'Women’s ageing processes raise important questions about the relationship between the body, the self, and society, but this topic has been widely ignored in Australian literature. The Australian Reifungsroman, through nuanced articulations of ageing women’s experiences of being doubly othered, shows itself to be a critical discourse that helps to break the cultural silence accorded to ageing women. This article aims to acknowledge the existence of the Reifungsroman in Australian literature while addressing questions around how this genre is employed in the Australian context, in order to actively engage with the topic of women’s ageing. Drawing on literary gerontology, this article examines Australian novelist Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection (2000) and Dorothy Hewett’s Neap Tide (1999) from a feminist perspective, focusing on the literary representations of ageing women offered by these novels. In so doing, this article contends that the Australian Reifungsroman unsettles the dominant ideas about women’s ageing as negative and declining. Indeed, narratives such as these help to articulate ageing women’s agency by reconstructing new images of older womanhood.' (Publication abstract)
The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction
Oxford
:
Peter Lang
,
2017
13852561
2017
multi chapter work
criticism
'This is the first in-depth, broad-based study of the impact of the Australian High Court’s landmark Mabo decision of 1992 on Australian fiction. More than any other event in Australia’s legal, political and cultural history, the Mabo judgement – which recognised indigenous Australians’ customary native title to land – challenged previous ways of thinking about land and space, settlement and belonging, race and relationships, and nation and history, both historically and contemporaneously. While Mabo’s impact on history, law, politics and film has been the focus of scholarly attention, the study of its influence on literature has been sporadic and largely limited to examinations of non-Aboriginal novels.
'Now, a quarter of a century after Mabo, this book takes a closer look at nineteen contemporary novels – including works by David Malouf, Alex Miller, Kate Grenville, Thea Astley, Tim Winton, Michelle de Kretser, Richard Flanagan, Alexis Wright and Kim Scott – in order to define and describe Australia’s literary imaginary as it reflects and articulates post-Mabo discourse today. Indeed, literature’s substantial engagement with Mabo’s cultural legacy – the acknowledgement of indigenous people’s presence in the land, in history, and in public affairs, as opposed to their absence – demands a re-writing of literary history to account for a “Mabo turn” in Australian fiction. ' (Publication summary)
The Paradoxical Taboo : White Female Characters and Interracial Relationships in Australian Fiction
Brisbane
:
2004
Z1180791
2004
single work
thesis
The thesis looks at the way white female characters and interracial relationships are represented in Australian fiction by white Australian writers.
Margaret Throsby in Conversation With Dorothy Hewett
Margaret Throsby
(interviewer),
Sydney
:
ABC Radio Tapes
,
1999
Z1005443
1999
single work
interview
Margaret Throsby talks to Dorothy Hewett on the occasion of the publication of her new novel, Neap Tide. Hewett is perhaps best known as a playwright, but thinks of herself 'first and foremost' as a poet. She speaks of her childhood on an isolated property in Western Australia, and how her poetry is full of 'remembered childhood'. She discusses her membership of the Communist Party, which lasted 22 years.
The Paradoxical Taboo : White Female Characters and Interracial Relationships in Australian Fiction
Brisbane
:
2004
Z1180791
2004
single work
thesis
The thesis looks at the way white female characters and interracial relationships are represented in Australian fiction by white Australian writers.
