Rhona Mayers Rhona Mayers i(A68225 works by)
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 'As If This Were Narnia or Somewhere' : What's Real(ly) Fantasy? An Exploration of John Marsden's 'Tomorrow, When the War Began' and Isobelle Carmody's 'Greylands' Rhona Mayers , 1998 single work criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , April vol. 8 no. 1 1998; (p. 18-24) Mayers is interested in examining the symbiotic relationship between realism and fantasy, which she sees as a 'hybrid twinning of two constructs' rather than two discrete and opposing genres (18). Setting up a comparative reading between Marsden's Tomorrow When the War Began and Carmody's Greylands, Mayers contends that Marsden's novel, 'conflates future and past tense' in ways that locate it in the realm of 'speculative fantasy' despite the narrative's dicourse which situates events as 'close to reality' (19). The result is a narrative which according to Mayers, 'negates any solid compatibilty between the two genres [fantasy / realism] and privileges their binary opposition' in ways that manipulate the reader to accept the homogonenized adolescent narrative voice as a reflection of 'real' adolescence experience in contemporary society (20-21). On the other hand, she reads Carmody's novel as one that deftly intergrates the two genres by blurring the boundaries between fantasy and realism in a narrative that 'shifts comfortably between incident and imagination' and enables readers to 'make connections between their experience of dreams and of reality' (21).
1 'Legends of Power and Weakness' : The Construction of Relationships Between Adults and Children in 'Jacob Have I Loved' and 'Dear Nobody' Rhona Mayers , 1994 single work criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , August-December vol. 5 no. 2-3 1994; (p. 109-112) Mayers looks at two non-Australian novels Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson and Dear Nobody by Berlie Doherty, however she also makes a brief reference to The Gathering by Isobelle Carmody. Mayers examines 'the construction of adult empowerment and child powerlessness' by drawing attention to the way the texts construct and delineate the power relationship between parent and child (109). Discussing The Gathering, Bates reveals how Carmody perpetuates 'adult knowledge and adolescent ignorance by perpetuating a unitary meaning of truth' which position the readers to 'identify totally with the youths as the principle focalisers in the novel' (112). This technique ultimately works to reinforce the discursive practices which support and maintain the privileging of certain groups and the inferioroty of others, in this case the binary opposition of dominant-subordinate which structures adult/child relationship (112).
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