Gut Instinct single work   review  
Issue Details: First known date: 2014... 2014 Gut Instinct
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Almost two decades have passed since Helen Garner published The First Stone (1995), her controversial account of a sexual harassment case at Melbourne University’s Ormond College. Revisiting the book, even from this relatively safe distance, one can still appreciate why it caused such an uproar. It is spiked with incendiary and judgemental language. Garner writes of a generation of younger feminists ‘consumed by rage and fear’. They have an ‘unmodulated vision of the human things we’ – that is, Garner’s generation of feminists – ‘have learned to respect.’ She condemns the ‘cold-faced, punitive girls’ who adopt a ‘certain kind of modern feminism: priggish, disingenuous, unforgiving’. They are ‘puritan feminists’, ‘saboteurs’, ‘ideologues’, ‘thought police’. They display a ‘disproportionate ferocity’. When someone tells a story about the Prime Minister condescendingly touching a woman’s forearm during conversation and someone else exclaims ‘How sexist!’, Garner feels ‘a bomb of fury and disgust go off inside my head’.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Sydney Review of Books December 2014 8127848 2014 periodical issue review 2014 pg. http://www.sydneyreviewofbooks.com/this-house-of-grief-helen-garner/
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Australian Face : Essays from the Sydney Review of Books James Ley (editor), Catriona Menzies-Pike (editor), Artarmon : Sydney Review of Books Giramondo Publishing , 2017 12141177 2017 anthology essay

    'The Sydney Review of Books is Australia’s leading space for longform literary criticism. Now celebrating five years online, the SRB has published more than five hundred essays by almost two hundred writers. To mark this occasion, The Australian Face collects some of the best essays published in the SRB on Australian fiction, poetry and non-fiction. The essays in this anthology are contributions to the ongoing argument about the condition and purpose and evolving shape of Australian literature. They reflect the ways in which discussions about the state of the literary culture are constantly reaching beyond themselves to consider wider cultural and political issues.

    'The Sydney Review of Books was established in 2013 out of frustration at the diminishing public space for Australian criticism on literature. There’s even less space for literature in our newspapers and broadcast media now. The Sydney Review of Books, however, is thriving, as the essays in The Australian Face show. Here, you’ll read essays on well-known figures such as Christos Tsiolkas, Alexis Wright, Michelle de Kretser and Helen Garner, alongside considerations of the work of writers who less frequently receive mainstream attention, such as Lesbia Harford and Moya Costello.' (Publication summary)

    Artarmon : Sydney Review of Books Giramondo Publishing , 2017
    pg. 81-97
Last amended 30 May 2019 07:16:10
http://www.sydneyreviewofbooks.com/this-house-of-grief-helen-garner/ https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/this-house-of-grief-helen-garner/ Gut Instinctsmall AustLit logo Sydney Review of Books
81-97 Gut Instinctsmall AustLit logo
Review of:
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X