Christopher Lee Christopher Lee i(A35749 works by) (a.k.a. Christopher John Lee; Chris Lee)
Born: Established: 1962 ;
Gender: Male
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 [Review] The Fin de Siècle Imagination in Australia, 1890–1914 Christopher Lee , 2024 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Historical Studies , vol. 55 no. 1 2024; (p. 213-215)

— Review of The Fin de Siècle Imagination in Australia, 1890-1914 Mark Hearn , 2022 multi chapter work criticism

'In The Fin de Siècle Imagination in Australia, 1890–1914, Mark Hearn uses a biographical method to investigate the influence of ‘powerful movements’ and new ideas on seven select Australian writers, activists, and politicians, who are distinguished by their differences of race, class, and gender. The test subjects, in order, are the working-class writer Henry Lawson; the feminist activists Rose Summerfield and Vida Goldstein; the poet and academic Christopher Brennan; the journalist-turned-politician and, ultimately, prime minister Alfred Deakin; the First Nations writer and inventor David Unaipon; and the working-class activist John Dwyer. The book is organised into an introduction, the seven biographical chapters, and a brief conclusion.' (Introduction)

1 White Lies : Colonial Mythology and the Decolonial Impasse in the Award-winning Novels of Roger McDonald, Kim Scott and Alex Miller Christopher Lee , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel 2023;
1 2 y separately published work icon Postcolonial Heritage and Settler Well-Being : The Historical Fictions of Roger McDonald Christopher Lee , Amherst : Cambria Press , 2018 15395794 2018 multi chapter work criticism

'The Australian writer Roger McDonald is the author of ten novels, two novelisations from and for film scripts, two television scripts, one semi-fictionalised memoir, a collection of essays, and two volumes of poetry. His publication record spans half a century from the late 1960s up until the late teens with his tenth novel, A Sea Chase, published in 2017. His books have achieved a significant record in the Australian list of literary awards and he has gone close to breaking into the major international prizes that distinguish the transnational careers of other contemporary Australian writers such as Thomas Keneally, Peter Carey, David Malouf, and, more recently, Kate Grenville. McDonald’s work has been published in London and New York as well as in the key metropolitan markets of his native Australia, and it has been translated into Spanish, German, and Swedish. 1915, his first novel, was adapted into an Australian Broadcasting Commission television series, which was shown on Australian screens in the early 1980s and distributed internationally.

'McDonald writes about ordinary characters whose lives have often been overtaken by historical forces they do not understand and cannot control. These men and women are commonly defined by whom they know and what they do rather than through the display of extraordinary qualities of mind, sensibility, or virtue. McDonald often situates his characters’ within foundational Australian historical periods such as the convict period, frontier settlement, the development of the pastoral industry, the Great War, the Golden Age of Aviation, and the Second World War and its aftermath. This later post-war period saw the transformation of Anglo-Celtic Australia by waves of initially southern and eastern European migration, followed by Asian and indeed wider international migration. The emerging multicultural character of the country coincided with the decline of rural Australia and the pastoral industry as the preferred locations for representative Australian types and values. These events or periods are well entrenched within the public memory of a White Australia and that enables McDonald to explore his characters’ search for purpose and fulfillment within the mythological registers of his nation’s postcolonial history.

'This study focuses on the books (five novels and the fictionalised memoir) in which McDonald has decided to situate his characters’ search for purpose and well-being within the mythological registers of colonial history. It explores McDonald’s investments in story and his developments in idiom and literary form, as endeavors to engage a wider public in the problem of postcolonial settlement. The common narrative problem is the elusiveness of a condition of Being that is well settled in the web of social, cultural, and environmental connections that are necessary for dwelling. McDonald pursues the possibilities for a wider more satisfying sense of human connection but his representations of the common man under the conditions of postcolonial modernity never allow that to come easily.'

Source: Abstract.

1 The Beast in the Machine : Modernity, Aviation and the Legacies of Colonialism in Roger McDonald’s Slipstream Christopher Lee , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , vol. 41 no. 4 2017; (p. 435-449)

'The expectation that a novel about a celebrity aviator will romanticise flight and glorify the pilot is a product of the mythologisation of aviation, which this essay understands is a response to the threat of technology and the alienating conditions of modernity. Roger McDonald’s novel Slipstream refuses to reproduce this mythology, expressing a literary aspiration to use the form of the modern novel to explore the entanglement of the subject under the conditions of postcolonial modernity. My argument will develop through three parts. The first section will explore the mythologisation of aviation as a symptom of modernity. The second will examine the ways in which the novel uses its modernist form to call into question the celebrity of the aviator and the spectacle of flight. This part of my argument is indebted to the critique by German philosopher Martin Heidegger of the technological mode of Being. Finally, I take up the postcolonial implications of the Heideggerian critique in a country in which many of modernism’s standard antidotes to the problems of its century are compromised by the legacies of colonialism.' (Publication abstract)

