'Gail Jones: Word, Image, Ethics is an accessible guide to the writings of Gail Jones, the award-winning Australian author, essayist and academic.
'Drawing together ideas from literature, art, philosophy and photography, the volume presents a compelling analysis of Jones’ literary commitment to the political and the personal, and reflects on how and why we interpret literary texts.
'An essential contribution to the intersecting fields of Australian studies and international literature, Gail Jones: Word, Image, Ethics offers innovative insights into the writing of one of Australia’s most accomplished authors.' (Publication summary)
'In 2022, Gail Jones published Salonika Burning, set during the First World War, her ninth novel and the latest entry in an impressive body of literary work. Jones began her professional life as an academic, first at Edith Cowan University and then at the University of Western Australia, and her first two works of short fiction, The House of Breathing (1992) and Fetish Lives (1997), as well as her first novel, Black Mirror (2002), are notable for their experimental integration of critical theory, feminism, and innovative reinterpretations of canonical texts. It was Jones's subsequent novels—Sixty Lights (2004), Dreams of Speaking (2006), Sorry (2007), and Five Bells (2011)—with a new focus on the historical and national issues of Australia's colonial legacy that established her as a major author. This status has been cemented by the publication of two recent academic studies of her work: Gail Jones: Word, Image, Ethics (2020), by Tanya Dalziell, and Inner and Outer Worlds: Gail Jones' Fiction (2022), edited by Anthony Uhlmann.' (Introduction)
'Grouping sets of novels and stories to elucidate the functions of key tropes in Jones’s fiction, Dalziell covers the writer’s entire output up to 2020. With recourse to the novelist’s essays and interviews, chapters provide close readings of weather, time, reading and writing, image and modernity. The interest overall is to show how unstable oscillations in the stories serve to express an idea of ethical relations as tentative constructions of community aware of their limitations, both in life and literature.' (Publication abstract)
'Grouping sets of novels and stories to elucidate the functions of key tropes in Jones’s fiction, Dalziell covers the writer’s entire output up to 2020. With recourse to the novelist’s essays and interviews, chapters provide close readings of weather, time, reading and writing, image and modernity. The interest overall is to show how unstable oscillations in the stories serve to express an idea of ethical relations as tentative constructions of community aware of their limitations, both in life and literature.' (Publication abstract)
'In 2022, Gail Jones published Salonika Burning, set during the First World War, her ninth novel and the latest entry in an impressive body of literary work. Jones began her professional life as an academic, first at Edith Cowan University and then at the University of Western Australia, and her first two works of short fiction, The House of Breathing (1992) and Fetish Lives (1997), as well as her first novel, Black Mirror (2002), are notable for their experimental integration of critical theory, feminism, and innovative reinterpretations of canonical texts. It was Jones's subsequent novels—Sixty Lights (2004), Dreams of Speaking (2006), Sorry (2007), and Five Bells (2011)—with a new focus on the historical and national issues of Australia's colonial legacy that established her as a major author. This status has been cemented by the publication of two recent academic studies of her work: Gail Jones: Word, Image, Ethics (2020), by Tanya Dalziell, and Inner and Outer Worlds: Gail Jones' Fiction (2022), edited by Anthony Uhlmann.' (Introduction)
