David Crouch David Crouch i(A83509 works by)
Gender: Male
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Works By

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1 1 y separately published work icon Colonial Psychosocial : Reading William Lane David Crouch , Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars Press , 2014 8335402 2014 single work criticism

'A small, bespectacled man with impressive moustaches and a devastating way with words, William Lane was at first delighted with the pliant disposition of the society he found emerging in the colonies of Australia. The nascent nation was awash with radical ideas and inherited bigotries, but also obsessed with itself and uneasy about its own place and composition. To this combustible atmosphere, Lane contributed all the excesses of his blistering rhetoric and seductive hyperbole; he mesmerised his audience with all the things it feared.

'Colonial Psychosocial traverses the ‘darkness’ of colonial cities, descriptions of opium dens and Fan Tan gambling rooms, tales of race-war and the morbid textual dissections of alien interlopers; it delves into vicious narratives of invasion and expulsion, inscrutable crowds and rioting mobs. Through the focus provided by Lane’s life and writing, the book traces phantasmagorias of deformity, disease and degenerative decline; it considers the fate of the ‘workingman’s paradise’, a miscellanea of socialist, nationalist and utopian delusion, and the disorienting appearance of modernity in the colonial laboratory. It follows the dictatorship and demise of ‘New Australia’, a settlement in Paraguay based on purity of blood, and closes with the violence and idealism of a transnational twilight in New Zealand.

'Lane helped shape a lexis of exclusion and denial that suffused the colonies. His divisive social commentary fed a fantasy of Australia that became the persistent rationale for aggressive assertions of identity. Through Lane, this study develops a way of approaching the historically situated and discursively shaped anxieties that were invigorated by the uncertainties bred at the edges of empire, distilled in a pervasive lexicon of ‘race thinking’, and made part of far wider technologies of social control.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

1 Alien Intoxications : The Aggressions of a Brisbane Opium Smoker David Crouch , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , vol. 27 no. 2 2012; (p. 81-96)
1 Untitled David Crouch , 2008 single work review
— Appears in: Australasian Drama Studies , April no. 52 2008; (p. 204-207)

— Review of Unsettling Space : Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre Joanne Tompkins , 2006 single work criticism
1 2 National Hauntings: The Architecture of Australian Ghost Stories David Crouch , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue 2007; (p. 94-105)

Echoing Judith Wright, David Crouch identifies two twisted strands in the Australian postcolonial condition - a love of the land and an invader's guilt. This 'non-indigenous desire to belong to a stolen land' gives the Australian ghost story 'a particular resonance ... In this country the presence of ghosts can be read as traces of historical traumas, fears which are often exposed in expressions of apprehensive (un)settlement.' Crouch aims to draw out some reflections on this perturbance in the Australian consciousness 'by reading Hume Nisbet's mobilisation of a phantasmic topology in his story "The Haunted Station" alongside the unsettling ghosts of Tim Winton's Cloudstreet.

Crouch concludes, in part, that both stories 'seem concerned with the continuity and legitimacy of settlement'. The haunted houses in both tales 'navigate the tensions surrounding the occupation of place in Australia' and both are 'undercut by the awareness of displaced indigenous habitation and suggest a moral disturbance in the non-indigenous Australian relationship with place'. It is conceivable, Crouch argues, that 'the ghost story itself is a way of silencing an indigenous presence within a discursive structure that asserts the legitimacy of non-indigenous occupation.'

1 Insane Lane: Crowds, Contamination and Violence in Australia David Crouch , 2006 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , no. 5 2006; (p. 72-85)
David Crouch argues that White or Yellow? : A Story of the Race War of A.D.1908 'is an early manifestation of a long lineage of national paranoia, part of a history of primal anxiety which colours the contemporary rhetoric of border protection, illegal immigrants and the increasingly phobic suspicion that a multicultural Australia might include hidden cells - or "communities of interest" - within.' He suggests that William Lane's novel 'is particularly interesting because of the way in which he presents ideas about the relations between the individual and the mass that are inflected by both sexual and racial politics.'
1 Untitled David Crouch , 2006 single work review
— Appears in: API Review of Books , February no. 41 2006;

— Review of Influence : Operator : Two Plays David Williamson , 2005 selected work drama criticism essay
1 Untitled David Crouch , 2005 single work review
— Appears in: API Review of Books , October no. 38 2005;

— Review of Australian Literature in Contexts Jaroslav Kušnír , 2003 single work criticism
1 Untitled David Crouch , 2005 single work review
— Appears in: JAS Review of Books , April no. 32 2005;

— Review of Popular Mechanics Liam Ferney , 2004 selected work poetry
1 1 Writing of Australian Dwelling : Animate Houses and Anxious Ground David Crouch , 2004 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , no. 80 2004; (p. 43-52, notes 235-236)
1 y separately published work icon Dwelling Spaces David Crouch , St Lucia : 2003 Z1792826 2003 single work thesis 'This is an essay in ideas of dwelling in Australia. It brings together a set of contemporary Australian conceptions of interior space and suggests a way of considering the mechanics of writing intimate spaces. It is concerned with a pattern of themes and correspondences.'
Source: Author's abstract
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