Cirrus@Austlit

'This volume explores the possibilities and potentialities of “negative” affect in postcolonial literature and literary theory, featuring work on postcolonial studies, First Nations studies, cognitive cultural studies, cognitive historicism, reader response theory, postcolonial feminist studies, and trauma studies. The chapters of this work investigate negative affect in all its types and dimensions: analyses of the structures of feeling created by socio-political forces; assemblages and alliances produced by negative emotion; enactive interrelationships of emotion and environment; and the ethical implications of emotional response, to name a few. It seeks to rebrand “negative” emotions as productive forces which can paradoxically confer pleasure, agential power, and social progress through literary representation.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This book explores how postmillennial Anglophone women writers use romantic narrativisations of history to explore, revise, repurpose and challenge the past in their novels, exposing the extent to which past societies were damaging to women by instead imagining alternative histories. The novelists discussed employ the generic conventions of romance to narrate their understanding of historical and contemporary injustice and to reflect upon women’s achievements and the price they paid for autonomy and a life of public purpose. The volume seeks, firstly, to discuss the work of revision or reparation being performed by romantic historical fiction and, secondly, to analyse how the past is being repurposed for use in the present. It contends that the discourses and genre of romance work to provide a reparative reading of the past, but there are limitations and entrenched problems in such readings.'  (Publication summary)

'The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature offers a comprehensive survey of an increasingly important field. It demonstrates the influence of the “age of migration” on literature and showcases the role of literature in shaping socio-political debates and creating knowledge about the migratory trajectories, lives, and experiences that have shaped the post-1989 world.

'The contributors examine a broad range of literary texts and critical approaches that cover the spectrum between voluntary and forced migration. In doing so, they reflect the shift in recent years from the author-centric study of migrant writing to a more inclusive conception of migration literature. The book contains sections on key terms and critical approaches in the field; important genres of migration literature; a range of forms and trajectories of migration, with a particular focus on the global South; and on migration literature’s relevance in social contexts outside the academy. Its range of scholarly voices on literature from different geographical contexts and in different languages is central to its call for and contribution to a pluriversal turn in literary migration studies in future scholarship.

'This Companion will be of particular interest to scholars working on contemporary migration literature, and it also offers an introduction to new students and scholars from other fields.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Children’s Literature in Place: Surveying the Landscapes of Children’s Culture is an edited collection dedicated to individual, international, and interdisciplinary considerations of the places and spaces of children’s literature, media, and culture, from content to methodology, in fictional, virtual, and material settings. This volume proposes a survey of the changing landscapes of children’s culture, the expected and unexpected spaces and places that emerge as and because of children’s culture. The places and spaces of children’s literature are varied and diverse. By making place studies a guiding principle, this book builds on the impressive body of international research on place in children’s literature, media, and culture to bring together and provide a comprehensive overview of how to study place in children’s and young adult literature. This volume provides a wide range of approaches and international perspectives of place in children’s literature, media, and culture and contributes to this growing and relevant field by showcasing various scholarly aspects and approaches to children’s literature, and the place of children’s literature in the context of international scholarship.' (Publication summary)

'During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, children’s media use increased (Mesce et al. 2021) while a decrease in print-book reading was observed (Nolan et al. 2022). An increase in tablet use suggests that when children were reading, it was mostly online in the form of ePub3 pdf files for illustrated works and prescribed school texts, while smartphone use was linked to apps and games. (Susilowati et al. 2021) For many years now, children’s publishers have experimented with digital picture-book formats but have regarded the genre as not suitable for digitisation.

'This book documents the findings of a one-year research project engaging the children’s publishing sector for feedback on reading trends and digital publishing in picture-book genres. The research assesses the plight of picture books in the current climate and considers how picture-book publishers cater to diverse readerships and new reading platforms post Covid-19 lockdowns and into the digital age.

'Written by an academic and editor with over 15 years industry experience, this book offers a nuanced response to children’s picture book publishing and reception for librarians, teachers, publishers and international scholars in the fields of publishing studies, library studies, early childhood studies, early education and childhood psychology.' (Publication summary) 

'Australian governments at all levels have been engaged with arts and culture in many different forms since the beginning of European settlement. The way this has occurred is documented and analysed here, both from an historical and critical perspective.

'Changing understandings of culture and the significance of Indigenous Culture to Australia receive special attention. While the focus is primarily directed to Federal Government engagement, there is also consideration paid to both state and local government involvement. There is attention paid to the censorship of arts practice by governments as well as the direct interventions by politicians in arts practice. Different approaches to the arts by governments are also considered, as well as attempts to develop a national cultural policy. The impact of the recent pandemic is addressed and various research reports about the arts sector and its relationship with government are also noted. There is then a final discussion about some issues that governments could address in the future, that might ensure a more sustainable Australian arts sector.

