y separately published work icon JASAL periodical issue   peer reviewed assertion
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... vol. 22 no. 1 2022 of JASAL est. 2002 JASAL
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Contents

* Contents derived from the 2022 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
‘Somewhere to Store All Those Memories’ : Archive Fever in Simone Lazaroo’s Lost River, Susan Ash , single work criticism

'This article examines how the concept of the archive may operate as a generative rather than purely repressive space for a young Eurasian woman, Ruth, who is dying of breast cancer in Simone Lazaroo’s novel, Lost River: Four Albums. I build on the concept of hypomnesis which first appeared in Plato’s Phaedrus to distinguish between the oral and written forms of remembering, but has come to signify the wider act of turning memory into something concrete, a product emerging from the process of remembering and memorialising. The preamble announces the marginalised Eurasian woman’s decision to use four discarded photograph albums as ‘Somewhere to store all those memories’ for her child, Dewi, to have after the mother’s passing.  The narrative then follows a nonlinear structure where each of the four albums investigates the origins and meaning of Dewi’s life from her conception until her mother’s final moments. I argue that this act of domiciling lives in these albums operates as a form of counter history, comprising moments that tell an alternative story about belonging for the disenfranchised. That is, operating from the bottom, as a mother intimately familiar with the precarity of home, Ruth designs her archive to demonstrate how dwelling, if you get it ‘right,’ may lead to a sense of binding love, happiness, and home. To conclude, the essay explores how Derrida’s ideas about ‘archival desire’ help to illustrate the kind of ‘taking care’ Heidegger privileges in his writing on dwelling.' (Publication abstract)

Henry Handel Richardson and Olga Roncoroni 1919-24: An Entanglement, Rachel Solomon , single work criticism

Olga Roncoroni’s essay in Henry Handel Richardson: Some Personal Impressions is the only first-hand account of how she and Henry Handel Richardson became ‘entangled.’ However, it does little to explain why Richardson sacrificed so much of her own life, including the writing of The Way Home between 1919-24, for her new and younger friend. Gaps in Roncoroni’s memoir and the destruction of private papers have enabled speculation about Richardson’s motivations in assisting Roncoroni and the nature of Roncoroni’s character. This essay considers previously unexamined materials from the Medico-Psychological Clinic, the London School of Dalcroze Eurhythmics, and Queenswood School to paint a broader picture of Roncoroni and her activities during this period and the years immediately following. In addition to Richardson’s correspondence and Roncoroni’s memoir, this analysis exposes the extent of Roncoroni’s mental health issues, Richardson’s burden of care, and the circumstances that allowed Richardson to resume her writing life while continuing to support Roncoroni. Consequently, the prevailing characterisations of Richardson as self-serving and dominant and Roncoroni as entirely dependent on and preoccupied with Richardson is reconsidered. In this way, Dorothy Green’s largely overlooked or misconstrued understanding of the two women and their relationship is also reaffirmed and developed. The conclusions of this study pave the way for a re-evaluation of subsequent aspects of Richardson’s biography, including her relationships and disturbances to her writing patterns.' (Publication abstract)

‘One Red Blood’ : Multi-Species Belonging in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, Liz Shek-Noble , single work criticism

'Non-human animals feature prominently in Alexis Wright's novel, The Swan Book. In addition to the avian creatures of the novel's title, The Swan Book includes representations of fish, owls, mynas, brolgas, rats, cats, dogs, and snakes. Building on previous scholarship into the novel's focus on non-human species, this article explores the centrality of multi-species being and interconnectedness within an Indigenous cosmological framework. The Swan Book demonstrates the pivotal role of non-human animals in communicating the ancestral stories and historical knowledge of Aboriginal nations. As a result, an Indigenous worldview centred on the notion of Country is presented as a potential solution to current environmental challenges in our world. The article also draws attention to the muteness of Oblivia, the central character of Wright's novel. Employing concepts from disability studies and critical animal studies, the article finds that Oblivia's muteness demonstrates the interlocking discourses of racism, ableism, and anthropocentrism at work in Western colonialism. As a result, the character's muteness indicates how the category of ‘animal’ has been discursively employed to justify the dual exclusion of Indigenous and disabled people from the category of the human. Oblivia’s embrace of the black swans and her subsequent refusal to communicate in ways that are normatively acceptable to hearing people is an important reminder for readers to orient themselves ethically to others whose embodiments, minds, and ways of life may be (radically) different from their own.'(Publication abstract)

