Cirrus@Austlit

'Ubiquitous, highly visible, nonspecific to geography, history, race, or sex, dwarfism's connection with Australia's mythic and literary histories is remarkable enough to suggest here that it occupy its own subgenre in literature, the zwergroman (m). Australia's branding as the "Antipodes" geographically recalls its colonial past; mythographically the imaginative configuration was as an underworld of opposites ruled by the diminutive King of the Antipodes. Thus, the zwergroman is frequently fashioned from Celtic myths of the colonizing power along with the shaping power of colonial processes. In addition to introducing the conventions of the zwergroman and demonstrating the significance of dwarf characters to Australia's pre- and postcolonial narratives, this article gradually introduces concepts from disability studies (through the scholarly work of Erin Pritchard, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, and others) by examining representations and cultural meanings imposed on dwarf characters prior to the counter histories of twenty-first-century short-statured scholars whose demand for personhood required an engagement with subjective and experiential realities. The novels discussed (1970–94) represent a cluster of dwarf-centric novels by notable writers, all able-bodied at the time of writing (excepting Patrick White). They include C. J. Koch, The Year of Living Dangerously (1978; filmed 1982); James McQueen, Hook's Mountain (1982); Ruth Park, Swords and Crowns and Rings (1977); Peter Carey, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994); and Patrick White, The Vivisector (1970).' (Publication abstract)

'Like a template for a climate-changing world, Australia – the driest inhabited continent on Earth – exists in an imaginative and emotional landscape shaped from extremities. Situated within the geopolitical region of Australasia/Oceania, Australia’s trans-Tasman relations with earthquake-prone Aotearoa (“land of the long white cloud”) began in 1788 when New Zealand was included within the British colony of New South Wales. New Zealand, however, was never a penal colony and separation from its rough cousin came after Māori (consolidated under a single language) signed the Treaty of Waitangi with the British Crown in 1840 – itself a marker of difference between the First Nations of both countries. Australian Aborigines, scattered across the continent, each nation speaking its own language – saw land rights withheld under the illegal fiction of terra nullius, “nobody’s land.”'

Source: Introduction.

'In this, the first collection of ecocritical essays devoted to Australian contexts and their writers, Australian and US scholars explore the transliteration of land and sea through the works of Australian authors and through their own experiences. The littoral zone is the starting point in this fresh approach to reading literature organised around the natural environment - rainforest, desert, mountains, coast, islands, Antarctica. There's the beach, where sexual and spiritual crises occur; the Western Australian wheatbelt; deserts, camel trekking, and the transformation of a salt flat into an inland island; New Age literature that 'appropriates' Aboriginal culture as the healing poultice for an ailing West; a re-examination of pastoralism; an inquiry into whether Judith Wright's work can "persuade us to rejoice" in the world; the Limestone Plains, home of the bush capital and the bogong moth; tropical North Queensland; national parks where "the mountains meet the sea"; temperate islands, with their history of sealing, Soldier Settlement, and sea country pastoral; and Antarctica, where a utopian vision gives way to an emphasis on its 'timeless' icescape as minimalist backdrop for human dramas. The author-terrain includes poets, playwrights, novelists, and non-fiction writers across the range of contexts constituting the littoral zone of 'Australia'.'

Source: Rodopi website, http://www.rodopi.nl
Sighted: 28/08/2007