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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'This essay joins in the discussion about the future of national literatures in the shifting formations of globalisation. Specifically, I want to interrogate what we mean by the future when we speak of literature and, specifically, of Australian or New Zealand literature.
The essay proposes a literary cartography that overlays the alienation of this ‘no world’ with the ‘no-place’ of island utopias as they are mobilised in archipelagic chains or threads. This alternative model of spatial relationality and dynamism differs from conventional global traffic. It is a cartography derived from islands: from their history, fictions, and their theorists. This project is at least partly utopian in a strictly generic sense; that is, in its implication in the reading practices and politics of utopian texts.' (Author's abstract)
Notes
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Epigraph:
- Over production, waste and maldistribution, the principal evils of the Western economic ‘system’ afflict every aspect of its culture. Literature, like everything else, is dominated by the growth myth: the health of a culture is assumed to be determined by its consumable products.
Dorothy Green (‘Writer, Reader, Critic’)
- There is no world any more, only islands.
(Derrida 9)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
JASAL
- Wonders of a Godless World 2009 single work novel
- The Light between Oceans 2012 single work novel
- The Wandering Islands 1955 selected work poetry
- For Love Alone 1944 single work novel
- Carpentaria 2006 single work novel