'This book will be of particular interest to scholars of contemporary arts, arts management, cultural history, public policy and cultural policy. It may also interest bureaucrats and politicians.' (Publication summary) 

'This book examines the reading cultures developed by communities of readers and book lovers on BookTube, Bookstagram, and BookTok as an increasingly important influence on contemporary book and literary culture. It explores how the affordances of social media platforms invite readers to participate in social reading communities and engage in creative and curatorial practices that express their identity as readers and book lovers.

'The interdisciplinary team of authors argue that by creating new opportunities for readers to engage in social reading practices, bookish social media has elevated the agency and visibility of readers and book consumers within literary culture. It has also reshaped the cultural and economic dynamics of book recommendations by creating a space in which different actors are able to form an identity as mediators of reading culture.

'Concise and accessible, this introduction to an increasingly central set of literary practices is essential reading for students and scholars of literature, sociology, media, and cultural studies, as well as teachers and professionals in the book and library industries.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This volume adopts a transversal South-South approach to the study of visual culture in transnational, transcultural, and geopolitical contexts.

'Every day hundreds of people travel back and forth between southern countries, including Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, New Zealand, Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and South Africa. With these people travel cultures, experiences, memories, and images. This creates the conditions for the generation, sharing, and circulation of new knowledge that is both southern and about the South as a specific kind of material and imaginary territory (or territories). It does so through the study of the southern hemisphere’s screen cultures, addressing the broad spectrum of cultural expression in both traditional and new screen media, including film, television, video, digital, interactive, and online and portable technologies.' (Publication summary)

Storied Deserts makes a crucial and critical intervention in the field of environmental humanities by showcasing an emerging body of research on desert places from around the world.

'Deserts, despite dominant stereotypes of wasteland and barrenness, are culturally and ecologically abundant places. This edited volume sets out to reimagine the world’s desert places and the very concept of ‘the desert’ itself, taking a boldly interdisciplinary and multicultural approach. Authors engage in literary ecocriticism and ecopoetics, film and visual studies, critical theory, personal and transdisciplinary reflection, creative practices, and historical scholarship. Through their diverse range of perspectives, contributors show how arid lands have been and can be understood as sites of narrative production, places where signs and imaginaries are born from the materialities of space and entanglement. In this way, the volume highlights how the storied matter of the Earth’s deserts informs lived realities, environmental histories, cinematic and literary imaginaries, political conflicts, and even intellectual categories such as ‘the human’ and ‘the elemental’.

'Ultimately, this book shows that reimagining desert places can help us to grapple with the epochal challenges of the Anthropocene. It is an important and engaging collection for scholars and students across disciplines that helps establish the value of desert humanities.' (Publication summary)

'This collection uncovers connections and coincidences that challenge the old stories of pioneering performers who crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

'It investigates songlines, drama, opera, music theatre, dance, and circus—removing traditional boundaries that separate studies of performance, and celebrating difference and transformation in style, intention, and delivery. Well known, or obscure, travelling performers faced dangers at sea and hazardous journeys across land. Their tracks, made in pursuit of fortune and fame, intersected with those made by earlier storytellers in search for food. Touring Performance and Global Exchange takes a fresh look at such tracks—the material remains—demonstrating that moving performance does far more than transfer repertoires and people; it transforms them. Touring performance has too often beenconceived in diasporic terms, as a fixed product radiating out from a cultural centre. This collection maps different patterns—ones that comprise reversed flows, cross currents, and continually proliferating centres of meaning in complex networks of global exchange.

'This collection will be of great interest to scholars and students in theatre, music, drama studies, and cultural history.' (Publication summary)

'This book focuses on varied forms of self-referential storytelling or life writing and its emergence as a democratic and inclusive genre, both globally and in India, and its intersections with history, fiction, memory, truth and identity.

'The book examines the practice of life writing and its scope for accommodating diverse voices, distinct identities, collaborations and non-hierarchical connections as it gives voice to oral, silenced and marginalized communities. It explores forms like auto/biographical fiction, digital storytelling, graphic memoirs, and testimonies of migration and exile, among others. The eclectic collection of essays in this volume draws attention towards the transformative possibilities of life writing as it engages with issues of resistance, recuperation, reinscribing individual and collective memories, and histories, and promotes an understanding of multicultural others. Focusing on the multiple ways in which the production, circulation, and consumption of life writing has helped to reimagine and redefine individual and collective identities in different cultural and geopolitical contexts, the collection breaks new ground by initiating a cross-cultural perspective in life writing studies. The book aims to encourage critical engagement with a vastly growing body of literature that has seen a publishing and translation boom in contemporary times, both globally and in India. With life writing emerging as a robust area of research, this edited collection provides a much-needed impetus to critically engage with issues of self-representation, memory and identity in recent times.