Colonial Hauntings : Settler Colonialism and the Abject in Kenneth Cook’s Fear Is the Rider, Lukas Klik , single work criticism

'Kenneth Cook’s literary oeuvre has hitherto received relatively little critical attention. Recently, almost thirty years after his death, an unknown novel by Cook was discovered and, in 2016, published under the title Fear Is the Rider. While it echoes his best known novel Wake in Fright in many ways, it is yet more than simply a Gothic narrative about the Australian outback. In fact, one of its main interests is settler colonialism. In this article, drawing on Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, I argue that Fear Is the Rider constructs Australian settler colonialism as an abject structure by envisioning it as something that, despite efforts to do so, cannot be banished and instead haunts the nation uncomfortably. Through the figure of the monster chasing the protagonists relentlessly, which becomes an embodiment of settler colonialism, the narrative pictures the violence of colonialist structures and thereby provokes readers to question them.'(Publication abstract)

Michelle Cahill. Letter to Pessoa., Antonio Jose Simoes Da Silva , single work review
— Review of Letter to Pessoa Michelle Cahill , 2016 selected work short story ;
Dennis Haskell. And Yet …, David Gilbey , single work review
— Review of And Yet... Dennis Haskell , 2020 selected work poetry ;
'And Yet . . ., Dennis Haskell’s ninth collection of poems, is a (late?) string quartet, its four movements attenuating poetic moments, moods and wordplay with poise and emotional intelligence. The first movement ‘Afterwards’ is a jugular-seeking, sonata-form allegro, spinning words around experiences of grieving after the deaths of his wife, his mother and his father-in-law: ‘No matter how blanketed, you can’t get warm / because the blizzard of death is blowing / from within; blood leaches from your body / all the dim day and all through the night’ (‘Go Gently’).' (Introduction)
Helen Vines. Eve Langley and the Pea Pickers., Frances Devlin-Glass , single work review
— Review of Eve Langley and 'The Pea Pickers' Helen Vines , 2021 single work biography ;
'Helen Vines’s Eve Langley and the Pea Pickers attempts more than its title suggests: it is both literary biography, and a literary critical exercise, aiming to separate the life from the fiction but inevitably seeing the interrelationships. However, because Langley writes fictionalised autobiography (no-one disputes this), Helen Vines sifts the known facts judiciously in chapters 1–5, but in chapter 6, she writes (explicitly) speculatively, drawing on a small repertoire of five clinical texts and articles and the opinion of an unnamed clinical psychologist, for some of her insights. This small body of texts and articles dates from the 1980s.' 

(Introduction)

Juliana de Nooy. What’s France Got to Do with It?: Contemporary Memoirs of Australians in France., Paul Genoni , single work review
— Review of What's France Got to Do with It? : Contemporary Memoirs of Australians in France Juliana De Nooy , 2020 multi chapter work criticism ;
'Scholars of literature and related disciplines should feel at least a frisson of interest when a colleague signposts a ‘new’ area of writing, publishing and academic interest. Not that an emerging genre may have gone entirely unnoticed, but others have perhaps passed it by with only a backward glance, or even a thought that it may be unworthy of their professional interest.' 

(Introduction)

