Cirrus@Austlit

'Whose History? examines the traditions in Australian historical fiction, and ponders how Australian historical novels can engage teachers and student teachers. Whose History? aims to illustrate how historical novels and their related genres may be used as an engaging teacher/learning strategy for student teachers in pre-service teacher education courses. It does not argue all teaching of History curriculum in pre-service units should be based on the use of historical novels as a stimulus, nor does it argue for a particular percentage of the use of historical novels in such courses. It simply seeks to argue the case for this particular approach, leaving the extent of the use of historical novels used in History curriculum units to the professional expertise of the lecturers responsible for the units.' (Publisher's blurb)

'In 2011, Amy T Matthews published End of the Night Girl with Wakefield Press, a novel which engages creatively with questions of identity politics and the ethics of fictionalising the Holocaust. In Navigating the Kingdom of Night, Matthews contextualises End of the Night Girl in terms of the critical debate surrounding Holocaust fiction.

The critic Theodor Adorno once famously proclaimed that ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. He made this proclamation in 1949, at a time when high-ranking Nazis faced the Nuremberg Trials; when the world was watching newsreels of bodies in pits and walking skeletons in striped pyjamas; when the Holocaust was a recent, raw and stunning event; and when the victims faced a disbelieving world and the perpetrators a divided, beaten and shamed homeland. Adorno’s statement, made so soon after the horrors, still resonates today and can be applied critically to all imaginative literature about the Holocaust.

Critics, historians and Holocaust survivors have argued for decades over whether the Holocaust should be accessible to fiction and, if so, who has the right to write those fictions. Navigating the Kingdom of Night addresses such concerns and analyses various literary strategies adopted by authors of Holocaust fiction, including the non-realist narrative techniques used by authors such as Yaffa Eliach, Jonathan Safran Foer and John Boyne and the self-reflexivity of Art Spiegelman. Matthews frames the discussion by self-examining her experience as an author of a Holocaust fiction.' (Publisher's blurb)

'The novel Children Of The Earth is about transformation. It uses Ovid's Metamorphoses as a metaphor for the processes which occur in the psyche of each character, and is based on Jungian insights into myth and alchemy. Archetypes that underlie the unconscious processes of all humanity are seen in the symbolism of three very different religious traditions, namely Greek mythology, the Hebrew Old Testament and Australian Aboriginal beliefs. I explore the ways in which these three great mythologies might have converged in colonial South Australia. The story deals with the troubled marriage of isolated settler couple, Hestia and Adam George, and the effects on it of three people who come into their lives. Itinerant German mineralogist Johannes Menge ( based on a real life pioneer ) is a self-taught, eccentric polymath, and a devout but unorthodox exponent of the Bible. In Jungian terms he fulfils the role of an archetypal, but flawed, ' Wise Old Man'. Menge represents nineteenth century Protestantism, albeit still trailing some arcane superstitions. His protégé, a disgraced young teacher of classics, calls himself Hermes, and represents the role of Greek mythology in European civilization. Reliving the life of the mercurial god in the antipodes, he becomes messenger, trickster and seducer. Unatildi, an Indigenous girl whom Adam finds in a burnt-out tree trunk, is an archetypal maiden. She introduces the Europeans to the mythology of their new land, as sacred for her people as the Bible is for Johannes Menge. Each of these three characters plays a part in transforming the marriage of Adam and Hestia, and each, in turn, undergoes a personal metamorphosis. Aboriginal women act as midwives at the birth of the love-child of Hestia and Hermes. Named Sophia, after the goddess of wisdom, the new child is thought to have inherited the miwi spirit of Unatildi's lost infant. On his deathbed, as Menge bequeaths his wisdom to his Australian friends, he predicts that Sophia will understand the sacredness of all spiritual life. Eventually Hestia and Adam find themselves changed by their encounters with the archetypes of myth. News of Menge's death on the goldfields gives them the courage they need to begin rebuilding an honest relationship. The novel is 107,400 words in length and is accompanied by an exegesis of 20,170 word, entitled Myth And Alchemy In Creative Writing. The exegesis describes the interactive process of researching and writing, as well as exploring the value of Jungian concepts for creative writing, and current issues of creating Indigenous characters. There is an emphasis on the Jungian approach to mythology and alchemy.'

Source: Abstract.

'The thesis, 'Harriet Chandler', a study in (inter)textuality, is made up of the Major Creative Work and Critical Essay. The Major Creative Work is an imagined re-creation of Harriet Chandler, a minor character in Australian writer Murray Bail's 1987 novel Holden's Performance. The work of intertextuality includes both homage to the predecessor and the creation of something new. The thesis (re)considers Harriet Chandler's life before, during and after her contact with Holden Shadbolt, the eponymous (anti)hero of Bail's novel, with the aim of figuring and foregrounding the female and feminine, even the feminist, art work and cultural practice, conviviality and contestation, colour, movement, a becoming. Harriet Chandler represents mutability in her polio-stricken body, her art practice and her living at Manly Beach on the coastline of Sydney's harbour. The work is playful in its intertexual strategies and innovative in its hybrid writing practice. The tone varies from the comic to the serious; language varies from abstraction and the poetic to the ordinary and everyday; and genres and discourses include fiction, history, nature writing and auto/biography. The Critical Essay considers the coastline and the veranda as physical manifestations of in-between spaces, and innovative writing practice and intertextuality as textual strategies of the liminal which is characterised by the potential for change.' (Thesis summary)