'This volume will serve as a significant and rich resource for university students, researchers, and academics of literature, comparative studies, cultural studies, history, indigenous studies and digital and media studies.' (Publication summary)

'Patrick West’s Architectures of Occupation in the Australian Short Story cultivates the potential for literary representations of architectural space to contribute to the development of a contemporary politics of Australian post-colonialism.

'West argues that the predominance of tropes of place within cultural and critical expressions of Australian post-colonialism should be re-balanced through attention to spatial strategies of anti-colonial power. To elaborate the raw material of such strategies, West develops interdisciplinary close readings of keynote stories within three, female-authored, pan-twentieth century, Australian short-story collections: Bush Studies by Barbara Baynton (1902); Kiss on the Lips and Other Stories by Katharine Susannah Prichard (1932); and, White Turtle: A Collection of Short Stories by Merlinda Bobis (1999). The capacity of the short-story form to prompt creative and politically germinal engagements with species of space associated with architecture and buildings is underscored. Relatedly, West argues that the recent resurgence of binary thought—on local, national, and international scales—occasions an approach to the short-story collections shaped by binary relationships like a dichotomy of inside and outside. Concluding his argument, West connects the literary and architectural critiques of the story collections to the wicked problem, linked to ongoing colonial violences, of improving Australian Indigenous housing outcomes.

'Innovative and interdisciplinary, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Literary, Architectural and Postcolonial Studies. .' (Publication summary)

'James Smith (1989) is study of this hitherto-neglected maker of colonial culture, and traces the rise and decline of the transplanted ideas and values that Smith and many of his fellow immigrants to Australia upheld. It reveals the remarkable vigour with which Smith set about making a new society out of the legacy of the old, and which saw the transformation of Melbourne from gold-rush town to Australia’s largest and most influential city in the new Federation.' (Publication summary)

'This book critically investigates the ways in which Aboriginal children and childhood figure in Australia’s cultural life to mediate Australians’ ambivalence about the colonial origins of the nation, as well as its possible post-colonial futures. Engaging with representations in literature, film, governmental discourse, and news and infotainment media, it shows how ways of representing Aboriginal children and childhood serve a national project of representing settler-Australian values, through the forgetting of colonial violence. Analysing the ways in which certain negative aspects of Australian nationhood are concealed, rendered invisible, and repressed through practices of representing Aboriginal children and childhood, it challenges accepted ‘shared understandings’ regarding Australian-ness and settler-colonial sovereignty.

'Through an innovative interdisciplinary approach that engages critical theory, post-colonial theory, literary studies, history, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, Representing Aboriginal Childhood responds to urgent questions that pivot on the role of the Indigenous child within settler nation-state formations. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and social geography, collective memory, politics and cultural studies.' (Publication summary)

'The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms delivers a new, inclusive examination of science fiction, from close analyses of single texts to large-scale movements, providing readers with decolonized models of the future, including print, media, race, gender, and social justice.

'This comprehensive overview of the field explores representations of possible futures arising from non-Western cultures and ethnic histories that disrupt the “imperial gaze”. In four parts, The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms considers the look of futures from the margins, foregrounding the issues of Indigenous groups, racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, and any people whose stakes in the global order of envisioning futures are generally constrained due to the mechanics of our contemporary world.

'The book extends current discussions in the area, looking at cutting-edge developments in the discipline of science fiction and diverse futurisms as a whole. Offering a dynamic mix of approaches and expansive perspectives, this volume will appeal to academics and researchers seeking to orient their own interventions into broader contexts.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Providing an international reference work written solely by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors, this book offers a powerful overview of emergent and topical research in the field of global Indigenous studies. It addresses current concerns of Australian Indigenous peoples of today, and explores opportunities to develop, and support the development of, Indigenous resilience and solidarity to create a fairer, safer, more inclusive future. Divided into three sections, this book explores: * What futures for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander peoples might look like, and how institutions, structures and systems can be transformed to such a future; * The complexity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island life and identity, and the possibilities for Australian Indigenous futures; and * The many and varied ways in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples use technology, and how it is transforming their lives. This book documents a turning point in global Indigenous history: the disintermediation of Indigenous voices and the promotion of opportunities for Indigenous peoples to map their own futures. It is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Indigenous studies, as well as gender and sexuality studies, education studies, ethnicity and identity studies, and decolonising development studies.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The Routledge Companion to Literature and Social Justice is a comprehensive and multi- purpose collection on this important topic. With contributors working in various fields, the Companion provides in- depth analyses of both the cumulative and emergent issues, obstacles, praxes, propositions, and theories of social justice.