Kate Leah Rendell, Ed. Randolph Stow: Critical Essays., Richard Carr , single work review
— Review of Randolph Stow : Critical Essays 2021 anthology criticism ;
'Kate Leah Rendell has capitalised on the revitalised enthusiasm for Randolph Stow with Randolph Stow: Critical Essays, an edited collection of thirteen pieces exploring the writer of fiction and the man. It was Suzanne Falkiner’s hefty tome, Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow (2015), that sparked renewed interest in a once-major writer who had descended into oblivion by the time of his death in 2010. Stow had ranked among Australia’s major writers for most of the late twentieth century. At age 22, he won the Miles Franklin Prize for his third novel, To the Islands (1958). His subsequent novels, Tourmaline (1962) and The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965) achieved classic status almost immediately. Stow’s history followed a pattern common enough among creative Australians in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He left the country in his twenties, in the early 1960s, leading a life as wanderer and then as a permanent exile. After an extended visit to Australia in 1974, Stow left for England—Suffolk—never to return. His writing silences moved from prolonged to permanent; after the 1984 publication of The Suburbs of Hell, Stow did not publish another work.' (Introduction)
Rebecca Waese. When Novels Perform History : Dramatizing the Past in Australian and Canadian Literature., Antonio Jose Simoes Da Silva , single work review
— Review of When Novels Perform History : Dramatizing the Past in Australian and Canadian Literature Rebecca Waese , 2017 multi chapter work criticism ;
'The title of Rebecca Waese’s book, When Novels Perform History: Dramatizing the Past in Australian and Canadian Literature (2017) pretty much explains what the work sets out to do. When Novels Perform History consists of a series of readings of selected novels that, on their own, generally support the claims made about the way some works of fiction foreground the power and effect of drama and performance to complicate, revise or reimagine the past as recorded in settler colonies. In Waese’s own words, she explores how ‘[d]ramatic modes of fiction about the past often heighten perceptions of immediacy and sensory awareness by creating a sense of immersion or embodiment in a particular historical scene’ (1). Apart from the Introduction, there are six chapters alternating between Australian and Canadian novels.' 

(Introduction)

Elizabeth McMahon and Brigitta Olubas, Editors. Antigone Kefala: New Australian Modernities., Anna Dimitriou , single work review
— Review of Antigone Kefala : New Australian Modernities 2021 anthology criticism ;
'Elizabeth McMahon and Brigitta Olubas’s edited work Antigone Kefala: New Australian Modernities is more than an overdue tribute to a significant Australian writer from elsewhere, who has continued to publish her work for over half a century. This collection traces Antigone Kefala’s life and her publishing career in Australia, and considers her work’s reception. Initially, the publication shows, Kefala’s writing was classed as ethnic, and then multicultural, but more recently it has become part of a wider understanding of ‘arts for a multicultural Australia’ (McMahon and Olubas 6). The scholars and writers who have contributed their essays to this edited collection offer a mix of critical appraisal, personal reflection, and their affirmation of commitment to a shared vision for the expansion of Australian writing, embodied in Kefala’s work. As Sneja Gunew argues, we need to ‘expand and even distort our understanding of international aesthetic categories such as Modernism and to question the dominance of English within those categories so as to include and account for the multilingual’ in the story of Australian Literatures as well (7).' 

(Introduction)

Brendan McNamee. Grounded Visionary: The Mystic Fictions of Gerald Murnane., Paul Genoni , single work review
— Review of Grounded Visionary : The Mystic Fictions of Gerald Murnane Brendan McNamee , 2019 multi chapter work criticism ;
'A rare task more difficult than reviewing a book by Gerald Murnane, might be reviewing a critical account encompassing most of Murnane’s oeuvre. Not that I subscribe to the regularly expressed view that Murnane is ‘difficult.’ Indeed, overall, his novels—while being admittedly daunting when encountered for the first time—are quite straightforward once the reader finds the measure of the writer’s style, tenor and range. But reviewers and critics have often struck trouble in trying to fulfil their role of describing the key elements of Murnane’s fiction to unfamiliar readers. This is because there is an undeniable intricacy to his fiction, which demands to be addressed, and in so far as possible explained or described. That ‘intricacy’ is present in the stylistic surface of Murnane’s conspicuously polished prose; in the constant flux between his fictional bedrock and the metafictional superstructure; and in the substantive content provided by his tangled thematic and imagistic obsessions. Indeed, it is the remarkable degree to which style, method and substance are interwoven that occasionally results in Murnane’s fiction perplexing even his most dedicated readers. As Brendan McNamee concedes at one point in Grounded Visionary, there is a notoriously challenging section of Murnane’s Inland that leaves him lamenting, ‘The point of which, if there is any, escapes me entirely’ (92).' 

(Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 7 Jul 2022 11:04:09
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