1 Bulletin Christopher Lee , 2014 single work companion entry
— Appears in: A Companion to the Australian Media : B 2014; (p. 76-77)
1 Literary Possibilities of Flight Christopher Lee , 2013 single work essay
— Appears in: Telling Stories : Australian Life and Literature 1935–2012 2013; (p. 1-7)
1 Celan i "everything that is was spoken", Christopher Lee , 2012 single work poetry
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 16 November vol. 22 no. 22 2012; The Wonder Book of Poetry , July 2013; The Wonder Book of Poetry , April 2013;
1 ‘Shapely Experience’ and the Limits of ‘Late Colonial Transcendentalism’ : The Portrait of the Artist as Soldier in Roger McDonald’s 1915 Christopher Lee , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 11 no. 2 2011;
'This essay argues that Roger McDonald's debut novel 1915 represents a form of literary modernism which rejects the easy aesthetic comforts of 'late colonial transcendentalism' (17). McDonald presents an intricate -- we might even say ritualised -- pattern of subversive counterpoint to 'reveal and dramatise the failure of the subject to escape its own limits, and hence its own history' (McCann 155). The result is a highly self-conscious literary novel that seeks to reconcile the art of high modernism with a postcolonial practice interested in the consequences of public memory.' (Author's abstract)
1 y separately published work icon The Diaries of Frank Hurley 1912-1941 Frank Hurley , Robert Dixon (editor), Christopher Lee (editor), London : Anthem Press , 2011 Z1760663 2011 single work diary 'Frank Hurley is best known today as a photographer and film maker. His major documentary films include The Home of the Blizzard, In the Grip of the Polar Pack Ice,Sir Ross Smith's Flight and Pearls and Savages, while his photographs of Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition, Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition and the two World Wars have been so widely exhibited and reproduced that in many cases they are the principal means by which we have come to see those world-historical events. Yet there is another source, so far little known to the public, which also gives us a startling sense of the presence of the past: it is Hurley's voluminous manuscript diaries, only brief extracts from which have so far been published. Originally written in the field in Antarctica, South Georgia, England, France, the Middle East, Papua and Australia, and later raided and revised for his many publications and stage performances, they have survived years of world travel and are now carefully preserved in the archives of the National Library of Australia in Canberra and the Mitchell Library in Sydney. This illustrated edition of his diaries presents Frank Hurley in his own words, explores his testimony to these significant events, and reviews the part he played in imagining them for an international public' (Publisher website). Contents; Illustrations; Introduction; Acknowledgments and Notes on the Text; 1. Sledging Diary, the Australasian Antarctic Expedition (November 1912 – January 1913); 2. The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition Diary (November 1914 – April 1917); 3. The Great War Diary (August 1917 – August 1918); 4. Tour Diary––In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice (December 1919 – January 1920); 5. The Torres Strait and Papua Expedition Diaries (December 1920 – August 1921); 6. The Papua Expedition Diary (August 1922 – January 1923); 7. The World War II and Middle East Diaries (September 1940 – April 1941); Index
1 The Country of Unspoken Feelings : An Interview with Jean Kent Christopher Lee (interviewer), 2009 single work interview
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 23 no. 1 2009; (p. 88-92)
1 Greeks and Moderns : The Search for Culture in the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918 Christopher Lee , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October vol. 23 no. 2 2007; (p. 106-120)
1 'From Progress into Stand-Still Days': Literature, History and the Darling Downs Christopher Lee , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: By the Book : A Literary History of Queensland 2007; (p. 111-139; notes 337-340)
1 Settling in the Land of Wine and Honey : Cultural Tourism, Local History and Some Australian Legends Christopher Lee , 2006 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , no. 86 2006; (p. 47-59, notes [180-182])
Explores the social function of rural heritage, as it is associated with the work and reputation of Henry Lawson in the New South Wales towns of Mudgee and Gulgong.
1 y separately published work icon Eucalypt no. 3 Christopher Lee , Brian Beasley (editor), 2004 Z1356972 2004 periodical issue
1 14 y separately published work icon City Bushman : Henry Lawson and the Australian Imagination Christopher Lee , Fremantle : Curtin University Books , 2004 Z1167150 2004 single work criticism From publisher's blurb: 'Chris Lee maps the route of Lawson's celebrity - the variety of uses to which his name and reputation have been put. He identifies a pervasive tension between the popular and the cultured, the amateur and the professional, the local and metropolitan. While Australians call upon Henry Lawson in the name of a united nation, those calls have always been troubled by social, cultural and political disagreements.'
1 Introduction : Frank Hardy and the Literature of Commitment Paul Adams , Christopher Lee , 2003 single work criticism
— Appears in: Frank Hardy and the Literature of Commitment 2003; (p. 9-21)
1 11 y separately published work icon Frank Hardy and the Literature of Commitment Christopher Lee (editor), Paul Adams (editor), Carlton North : The Vulgar Press , 2003 Z1050416 2003 anthology criticism
1 An Uncultured Rhymer and His Cultural Critics : Henry Lawson, Class Politics and Colonial Literature Christopher Lee , 2002 single work criticism
— Appears in: Victorian Poetry , vol. 40 no. 1 2002; (p. 87-104)
1 Killed According to the Law Christopher Lee , 2002 single work review
— Appears in: Overland , Winter no. 167 2002; (p. 111-112)

— Review of Les Murray : A Life in Progress Peter F. Alexander , 2000 single work biography
1 Lawson's Opportunity Lost Christopher Lee , 2002 single work review
— Appears in: The Sunday Age , 7 April 2002; (p. 9)

— Review of Henry Lawson 2002 selected work short story criticism poetry
X