking at two historical romances by women writers, Kathleen Graves’ Exile: A Tale of Old Tasmania (1945) and Isabel Dick’s Wild Orchard (1946), this article seeks to examine narratives of an early nineteenth-century Van Diemen’s Land that are apparently at odds with the 1940s Tasmania it was to become. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception” as the theoretical underpinnings for this essay, I read both the nineteenth- and twentieth-century island as a site for the proliferation of bare life whereby the whole of society finds itself defined by its prison-like capacity to strip individuals of their right to life. In telling these stories in which not all lives are equal, it seems that Dick and Graves are attempting to situate their narratives firmly in the past where they cannot contaminate the present, and indeed, future of their island.' (Publication abstract)

Bridget Grogan. Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction: An Abject Dictatorship of the Flesh., Jonathan Dunk , single work review
— Review of Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction : An Abject Dictatorship of the Flesh Bridget Grogan , 2019 multi chapter work criticism ;

'Bridget Grogan’s monograph Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction articulates a welcome challenge to a number of the assumptions of White studies. Her compelling primary thesis is that White doesn’t endorse a dualistic paradigm between spiritual transcendence and corporeal abjection, but rather stages it as an immanent critique of rationalist modernity. This argument draws on the concept of what Grogan calls the “somatic spirituality” which critically diverges from the Platonic and Pauline view of the flesh as the prison of the soul. This is salutary in a number of ways; critics have long recognized the importance of physical abjection in White’s novels, but often in unhelpful and contradictory ways.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 11 May 2020 12:36:21
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