Cirrus@Austlit

'Fantasy narratives for young people that represented Australia’s history, prior to, and after white settlement, initially depicted alternative pasts in which the land was populated by familiar European and British magical beings such as fairies and giants. Ruth Park’s Playing Beatie Bow (1980) marked the beginning of Australian children’s fantasy that sought to depict the country’s urban colonial history and reconcile its development into a modern nation. The time-slip novel, in which 14-year-old protagonist Abigail Kirk unwittingly travels from Sydney in the late-1970s to 1873, nevertheless engages in a similar process of importing British mythology to fill a presumed cultural vacancy in which First Nations people are erased. In Park’s novel, the folklore of the Orkney Islands, from which the family she encounters in the past has emigrated, provides the explanation for Abigail’s time travel and her place in contemporary Australia. Abigail’s time travel experience uncovers direct genealogical links between contemporary Australians and colonial settlers and the supernatural connections between Abigail and the colonial family counteract the absence of local mythical traditions.'  (Publication abstract)

'What makes an “Australian” fairy tale? Does this designation refer to marvelous narratives with a distinctly Australian bush setting? Or to fiction by Australian authors that is set in a European “once upon a time”? Is such a categorization as the Australian fairy tale even possible? Maurice Saxby once referred to early Australian examples of the genre as “so-called fairy tales,” dismissive of their limited connection with folk traditions (46). However, the literary fairy tale is not always derived from European, or folk, tradition. Moreover, recent attention to decolonizing fairy-tale studies and the fairy-tale canon has emphasized “the specifics of distinct cultures” and has called for resistance to “the twin urges to universalize traditional narratives at the expense of their specific historical and sociocultural contexts and to generalize the European fairy tale as an ahistorical global genre”. While British settlers made attempts to replicate European tale tradition in Australian settings, the fairy tales they produced could never precisely mirror those that evolved through centuries of oral and literary telling. In recent decades this uniqueness—once perceived as a failing—has become a strength of Australian fairy-tale texts. In this special issue, literary scholars and creative writing practitioners examine the way the genre was transplanted to take root in Australia through the process of white settler colonialism and how it has developed to take on its own inflections and possibilities as it has been adopted and adapted by a diverse range of writers, artists, and filmmakers.'  (Introduction)

'This article examines three collections of Australian fairy tales published between 1897 and 1925 and considers the ways in which they contributed to nation-building efforts. Atha Westbury’s Australian Fairy Tales (1897), J. M. Whitfeld’s The Spirit of the Bush Fire and Other Australian Fairy Tales (1898), and Hume Cook’s Australian Fairy Tales (1925) fantasise a nation into being through the fairy-tale genre. The associations of the European fairy-tale tradition with a distant past (‘once upon a time’) are mobilised to create a ‘ready-made’ set of traditions and cultural explanations through which the implied Australian child can understand a nation that was only federated in 1901. This ranged from creating origin stories for natural landmarks like J. M. Whitfeld, through to imagining well-developed fairy cities in the most isolated parts of Australia, far from the eyes of white settlers, as in Atha Westbury and Hume Cook’s collections. Stories by Cook and Westbury blur the distinction between fairy-tale characters and First Nations people, at once yoking imported traditions to the enduring history of First Nations peoples and replacing them in the cultural imaginary with mythical characters who have never existed.' (Publication abstract)

'This collection is the first to focus exclusively on twenty-first-century young adult Gothic fiction. The essays demonstrate how the contemporary resurgence of the Gothic signals anxieties about (and hopes for) young people in the twenty-first century. Changing conceptions of young adults as liminal figures, operating between the modes of child and adult, can be mobilised when combined with Gothic spaces and concepts in texts for young people. In young adult Gothic literature, the crossing of boundaries typical of the Gothic is often motivated by a heterosexual romance plot, in which the human or monstrous female protagonist desires a boy who is not her ‘type’. Additionally, as the Gothic works to define what it means to be human – particularly in relation to gender, race, and identity – the volume also examines how contemporary shifts and flashpoints in identity politics are being negotiated under the metaphoric cloak of monstrosity.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'While significant Australian literary mythology surrounds the bushman and masculinity in rural settings, this chapter focusses on the larrikin in fiction around the turn of the twentieth century to examine how an idealised, nationally distinctive character type was imagined in the city as part of an evolving urban Australian culture. From the 1870s, the larrikin symbolised the violence of the working class in its most threatening and sinister guise. However, several decades later, Ethel Turner’s The Little Larrikin (1896) and Louis Stone’s Jonah (1911) contribute to the ‘rescue’ of the literary larrikin in their attempts to show the figure as endearing, distinctly Australian, and ground down by poverty. Both novels present redeeming depictions of larrikin figures, one a small middle-class boy who has pretensions to becoming a larrikin, and the other, an orphaned ‘hunchback’ who gradually builds his own fortune and progressively leaves behind the pull of the ‘push.’'

