I'll Show You Love In a Handful of Dust single work   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 I'll Show You Love In a Handful of Dust
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'This article argues the final and arguably most permeable frontier Patrick White’s Voss sets out across is the material. Informed by the environmental and material turn in the humanities and turning away from the purely psychological and ‘country of the mind’ readings of White’s novel, I explore Voss’s engagement with various non-realist traditions to open questions on how literature and the text might materialise new sources of intimacy and interconnection with the mineral realm. Tracking a journey through stone and rock to dust, I connect Voss’s material poetics to larger themes and the wider question of the texts relationship to the Australian environment. I argue that in White’s novel a confrontation occurs between an inherited European literary aesthetics, connected to humanist ideals, and the dry and uniquely Australian material environments of the interior. Whereas colonial Sydney seeks stability and impermeability through their relation to stone and the material world, the journey inland will fracture and fissure established forms. The ultimate triumph of Voss’s material poetics, manifested largely through Laura, is to discover not simply fear in a handful of dust, as in T.S. Eliot’s famous line from The Waste Land, but love.' (Publication abstract)

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    y separately published work icon JASAL vol. 22 no. 2 December 2022 25574810 2022 periodical issue 'Welcome to issue 2 of JASAL for 2022. What a year it has been! For ASAL one of the highlights of 2022 was of course the annual conference. This year’s conference was held in July in Hobart at the University of Tasmania. The title was Coming to Terms, 30 Years On: The Mabo Legacy in Australian Writing. Presenters from around the country and beyond gathered in person and online to consider how the Mabo decision of 1992 has impacted Australian writers and writing in manifold ways. We look forward to showcasing a selection of these papers in our forthcoming conference issue in late 2023.' (Robert Clarke, University of Tasmania Victoria Kuttainen, James Cook University 2022
Last amended 22 Dec 2022 07:14:09
https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/JASAL/article/view/16715 I'll Show You Love In a Handful of Dustsmall AustLit logo JASAL
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