Cirrus@Austlit

The Honeyeater is Jessie Tu’s second novel, following A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing (2020). It moves between Paris, Sydney and Taipei, unravelling a story of deceit and confusion, as its protagonist, Miss Fay C, struggles to establish her identity among a cast of narcissists. Its transnational scope and powerful intimacy justify the accolades Tu has received and her growing success on the literary scene.

'Winnie Dunn’s first novel, Dirt Poor Islanders, takes as its epigraph a line from Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians (2013): “Remember, every treasure comes with a price.”'

'A coming-of-age tale about a city-born Indigenous teenager.'

'I read Andrew McGahan’s Praise (1992) in my first year of university. I was blown away. It was unlike anything else I had ever read: raw, gritty, real.' 

'I now find it jarring to watch films or television programs which depict characters standing closer than one and a half metres apart, failing to don their face masks, or ignoring the use of hand sanitiser. Their naivety is frustrating and glaring. Literature which sidesteps or ignores the pandemic, the way life is now, comes across as illusory, idealised, or fantastic, as if it is taking place in an alternate universe.'  (Introduction)

'Michelle Cahill’s Daisy & Woolf takes its epigraph and its inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s feminist essay A Room of One’s Own (1929): “A woman writing thinks back through her mothers.”'

'This article considers the way in which elite swimming in Australia constitutes a system of identity to frame the privileging of heterosexuality, able-bodiedness and hypermasculinity in Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Barracuda (2013) and its television adaptation (2016). It argues that the two versions of the story offer very different sporting narratives: a migrant, working-class, gay body in the novel, the complexity of which is never fully realised on screen. The article shows how the television adaptation of Barracuda reshapes the novel’s atemporal structure into a linear progression of rise, fall and redemption, and that under these narrative conditions Daniel Kelly’s body becomes simply object, rather than embracing the subjecthood he is permitted in the novel. The effect is one of compulsory normalisation and erasure: of Danny’s queer body, of Dennis’s and Martin’s damaged bodies, and of the consequences of Danny’s criminal act. This process parallels similar attitudes towards Australia’s most elite athletes and the public ownership of their body narratives.' (Publication abstract)

'The name Christos Tsiolkas may as well be a synonym for “controversial.” The term peppers most critical and popular articles about the writer’s work, such that what Zuckerman terms Tsiolkas’s “provocations” almost no longer bear comment. Yet for first-year students of Australian literature, such content may not be as commonplace as this discourse suggests. Indeed, the provocations of the Tsiolkas oeuvre, despite their affiliation with key genres and concerns of contemporary Australian literature, may prove too confronting or too overwhelming for the novice literary critic. This article maps a range of issues arising from the study of Tsiolkas’s work in a first-year Australian literature course at a regional university in Australia. With a particular focus on what is perhaps the author’s most controversial work, Dead Europe (2005), we consider why Tsiolkas’s narratives can be so difficult for literary studies students and outline how the use of reflective practice offers a safe space for engaging with such “triggering” work.' (Publication abstract)

'From 1996 to 2002, the renowned Australian novelist Christos Tsiolkas worked collaboratively with the Melbourne playwrights Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, and Melissa Reeves and the musician Irine Vela to write Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? (1998) and Fever (2002) for the Melbourne Workers Theatre. While Tsiolkas’s prose work is the subject of extensive study, these collaborative and highly successful plays are largely ignored, despite their undisputed influence on the subsequent Australian theatrical canon and the light they shed on his broader oeuvre. In this article, we posit that these two theatrical works draw on Tsiolkas’s political rage to deliberately challenge Australians’ perceptions of class warfare by problematizing political ideology through the exploration of race and religion. A historical context of Australian playwriting is provided and positions Tsiolkas as a key contributor in bringing queer and immigrant experiences from the margin to the center of Australian stages. Tsiolkas’s key contributions to both theatrical works are discussed in detail, and the implicit calls for revolution in the plays are put in the larger context of his career and its political and social preoccupations, including the themes of his later, more commercial works. The authors’ arguments are framed in notions of Tsiolkas provocatively calling for a revolution within Australian national identity.' (Publication abstract)

'This chapter considers the way ‘companion’ collections such as this one must be seen as a product of their particular cultural moment. To refer to such collections as ‘companions’ is a means of acknowledging the sense in which literature and its cultural commentary is our companion as we navigate the world, since literature and its criticism demonstrate the sense in which we must think through and respond to the world. To refuse to do so is to submit to a kind of virus of thoughtlessness. The counter to this, however, might be an attitude of ‘viral responsibility.’ This, the chapter suggests, can be catching, primarily through our very companionship, the construction of community, the continuous, performative choice of compassion and responsibility constructed in this volume’s responses to Australian literature.'

Source: Abstract

'In recent years, Australian literature has experienced a revival of interest both domestically and internationally. The increasing prominence of work by writers like Christos Tsiolkas, heightened through television and film adaptation, as well as the award of major international prizes to writers like Richard Flanagan, and the development of new, high-profile prizes like the Stella Prize, have all reinvigorated interest in Australian literature both at home and abroad. This Companionemerges as a part of that reinvigoration, considering anew the history and development of Australian literature and its key themes, as well as tracing the transition of the field through those critical debates. It considers works of Australian literature on their own terms, as well as positioning them in their critical and historical context and their ethical and interactive position in the public and private spheres. With an emphasis on literature’s responsibilities, this book claims Australian literary studies as a field uniquely positioned to expose the ways in which literature engages with, produces and is produced by its context, provoking a critical re-evaluation of the concept of the relationship between national literatures, cultures, and histories, and the social function of literary texts.'

Source : Publisher's blurb.

'In an interview that followed the publication of his 2013 novel Barracuda, Christos Tsiolkas declared that he ‘learnt to feel Australian by travelling to Europe’.¹ It’s a sentiment perhaps best expressed in Dead Europe (2005), a novel in which to be Australian is repeatedly compared to naivety or childishness. Such expressions suggest that for Tsiolkas, we can only understand Australian national identity in relief, an idea hearkening back to the earliest definitions of the nation made by its colonisers and continuing throughout Australia’s migrant and multicultural history.' (Introduction)

'In the middle of the nineteenth century, Marcus Clarke famously described the Australian outback as displaying a “Weird Melancholy” (qtd. in Gelder 116). The strange sights, sounds, and experiences of Australia’s rural locations made them ripe for the development of the European genre of the Gothic in a new location, a mutation which has continued over the past two centuries. But what does it mean for Australia’s Gothic landscapes to be associated with the affective qualities of the melancholy? And more particularly, how and why does this Gothic effect (and affect) appear in the most accessible Gothic media of the twenty-first century, the television series? Two recent Australian television adaptations, Wake in Fright (2017, dir. Kriv Stenders) and Mystery Road (2018, dir. Rachel Perkins) provoke us to ask the question: how does their pictorial representation of the Australian outback and its inhabitants overtly express rage and its close ties to melancholia, shame and violence? More particularly, I argue that in both series this rage is turned inwards rather than outwards; rage is turned into melancholy and thus to self-destruction – which constructs an allegory for the malaise of our contemporary nation. However, here the two series differ. While Wake in Fright posits this as a never-ending narrative, in a true Freudian model of melancholics who fail to resolve or attend to their trauma, Mystery Road is more positive in its positioning, allowing the themes of apology and recognition to appear, both necessary for reparation and forward movement.'

Source: Author's introduction.