Source: Abstract

'This collection will draw attention to new ideas in both Victorian studies and in the emerging area of literature and the environment. Adopting a broad interpretation of the term ‘environment’ the work aims to draw together new approaches to Victorian texts and cultures that conceptualise and are influenced by environments ranging from rural to urban, British to Antipodean, and from the terrestrial to the aquatic.With the pressures of industrialism and the clustering of workers in urban centres, the Victorians were acutely aware that their environment was changing.  Torn between nostalgia for a countryside that was in jeopardy and exhilaration at the rapidity with which their surroundings altered, the literature and culture produced by the Victorians reflects a world undergoing radical change. Colonization and assisted emigration schemes expanded the scope of the environment still further, pushing the boundaries of the ‘home’ on an unprecedented scale and introducing strange new worlds. These untamed physical environments enabled new freedoms, but also posed challenges that invited attempts to control, taxonomize and harness the natural world. Victorian Environments draws together leading and emerging international scholars for an examination of how various kinds of environments were constructed, redefined, and transformed, in British and colonial texts and cultures, with particular attention to the relationship between Australia and Britain.'

Source: Abstract.

'Through a comparison of Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand texts published between 1840 and 1940, From Colonial to Modern develops a new history of colonial girlhoods revealing how girlhood in each of these emerging nations reflects a unique political, social, and cultural context.

'Print culture was central to the definition, and redefinition, of colonial girlhood during this period of rapid change. Models of girlhood are shared between settler colonies and contain many similar attitudes towards family, the natural world, education, employment, modernity, and race, yet, as the authors argue, these texts also reveal different attitudes that emerged out of distinct colonial experiences. Unlike the imperial model representing the British ideal, the transnational girl is an adaptation of British imperial femininity and holds, for example, a unique perception of Indigenous culture and imperialism. Drawing on fiction, girls’ magazines, and school magazine, the authors shine a light on neglected corners of the literary histories of these three nations and strengthen our knowledge of femininity in white settler colonies.'  (Publication summary)

'This volume explores the relationship between representation, affect, and emotion in texts for children and young adults. It demonstrates how texts for young people function as tools for emotional socialisation, enculturation, and political persuasion. The collection provides an introduction to this emerging field and engages with the representation of emotions, ranging from shame, grief, and anguish to compassion and happiness, as psychological and embodied states and cultural constructs with ideological significance. It also explores the role of narrative empathy in relation to emotional socialisation and to the ethics of representation in relation to politics, social justice, and identity categories including gender, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality. Addressing a range of genres, including advice literature, novels, picture books, and film, this collection examines contemporary, historical, and canonical children’s and young adult literature to highlight the variety of approaches to emotion and affect in these texts and to consider the ways in which these approaches offer new perspectives on these texts. The individual chapters apply a variety of theoretical approaches and perspectives, including cognitive poetics, narratology, and poststructuralism, to the analysis of affect and emotion in children’s and young adult literature.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950 explores a range of real and fictional colonial girlhood experiences from Jamaica, Mauritius, South Africa, India, New Zealand, Australia, England, Ireland, and Canada to reflect on the transitional state of girlhood between childhood and adulthood. The interconnected themes of colonialism, empire, gender, race, and class show how colonial girls occupy ambivalent positions in British and settler societies between 1840 and 1950. Although girlhood is often linked to freedom, independence, novelty, and modernity, it may also represent an idea that needs to be contained and controlled to serve the needs of the nation. Across national boundaries, the malleability of colonial girlhoods is evident. Drawing on a range of approaches including history, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies, this book reflects on the complexities of girlhood during the colonial era.' [from Trove]