Peter Matthews Peter Matthews i(A131216 works by)
Gender: Male
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Works By

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1 The Transnational Fantasy : The Case of James Cowan Peter Matthews , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 26 no. 1 2012; (p. 67-73) 'Recent criticism has seen the rise of an approach to literature that views texts as products of 'transnationalism,' a move that arises from a growing sense that, in a global age, authors should not be bounded by the traditional limits of national culture. In her book Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2006), for instance, Rebecca Walkowitz looks at how this trend has evolved in world Anglophone literature, extending from canonical writers like Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf to such contemporary authors as Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and W.G. Sebald. In the field of Australian literature, the question of transnationalism is often linked to issues of postcolonialism, as reflected in recent critical works like Graham Huggan's Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism (2007) and Nathanael O'Reilly's edited collection Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature (2010), both of which examine how Australian literature and culture have metamorphosed in the new global context. While there is little doubt that world literature has been affected in important ways by this broadening of literary stage, there seems to be a widespread conflation between two similar but different terms: the transnational and transcultural. For while it is true that the culture of many countries arises from a cosmopolitan and diverse assortment of influences, this loosening of cultural boundaries between nations is far from being simultaneous with the decline of the state.' (Author's introduction)
1 Misunderstanding the Other : Colonial Fantasies in Japanese Story Peter Matthews , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , December vol. 23 no. 2 2009; (p. 185-189)

'Sue Brook's film Japanese Story (2003) constitutes an important contribution to Australian cinema's ongoing exploration of its cultural encounter with the other. Thematically - and even visually, with its reliance upon the outback landscape as background - the film appears canonical in its approach, reworking ideas and images that have haunted Australian filmmakers since Ralph Smart's Bitter Springs (1950). This tradition testifies to a fascinating and deep-rooted fear of otherness within mainstream Australian culture, even though the exact object of these anxieties - indigenous people, immigrants, global capitalists, to name but a few - has tended to shift in accordance with the pressing concern of the historical movement. The revival of the Australian film industry in the early 1970s provided an insightful and rejuvenated medium for cultural commentary, coinciding as it did with both the flowering of postcolonial criticism and a shift in society away from the stultifying values of the Menzies era. The significance of Brooks's film should, therefore, be assessed from its status as a new voice in the ongoing cinematic dialogue regarding Australia's profound anxiety about its relation to the other (in its various forms).' (p. 185)
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