Cirrus@Austlit

'Un-Australian Fictions sets out to analyse a subset of Australian literary fictions published between 1988 and 2008 - from the bicentenary of British settlement to the global financial crisis and into a new millennium. By 2008, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the contested optimism of the Australian bicentennial celebrations had faded. During a new transnational era Australians faced sober and unsettling times. Already accorded the status of national obsession, issues of national identity were vigorously contested. Concepts such as nation, multiculturalism and globalisation became topics for heated discussion in the public sphere. These terms were appropriated by interest groups throughout this period to put forward their claims as to what constituted real national belonging. Therefore, from 1988 onwards to name who someone was, as well as what he/she represented as being Australian became a mounting problem of definition. Australia's literary communities were not immune or isolated from the ongoing discussions in the wider public sphere. The un-Australian fictions which this book studies represent the challenges which these texts, in their own unique way, bring to the Australian national ethos and the national mythology which is predicated on traditions such as masculism; a bush ethos; the pre-eminence of white colonial settlement; connectedness to an imaginative European geography; as well as an unbreakable tie to Britain. As un-Australian fictions, these texts reflect the destabilisation of what were once certain, spatial and psychic borders and orders of Australianness. They affect as well as reflect, the wider conversation that continues today about what being Australian means in a new millennium. This book interweaves two disparate discourses: the nation's political and social discourse i.e. the public realm and the subjective, private and fictionalized discourse in the world of the author. Both nationally and internationally, during a time of escalating fear and conservatism, Australian literature through its un-Australian fictions reclaimed and legitimated many and diverse ways of being Australian. This book has been written to recognise this fact.'

Source: Amazon.co.uk. (Sighted: 19/6/2013)