Tamara S. Wagner Tamara S. Wagner i(A104069 works by)
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 The Antipodes of Victorian Fiction : Mapping 'Down Under' Tamara S. Wagner , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: Victorian Popular Fictions , Autumn vol. 1 no. 2 2019;

'Victorian settler fiction produced in colonial Australia and New Zealand increasingly expressed a search for settler identity, and yet it partly remained targeted at readers “at home,” at the centre of the British Empire. Nineteenth-century novels of daily life in the colonial settlements, therefore, also functioned as fictional maps for readers in Victorian Britain and elsewhere in the expanding empire. While some of these publications explicitly addressed potential emigrants, others endeavoured to reshape Britain’s antipodes in the popular imagination more generally. Australian and New Zealand women writers dismantled clichés involving bush-rangers, gold-diggers, as well as escaped convicts and resented returnees. By drawing on a variety of settler novels by female authors, I aim to track how their fictional maps for readers overseas worked and how these maps shifted in the course of the century. In particular, I focus on the motif of the homecoming and how its reworking in nineteenth-century settler fiction reveals shifting attitudes towards emigration and empire, homemaking and homecoming, old and new homes.'

Source: Abstract.
1 The New Chum Girl : Upending Colonial Clichés in Lilian Turner's Emigration Novel Tamara S. Wagner , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , February vol. 40 no. 1 2016; (p. 45-58)

'This essay analyses Lilian Turner's Three New Chum Girls (1910) to show how settler authors played with colonial clichés as part of a critical reaction to shifting imperialist and nationalist ideologies at the turn of the century. In particular, Turner redefines the derogatory colonial term “new chum”—commonly used to describe a recent emigrant in the settler colonies—to suggest what the welcome of new arrivals ought to be like. Yet if her deliberate reworking of stereotypes consequently contains an element of wish-fulfilment, the narrative also offers a startlingly stark portrayal of settler life. Emigration, Turner contends in the novel, is neither easy nor a solution to problems at home. Nor does settler Australia provide a convenient space for fortune-seeking sojourns. Turner thus dismantles two clusters of common clichés: emigration as a pat ending in fiction and settlers' return to the homeland as an equally expedient plot twist. The self-irony that runs through much of her intertextual rewriting of both metropolitan fiction and male-coded settler writing reveals how emigration and return were being imagined and written about differently in the settler colonies and how Turner was utilising the exposure of false expectations to promote her vision of a welcoming settler community.'

Source: Abstract.
1 Fugitive Homes : Multiple Migrations in Ethel Turner's Fiction Tamara S. Wagner , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand 2014; (p. 91-110)
1 1 y separately published work icon Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand Tamara S. Wagner (editor), London : Routledge , 2014 10213855 2014 multi chapter work criticism

'Colonial domestic literature has been largely overlooked and is due for a reassessment. This essay collection explores attitudes to colonialism, imperialism and race, as well as important developments in girlhood and the concept of the New Woman.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.
1 ‘Hours of Morbid Entertainment’ : Self-Irony and Replayed Clichés in Hsu-Ming Teo’s Fiction Australia’s Asia, Past and Present : Southeast Asian Backgrounds in Hsu-Ming Teo’s Fiction Tamara S. Wagner , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 12 no. 2 2012; This article examines the representation of Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian immigrants in popular Australian fiction. In a close analysis of Hsu-Ming Teo's first novel Love and Vertigo (2000), it draws attention both to the potential and the problems of self-irony in what have chiefly been read as autobiographically inspired texts. Parodic elements may constructively rupture common readerly expectations of an 'Asian past' and hence demand a larger rethinking of prevailing conceptuali-sations of diaspora and diasporic writing. Yet the use of parody has also got its limitations and is symptomatically often edited out in the texts' reception. [Author's abstract]
1 The Domestic Novel's Antipodes : False Heirs and Reclaimed Returnees in Charlotte Yonge's My Young Alcides Tamara S. Wagner , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , September vol. 35 no. 3 2011; (p. 317-334) 'This article reassesses nineteenth-century representations of Britain's geographical 'antipodes' by looking at the figure of the returnee. While mid-Victorian sensation fiction expressed a redirected imperial panic by producing popular impostor plots, the resulting typecasting of the antipodal returnee as an intrinsically threatening figure increasingly prompted authors to react critically to this easy sensationalisation. Simultaneously, a new craze for impostor narratives was inspired by real-life scandals such as, most prominently, the Tichborne Claimant, an Australian butcher who claimed to be the lost heir to an aristocratic family. The case inspired a range of popular representations: from street ballads to heated debates about class issues and a number of novels, both in the metropolitan centre and in the settler colonies. My Young Alcides (1875) by the religious, didactic writer Charlotte Yonge, I argue, offers a revealing case study of domestic fiction's reaction to the easy appropriation and typecasting of 'down under' as a sensational space.' [Author's abstract]
1 y separately published work icon Victorian Settler Narratives : Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature Tamara S. Wagner (editor), London : Routledge , 2011 24471337 2011 anthology criticism

'This edited collection from a distinguished group of contributors explores a range of topics including literature as imperalist propaganda, the representation of the colonies in British literature, the emergence of literary culture in the colonies and the creation of new gender roles such as "girl Crusoes" in works of fiction.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.
1 y separately published work icon Literature and Ethics : Questions of Responsibility in Literary Studies Daniel Jernigan (editor), Neil Murphy (editor), Brendan Quigley (editor), Tamara S. Wagner (editor), New York (State) : Cambria Press , 2009 9209409 2009 anthology criticism
1 Boutique Multiculturalism and the Consumption of Repulsion : Re-Disseminating Food Fictions in Malaysian and Singaporean Diasporic Novels Tamara S. Wagner , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature , vol. 42 no. 1 2007; (p. 31-46) This article argues that representations of repulsion and disgust regarding food in recent Singaporean and Malaysian fiction is reflective of 'the growing unease caused by the commercial and ideological exploitation of consumable multiculturalism' (32). The author reads the work of Hsu-Ming Teo, as well as that of Vyvyanne Loh and Josephine Chia to demonstrate how 'ironic displays of repulsive food' may 'counter Orientalization' (45).
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