'Thea Astley is one of the outstanding Australian fiction writers of the twentieth century. Four of her novels, including her last, Drylands (1999), won the prestigious Miles Franklin prize, and she was awarded numerous literary and civic honors during her lifetime. Always a writer who avoided solemnity and undercut her characters' claims to heroism of any kind, she reveled in the new-found capacity to mock male pretension and assert female rebellion. Perhaps because of this, her late masterpieces have not yet had the proper recognition that is due to them. This book examines Astley's works and reinforces her standing as a major novelist. The main organizing principle in this study of Astley's fiction is her representation of place and power relations, and the innovative work of historicizing place. Continuing threads from chapter to chapter include the modes of irony, humor, and satire; her varying use of point of view; and her characteristic compression of language and narrative. Descriptive accounts of the novels are offered to raise broader issues of interpretation. Over the period 1986 to 1999 she produced six major works which amply demonstrate her capacity to bring together a critical exploration of patriarchal power relations and a postcolonial perspective on race relations. Also important in her later stories is her satire on the worship of unbridled 'development' which dominated Australian economic and social life in this period, especially in Queensland. The currency of such political and moral issues frames her work, yet her lively engagement with them was never merely topical, but grew out of that acute yet compassionate consciousness of human weakness, formed by her Catholic upbringing, and the darkly comic sensibility draws all these elements into relationship in Astley's art. This book, which is in the Cambria Australian Literature Series (general editor: Susan Lever; see http: //www.cambriapress.com/Austlit-series) will encourage readers familiar with Astley's work to revisit it and reconsider her lifelong achievement, and it will also lead a whole new generation of readers to enter her imaginative world, to be moved and informed by it.' (Publication summary)
'I had heard the name of Thea Astley long before I ever came to read her words. I knew she had set a significant number of her stories in the region in which I grew up and I was curious to see how she had depicted this place I thought I knew. My introduction to her writing was through her short story collection Hunting the Wild Pineapple (1979), and as I closed the book I wondered why she had focused on the grotesque and extreme elements of the north, and on the strange lives of failing and disappointed people. But the characters burrowed into my psyche, as did the themes and ideas Astley was exploring, and I recognised uncomfortably familiar shapes and echoes of a not-too-distant past.' (Introduction)
'Susan Sheridan’s latest book, The Fiction of Thea Astley, is a comprehensive cross-disciplinary analysis of the greater portion of Astley’s oeuvre. Interestingly, Sheridan’s analysis focuses primarily on the interrogation of the role of emotions in Astley’s novels and short stories. While the first chapter is aptly named, ‘A Study in Emotions’, it is from this platform which Sheridan launches her interrogation of the literary worlds created by Astley. Sheridan’s book is the perfect reader for researchers and enthusiasts interested in the broader thematic, generic and sociopolitical preoccupations of Astley’s bibliography. Sheridan is at her finest analytical self when she exposes the feministic undercurrent of Astley’s novels. She situates Astley’s works, as they should be, in a specific political and temporal space which Sheridan shows both creates and problematises Astley’s writing. This fierce indictment of the patriarchy is one of the key elements which Sheridan interrogates in Astley’s work.' (Introduction)
'Australian novelist Thea Astley became known for her inclination to stare down the good fortune (four Miles Franklin awards) of her literary success during her lifetime with a persistent and self-generating narrative of having been neglected as a writer. It was never true then, and certainly not now. In fact, from this vantage point, over a decade after her death in 2004, critical attention paid to this gifted novelist has possibly reached a high point.' (Introduction)
Susan Sheridan's The Fiction of Thea Astley is worthy and comprehensive foci on one of Australia's most astute writers of fiction. The book captures the intelligence and significance of Thea Astley's fiction -its evolution and its points of difference.' (Introduction)
'I had heard the name of Thea Astley long before I ever came to read her words. I knew she had set a significant number of her stories in the region in which I grew up and I was curious to see how she had depicted this place I thought I knew. My introduction to her writing was through her short story collection Hunting the Wild Pineapple (1979), and as I closed the book I wondered why she had focused on the grotesque and extreme elements of the north, and on the strange lives of failing and disappointed people. But the characters burrowed into my psyche, as did the themes and ideas Astley was exploring, and I recognised uncomfortably familiar shapes and echoes of a not-too-distant past.' (Introduction)
'A prolific writer, Thea Astley published 16 works of fiction during her lifetime, 4 of which won the Miles Franklin Award. Susan Sheridan notes that Astley was ‘the only woman among the leading modernist novelists of the postwar period’ and the only woman who ‘published consistently throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when the literary world was heavily male dominated’. Astley received praise from Vance Palmer and Frank Dalby Davison at the start of her career, as well as a somewhat patronising nod in 1960 from friend and early mentor Patrick White: ‘She has wit and flashes of intelligence for a Brisbane girl turned schoolteacher’. Yet even in 1965 after Astley had published 4 novels and won 2 Miles Franklin Awards, Clem Christesen considered her work ‘not yet substantial enough’ to warrant an essay and that she was still to write ‘a really significant novel’. Influenced by innovative American short-form writers such as William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Ernest Hemingway, Astley’s work received American attention and she undertook a number of residencies in the United States. ' (Introduction)
'Australian novelist Thea Astley became known for her inclination to stare down the good fortune (four Miles Franklin awards) of her literary success during her lifetime with a persistent and self-generating narrative of having been neglected as a writer. It was never true then, and certainly not now. In fact, from this vantage point, over a decade after her death in 2004, critical attention paid to this gifted novelist has possibly reached a high point.' (Introduction)
'Susan Sheridan’s latest book, The Fiction of Thea Astley, is a comprehensive cross-disciplinary analysis of the greater portion of Astley’s oeuvre. Interestingly, Sheridan’s analysis focuses primarily on the interrogation of the role of emotions in Astley’s novels and short stories. While the first chapter is aptly named, ‘A Study in Emotions’, it is from this platform which Sheridan launches her interrogation of the literary worlds created by Astley. Sheridan’s book is the perfect reader for researchers and enthusiasts interested in the broader thematic, generic and sociopolitical preoccupations of Astley’s bibliography. Sheridan is at her finest analytical self when she exposes the feministic undercurrent of Astley’s novels. She situates Astley’s works, as they should be, in a specific political and temporal space which Sheridan shows both creates and problematises Astley’s writing. This fierce indictment of the patriarchy is one of the key elements which Sheridan interrogates in Astley’s work.' (Introduction)
