Cirrus@Austlit

'Mendelson examines the correspondence between Nadine Lewin Mendelson, her mother, and Lina Lewin, her grandmother, and Christina Stead, a novelist. She says reading the letters brings her the memory of visiting her grandmother's place in New York City and sheds some light on Stead's life as a great novelist.' (Publication summary)

'A a doctoral candidate working in Australian Studies, Wawrzinek shares the difficulty to find quality Australian literature in Europe, particularly in Paris and in Berlin. With the increasing availability of ebooks via download,she is hoping that it will become easier to include lesser known Australian writers on reading lists in the European university and to access material that otherwise takes months to arrive via conventional methods of transportation. She says a sustained, ongoing program to support Australian authors, to speak about their work, and to engage in collaborative programs with European scholars and artists is needed to show the world that Australia is not just about Kangaroos and beautiful beaches.' (Publication summary)

'British or English-trained professors were the central figures responsible for tertiary education and matriculation in Western Australia, and the "Englishness" limited the teaching of Australian literature at the tertiary and secondary levels in the first half of the twentieth century. Dowsett examines teaching and professing English in Western Australia that is influenced by Walter Murdoch, an English professor at the University of Western Australia.' (Publication summary)

'Henningsgaard considers the theoretical and political implications of teaching Sally Morgan's My Place to American university students alongside Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. My Place is a milestone in indigenous writing in Australia in which Morgan writes of her quest to discover her hidden Aboriginal heritage, while The Jungle and Uncle Tom's Cabin are American classics whose reputations are inextricably linked to the social reforms they inspired. He presents an intriguing thesis about proximity and identification, distance and empathy based on the experience of teaching Australian and American literature together.' (Publication summary)

'Morrison talks about the rhetoric of Luck in Christina Stead's Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946). The novel examines the terrain of female experience between the acquisition of sexual maturity and marriage. It is clear that the topoi of female survival and female ambition are central to this trilogy of books, and in Letty Fox: Her Luck, the framing questions of America and American politics complicate and extend these topoi. The anti-sentimental picaresque offered Stead an opportunity to return to the satirical energy that is so remarkable in House of All Nations (1938), to experiment with New York vernacular, and to anatomize various American dilemmas as she saw them: a materialistic and weak middle-class obsessed with easy success, the irritant of fake radicalism in the New York Left, and the irresistible rise and rise of gangster capitalism. Stead's use of "luck" highlights the episodic and contingent events that make up the life of her anti-heroine, but also provides a rhetorical focal point for her critique of sex and politics. "Luck" is a word at the heart of the novel's purpose as well as its action.' (Publication abstract)

'During the Federation era, the isomorphic association of literature, land, and nation found expression through the cartographic imaginary, a term that is meant to focus especially on the role of maps in shaping imagined geographies, but which also includes related media such as topographical engravings and photographic views. Contrary to Paul Giles's implication of an achieved "national period" in American literary history, however, Dixon argues that in Australia during the Federation era, the cartographic imaginary expressed an alignment of literature, land, and nation that was more wished for than achieved. He claims that the literature of the Federation period-in particular, the sketches and stories of Henry Lawson's While the Billy Boils (1896) and Joseph Furphy's novel Such is Life (1903)–reveals the uncertainties and the sense of incompletion that attend the cartographic imaginary.' (Publication abstract)

'Rhoden examines love and eroticisam in British and Australian Great War narratives. Interestingly, Australian narratives, with their protagonists even more separated from their women, are also likely to eschew homosexual themes. Although male tenderness exists, it is represented as being of a much lesser degree, at least in its physical manifestation. Male-male friendship–mateships–represented by Australian authors may carry undertones of emotional and physical intensity, but this is usually expressed in curt, economical gestures. The "lovely boys" of British works give way to a bunch of good blokes. Readers need to look more closely for evidence of romance and special individual bonds.' (Publication abstract)