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Robert Dixon Robert Dixon i(A24056 works by) (a.k.a. Robert William Dixon)
Born: Established: 1954 ;
Gender: Male
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Works By

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1 Transnational Optics : The Late Colonial Fiction of Ada Cambridge and Catherine Martin Robert Dixon , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel 2023;
1 Circles of Violence: Historical Constellations in 'Death of a River Guide' and 'The Sound of One Hand Clapping' Robert Dixon , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Richard Flanagan : Critical Essays 2018; (p. 21-41)
1 The Novels of Richard Flanagan : An Introduction Robert Dixon , Liliana Zavaglia , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Richard Flanagan : Critical Essays 2018; (p. 1-19)

'On 14 October 2014 Richard Flanagan was awarded the Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013). It was a signal moment not only in his own career but also in the international reception of Australian literature. In his acceptance speech and in media interviews in London, however, Flanagan identified with Tasmania rather than Australia, explaining, "I do not come out of a literary tradition. I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest on an island at the end of the world." Echoing Salman Rushdie in the wake of his own Booker win for Midnight's Children in 1981, Flanagan went on to claim that "Literary culture... is the vengeance of the edges on the centre".'

1 Figures in Geometry : The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones Robert Dixon , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , September 2018; Inner and Outer Worlds : Gail Jones' Fiction 2022;

'In Gail Jones’ 2018 novel about the life and death of Noah Glass, his ‘vocation’ as an art historian begins when, as a small boy growing up in the remote north of Western Australia, he opens a book about the Great Art Museums of the World. It translates him miraculously from the Mars-orange landscape of the outback to the rarefied, Prussian-blue world of Piero della Francesca: it was a ‘window to elsewhere’ and ‘other worlds and times blazed as portents from the pages’. The significance of this moment is confirmed twenty years later when, as a student in London, Noah discovers Piero’s The Nativity (c. 1470-5) hanging in the National Gallery: ‘Noah walked around the National Gallery, taking meticulous notes, registering line by line his self-improvement’. These are instances of what Peter Wagner calls intermediality: the intertextual use of one medium, such as painting, in another medium, such as prose fiction.' (Introduction)

1 1 y separately published work icon Richard Flanagan : Critical Essays Robert Dixon (editor), Sydney : Sydney University Press , 2018 14220542 2018 anthology criticism

'Richard Flanagan: New Critical Essays is the first collection of critical writing on Flanagan’s fiction, featuring 12 essays from leading Australian, European and North American scholars.

'From his early historical writing to his emergence as a global writer of literary fiction, Tasmania has always been at the centre of Flanagan’s work. Of his six novels, four are explicitly concerned with Tasmania and smaller surrounding islands.

'This collection examines the themes of ‘islandness’, the historical and geographical factors that have shaped Tasmanian identity, present in Flanagan’s work; the Tasmanian tradition of oral storytelling and the effect that it has had on Flanagan’s writing; and Flanagan’s treatment of the racial other. Together they offer new insights into a determinedly regional writer, and the impact that he has had on Tasmanian, Australian, and world literature.' (Publisher's abstract)

1 'The Wind from Siberia' : Metageography and Ironic Nationality in the Novels of Elizabeth Harrower Robert Dixon , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Elizabeth Harrower : Critical Essays 2017; (p. 54-70)

'Elizabeth Harrower’s third novel, The Catherine Wheel (1960) – the only one set outside Australia – begins with an example of what Jon Hegglund terms modernist “metageography”: that is, a use of maps and the conventions of cartographic representation in such a way as to defamiliarise the social production of space, and of national and personal identity. 1 Clemency James, a young Australian woman, has come to London in the late 1950s to study for the bar, and as she returns to her bedsitting room from a shopping trip to Notting Hill Gate, she takes her bearings from a weather report that locates London in relation to the landmass of hemispheric Europe:

“The wind from Siberia as announced by the BBC came down Bayswater Road from the direction of Marble Arch somewhere in a straight line beyond which, half a world away, Siberia was taken to be”. 2 Zooming in to a local scale, Clem locates her “centre of the universe” (3) in a boarding house just off Bayswater Road: Across the road the enigmatic façades of a row of semi-public buildings ended where the railings of Kensington Gardens began. Just opposite this corner of the gardens Miss Evans had her service-house, and it was here I had a room with a diagonal view of bare black avenues and paths and empty seats and grass. (4)' (Introduction)

