Fire single work   essay  
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 Fire
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

Much of the Great Dividing Range that runs across Eastern Australia was burning while I wrote this book. In Canberra our days were punctuated with the anxious checking of air quality and emergency services apps. Amanda Lohrey is a writer who speaks to these times: her work is concerned with the relationship between people and the communities and environments they live with. More specifically, she writes about our apprehension of crisis and its proximity. Lohrey's novels use the motif of fire to engage with ethical and political questions about how individuals feel, and take, responsibility for others, especially in relation to environmental crisis. Fire acts both as symbol and plot device in Lohrey's novels and stories; it is a real crisis that is also a metaphor for catastrophe more generally. This is especially the case in The Reading Group (1988) and Vertigo: A Pastoral (2008). Two decades separate the publication of these novels, and formally they are extremely different, yet they show the continuation of a series of ideas about the relationship between personal and political conflagrations: how private life is impacted by political events, and how it can also be understood through the lens of large-scale crisis such as fire.' (Introduction)
 

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

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    y separately published work icon Lohrey Julieanne Lamond , Collingwood : Melbourne University Press , 2022 24426524 2022 selected work essay

    'A guide to the world of Amanda Lohrey's fiction, and a meditation on what her writing has to say about contemporary life and how we live it.

    'Amanda Lohrey is a fearless and idiosyncratic writer whose award-winning career spans four decades. Her work is experimental, political, intimate and compelling. Lohrey provides an illuminating series of readings of key preoccupations across Lohrey's body of work. From the relationship of the personal to the political, masculinity and free will, human and non-human worlds and how reading shapes us, Lohrey traces a remarkable career across the contemporary literary landscape, and provides readers with an understanding of Lohrey's bold and singular style.'  (Publication summary)

    Collingwood : Melbourne University Press , 2022
    pg. 88-118
Last amended 18 Oct 2022 09:34:36
88-118 Firesmall AustLit logo
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