Texts

Trumpet!$!Kay, Jackie!$! !$!Picador!$!
The Lesbian Body!$!Wittig, Monique!$! !$!Peter Owen!$!
The Bone People!$!Hulme, Keri!$! !$!!$!
Tar Baby!$!Morrison, Toni!$! !$!!$!
She Came to Stay!$!Beauvoir, Simone de!$! !$!Fontana!$!
Paradise of the Blind!$!Huong, Duong Thu!$! !$!Perennial!$!
y separately published work icon The Well Elizabeth Jolley , Ringwood : Viking , 1986 Z385481 1986 single work novel (taught in 17 units)
— Appears in: Kokainovyj Bljuz [and] Kolodec 1991;
‘What have you brought me Hester? What have you brought me from the shop?’ / ‘I’ve brought Katherine, Father,’ Miss Harper said. ‘I’ve brought Katherine, but she’s for me.’

It had been a harsh, lonely life for spinster Hester Harper on the isolated farm in Western Australia, with only her elderly, ailing father for companionship. Then, “partly out of pity and aptly out of fancy,” she brought the young orphan girl to stay with them. Katherine was eager to work and to learn, and Hester’s emotionally impoverished life began to flower as the two cooked and sewed and ran the farm and made music for each other’s entertainment. It was all so beautiful–until the night they ran into a mysterious creature (or was it a human being?) on a rutted country road on the way home from a dance. Even after Hester deposited the evidence in the farm’s deep well, the injured voice at the bottom would not be stilled. Most disturbing of all, the closer Katherine is drawn to the edge of the recess, the farther away she gets from Hester.

A haunting, deeply resonant tale of obsessive attachment and sexual awakening, The Well demonstrates once again that Elizabeth Jolley is a writer of wit, high moral purpose, and great conviction. Reviewing her previous novel, Foxybaby, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Carolyn See wrote: “This is prose, thought, and art of the highest elegance and caliber.” The same, and more, can be said of this compassionate, extremely moving, and beautifully articulated new work.

y separately published work icon Her Sister's Eye Vivienne Cleven , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2002 Z985143 2002 single work novel (taught in 7 units)

'...always remember where you're from... To the Aboriginal Families of Mundra this saying brings either comfort or pain. To Nana Vida it is what binds the generations. To the unwilling savant Archie Corella it portends a fate too cruel to name. For Sophie Salte, whose woman's body and child's mind make her easy prey, nothing matters while her sister Murilla is there to watch over her.

For Murilla, fierce protector and unlikely friend to Caroline Drysdale, wife of the town patriarch, what matters is survival. In a town with a history of vigilante raids, missing persons and unsolved murders, survival can be all that matters'. (Source: back cover, 2002 edition)

y separately published work icon For Love Alone Christina Stead , New York (City) : Harcourt Brace , 1944 Z796198 1944 single work novel (taught in 5 units)

'Superbly evoking life in Sydney and London in the 1930s, For Love Alone is the story of the intelligent and determined Teresa Hawkins, who believes in passionate love and yearns to experience it. She focuses her energy on Jonathan Crow, an unlikeable and arrogant man whom she follows to London after four long years of working in a factory and living at home with her loveless family. Reunited with Crow in London, she begins to realise that perhaps he is not as worthy of her affections as originally thought and abandons her idealised vision of love for something quite different.' (From Melbourne University Publishing's website, new ed., 2011)

Description

This subject examines the literary production of a range of twentieth century women writers in France, Britain, the United States, New Zealand, Vietnam and Australia. Perspectives within which this writing will be placed include literary and political aspects of feminist theory, the intersection of questions of gender, class and race, the specific situation of women writers at particular historical periods, women and colonisation, "madness", sexual politics.

Assessment

Short Essay

25%

Class Attendance and Participation

10%

Long Essay

50%

Take home exam

15%

Other Details

Current Campus: St Lucia
Levels: Undergraduate
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