1 "Communications from Below" : Scalar Transformations in Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) and Steven Carroll's A World of Other People (2013) Robert Dixon , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 31 no. 1 2017; (p. 184-205)
1 National Literatures, Scale and the Problem of the World Robert Dixon , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 15 no. 3 2015; Text, Translation, Transnationalism: World Literature in 21st Century Australia 2016; (p. 173-195)
'One of the leading figures in world literature today is the Harvard scholar David Damrosch. His 2003 book What is World Literature? has been widely influential, and might be said to have established the new, US-centred field of study known as world literature. In a 2010 review of three later books edited or co-edited by Damrosch—How to Read World Literature (2009), Teaching World Literature (2009) and The Longman Anthology of World Literature (2009)—John M. Kopper describes them as Damrosch’s aleph. The reference, which I take to be ironic, is to the title story of Jorge Luis Borges’s collection, The Aleph (1949). The aleph is a mysterious gadget that apparently allows the narrator, who is also named ‘Borges,’ briefly to experience an all-encompassing vision of the universe. It is a parable about the madness of desiring a total or ‘encyclopedic vision’ (Echevarria 125). To describe world literature as Damrosch’s aleph is to imply that it is fundamentally misguided to seek a total vision of literature or to read books at the scale of the world. ‘If the aleph stands for the totality of literature,’ Kopper writes, then today’s rich and expanding bibliography of works about that immensity, along with the increasingly massive anthologies that seek to encircle it, show that we have lost our fear of the unbounded object that we study’ (408). ' (Author's introduction)
1 Before the Nation : Rolf Boldrewood and the Problem of Scale in National Literatures Robert Dixon , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 31 October vol. 30 no. 3 2015;

'While Babes in the Bush is an artefact of Federation nationalism, the original serial, An Australian Squire, belongs to an earlier, pre-Federation era of colonial writing. That fine distinction is germane to my purpose in this essay, which explores the cartographic imaginary of that time before the nation. My reading of An Australian Squire is routed through the novel’s many allusions to James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), among other British and American classics. My purpose is to view citational writing as an aesthetic practice that defines colonial literary culture prior to its self-consciously national period. Intertextuality is an aesthetic strategy by which colonial writers, in the absence of a felt national tradition – though in deliberate anticipation of one – set about using the classic works of British and American literature from the perspective of a new society. In the absence of such a tradition, An Australian Squire is a text whose cartographic imaginary is intra- and inter-colonial rather than national, albeit located within broader transnational or trans-imperial horizons. Finally, I use this case study of transnational fictions to reflect on the problem of scale in literary history and literary criticism, especially in the relationship between Australian literature – as an academic discipline – and world literature. What is the appropriate scale for the study of Australian literature? Is it desirable or even possible to study it on a ‘global’ or ‘world’ scale? What are the consequences of approaching a pre-national literature from the scale of the nation, or a national literature from the scale of the world?'

Source: Abstract.

1 Returning to the Scene of the Crime : On Re-reading The Transit of Venus Robert Dixon , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: Shirley Hazzard : New Critical Essays 2014; (p. 79-93)
1 'A Nation for a Continent' : Australian Literature and the Cartographic Imaginary of the Federation Era Robert Dixon , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 28 no. 1 2014; (p. 141-154, 254)
'During the Federation era, the isomorphic association of literature, land, and nation found expression through the cartographic imaginary, a term that is meant to focus especially on the role of maps in shaping imagined geographies, but which also includes related media such as topographical engravings and photographic views. Contrary to Paul Giles's implication of an achieved "national period" in American literary history, however, Dixon argues that in Australia during the Federation era, the cartographic imaginary expressed an alignment of literature, land, and nation that was more wished for than achieved. He claims that the literature of the Federation period-in particular, the sketches and stories of Henry Lawson's While the Billy Boils (1896) and Joseph Furphy's novel Such is Life (1903)–reveals the uncertainties and the sense of incompletion that attend the cartographic imaginary.' (Publication abstract)
1 7 y separately published work icon Alex Miller : The Ruin of Time Robert Dixon , Sydney : University of Sydney , 2014 7705472 2014 single work criticism

'Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time is the first sole-authored critical survey of the respected Australian novelist's eleven novels. While these books are immediately accessible to the general reading public, they are manifestly works of high literary seriousness - substantial, technically masterful and assured, intricately interconnected, and of great imaginative, intellectual and ethical weight.

Among his many prizes and awards, Alex Miller has twice won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, for The Ancestor Game in 1993, and Journey to the Stone Country in 2003; the Commonwealth Writers' prize, also for The Ancestor Game in 1993; and the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize, for Conditions of Faith in 2001 and Lovesong in 2011. He received a Centenary Medal in 2001 and the Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2012. In 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Having published his eleventh novel, Coal Creek, in 2013 - which won the Victorian Premier's Fiction Award in 2014 - Miller is currently writing an autobiographical memoir with the working title 'Horizons'.' (Publication summary)

1 y separately published work icon Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity : Frank Hurley's Synchronized Lecture Entertainments Robert Dixon , New York (City) : Anthem Press , 2013 8798837 2013 single work biography

'Australian photographer and film maker Frank Hurley became an international celebrity through his reporting of the Mawson and Shackleton Antarctic Expeditions, the First and Second World Wars, the England-Australia air race of 1919, and his own expeditions to Papua in the 1920s. This book is an account of his stage and screen practice in the context of early twentieth-century mass media.

'Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity' is not a biography of Frank Hurley the man; it is instead an examination of the social life of the many marvellous and meaningful things he made as a professional photographer and film maker in the early twentieth century: the negatives, photographic prints, lantern slides, stereographs, films, diaries and newspaper articles. His stage and screen practices offer an insight into Australia's engagement with the romance and wonder of international modernity in the early years of the twentieth century. The level of description at which this volume works is not that of personality or the originary events of Hurley's life - the Mawson and Shackleton Antarctic Expeditions, and the First and Second World Wars - but the media events he worked so hard and so professionally to create. He called them his 'synchronized lecture entertainments'.

'These media events were at once national and international; they involved Hurley in an entire culture industry comprising many kinds of personnel, practices and texts that were constantly in movement along global lines of travel and communication, and in a variety of institutional locations around the world. This raises complex questions both about the authorship of Hurley's photographic and filmic texts - which were often produced and presented by other people - and about their ontology, since they were in a more or less constant state of re-assemblage in response to changing market opportunities. This unique study re-imagines, from inside the quiet and stillness of the archive, the prior social life of Hurley's creations as they were once accelerated through the complicated topography of the early twentieth century's rapidly internationalizing mass media landscape. As a way to conceive of that space and the social life of the people and things within it, this study uses the concept of 'colonial modernity'.' (Publication summary)

1 Introduction : Australian Literature, Globalisation and the Literary Province Robert Dixon , Brigid Rooney , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Scenes of Reading : Is Australian Literature a World Literature? 2013; (p. ix-xxxvi)
1 4 y separately published work icon Scenes of Reading : Is Australian Literature a World Literature? Robert Dixon (editor), Brigid Rooney (editor), North Melbourne : Australian Scholarly Publishing , 2013 6581736 2013 anthology criticism

'Australian literature is negotiating the relationship between its legacy as a national literature and its growing international reach. Scenes of Reading explores some of the key questions and issues arising from this moment of apparent transformation. How is Australian literature connected to other literatures? What potential might transnational reading practices have to renew the practice of Australian literary criticism? And as such criticism challenges the provincialising of knowledge, to what extent might perspectives routed through the literary province in turn challenge 'world' literature?' (Publisher's blurb)

1 1 Invitation to the Voyage : Reading Gail Jones' Five Bells Robert Dixon , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 12 no. 3 2012;
'In this article, the first on Five Bells, I outline several contexts that will be foundational for subsequent readings of the novel. They include its relationship to Kenneth Slessor's poem; Jones' interest in the French Situationist International and their theories of urbanism and psychogeography; the influence of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, trauma studies and the trauma novel; and another cluster of themes associated with Pastnernak's Doctor Zhivago, World Literature, cosmopolitanism and global translation.' (Author's abstract)
1 Scenes of Reading : Is Australian Literature a World Literature? Robert Dixon , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Republics of Letters : Literary Communities in Australia 2012; (p. 71-83)
'Robert Dixon explores how Australian literature can negotiate between provincial, national and world literary space. At what appears to be a lime of unprecedented internationalisation, can Australian literature be considered a world literature, or does it remain a relatively minor national literature embedded uncertainly in world literary space?' (Kirkpatrick, Peter and Dixon, Robert: Introduction xiv)
1 8 y separately published work icon Republics of Letters : Literary Communities in Australia Robert Dixon (editor), Sydney : Sydney University Press , 2012 Z1911531 2012 anthology criticism 'Republics of letters: literary communities in Australia is the first book to explore the notion of literary community or literary sociability in relation to Australian literature. It brings together twenty-four scholars from a range of disciplines - literature, history, cultural and women's studies, creative writing and digital humanities - to address some of the key questions about Australian literary communities: how they form, how they change and develop, and how they operate within wider social and cultural contexts, both within Australia and internationally.' (Publisher's blurb)
1 ‘English’ in the Australian Curriculum: English Robert Dixon , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: English in Australia , vol. 47 no. 1 2012; (p. 19-25)
'The author has been a consultant to the national curriculum process from its beginnings in 2008, first with the interim National Curriculum Board (NCB) and then with the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Reporting Authority (ACARA). In this paper he offers an overview of how the English curriculum was developed, outlines some of the issues that proved to be most difficult and even controversial during the consultation period, then looks briefly at the English curriculum itself to reflect on how he thinks teachers might use it to develop their teaching materials. Finally, he returns to some of the differences that emerged between school and university teachers of English during the consultation phase and suggests some of the ways in which current academic research might contribute to curriculum content. The author argues that these differences raise what are essentially institutional problems that might best be addressed by improving the relationships between our respective peak professional bodies. (Author abstract)
1 Disestablished Worlds : An Introduction to the Novels of Alex Miller Robert Dixon , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Novels of Alex Miller : An Introduction 2012; (p. 1-28)
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