'The first section offers a historical overview of major developments and debates in the field, while the following sections look in more detail at the key traditions and show how literature and theory can be applied as analytical tools to real- world inequalities and the impact of doing so. The contributors provide reviews of major theoretical traditions, including Marxism, feminism, Critical Race Theory, disability studies, and queer studies. They also share literary analyses of influential authors including W. E. B. Du Bois, Yang Kui, Edwidge Danticat, Octavia Butler, and Rivers Solomon amongst others. The final section considers future possibilities for theory and action of justice, drawing specifically from theories and knowledges in decolonial, Indigenous, environmental, and posthumanist studies.

'This authoritative volume draws on the intersections between literary studies and social movements in order to provide scholars, students, and activists alike with a complete collection of the most up- to- date information on both canonical and emerging texts and case studies globally.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This dynamic multidisciplinary collection of essays examines the uncanny, eerie, wondrous, and dreaded dimensions of oceans, seas, waterways, and watery forms of the oceanic South, a haunted global precinct stretching across the Pacific, Southern and Indian Oceans, and around Australasia, Oceania, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa.

'Presenting work from leading scholars, the chapters contend with the contemporary fears and repressions associated with the return of environmental traumas, colonial traumas, and the spectres of the precolonial deep past that resurface in the present. The book examines the manifestations of these Gothic aesthetics and propensities across a range of watery spaces – seas, oceans, waterholes, and swamps – in vessels, ports, shorelines, journeys, strandings, and transformations, in amphibious bodies and the drowned, all of which promote haunted engagement with the materiality of water. This collection renews the interdisciplinary breadth of Gothic criticism and the relevance of Gothic affect and sensibility to understanding the histories and cultures of the oceanic South through an exploration of the rarely considered uncanniness of the oceans, waterways, and aqueous forms of the Southern Hemisphere, haunted by colonial and precolonial imaginings of the Antipodes, the legacies of imperialism, and the “double vision” between Oceanic and settler-colonial epistemologies, and the encroaching menace of climate change. Comprising diverse contributions from screen, literary, and cultural studies, environmental humanities, human geography, and creative practice in ecological sound art, and poetry, the collection examines the uncanny and the sublime in watery fictions and authentic settings of a range of aqueous southern forms – ocean surfaces and depths, haunted shallows and reefs, moist mangroves, moss and lichen, the awesome horror of tidal apocalypse.

'This book will be illuminating reading for students and scholars of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, area studies, and Indigenous studies.' (Publication summary)

This book presents an innovative and imaginative reading of contemporary Australian literature in the context of unprecedented ecological crisis.

'The Australian continent has seen significant, rapid changes to its cultures and land-use from the impact of British colonial rule, yet there is a rich history of Indigenous land-ethics and cosmological thought. By using the age-old idea of ‘cosmos’—the order of the world—to foreground ideas of a good order and chaos, reciprocity and more-than-human agency, this book interrogates the Anthropocene in Australia, focusing on notions of colonisation, farming, mining, bioethics, technology, environmental justice and sovereignty. It offers ‘cosmological readings’ of a diverse range of authors—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—as a challenge to the Anthropocene’s decline-narrative. As a result, it reactivates ‘cosmos’ as an ethical vision and a transculturally important counter-concept to the Anthropocene. Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell argues that the arts can help us envision radical cosmologies of being in and with the planet, and to address the very real social and environmental problems of our era.

'This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, and postcolonial, transcultural and Indigenous studies, with a primary focus on Australian, New Zealand, Oceanic and Pacific area studies.' (Publication summary)

'Verbatim Theatre Methodologies for Community-Engaged Practice offers a framework for developing original community-engaged productions using a range of verbatim theatre approaches.

'This book's methodologies offer an approach to community-engaged productions that fosters collaborative artistry, ethically nuanced practice, and social intentionality. Through research-based discussion, case study analysis, and exercises, it provides a historical context for verbatim theatre; outlines the ethics and methods for community immersion that form the foundation of community-engaged best practice; explores the value of interviews and how to go about them; provides clear pathways for translating gathered data into an artistic product; and offers rehearsal room strategies for playwrights, producers, directors, and actors in managing the specific context of the verbatim theatre form.

'Based on diverse, real-world practice that spans regional, metropolitan, large-scale, micro, independent, commercial, and curriculum-based work, this is a practical and accessible guide for undergraduates, artists, and researchers alike.' (Publication summary)