'The scene is Naples, against whose ancient and fantastic background the modern action takes place.
'Among the protagonists is Jenny, young and pretty, who has come to Naples in flight from a sombre drama, unaware that a larger drama waits her there.
'She has an introduction to a Neapolitan woman, and one day she idly follows it up. This is her leap through the looking glass.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Over a publishing career spanning a half-century from the early 1960s. Shirley Hazzard published four acclaimed novels: The Evening of the Holiday (1961), The Bay of Noon (1970), The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great Fire (2003). These novels focus on the intertwined matter of low and loss: they rake her readers into complex moral territory, with the certainties and compulsions of sexual and romantic love tested throughout by individual vulnerability. At the same time, and much in the manner of novels written a century earlier, they take up what Harvard referred to as "public themes," that is, the substantial human matter of political and social life, played out against the backdrop of the globalising world of the second half of the twentieth century.' (Introduction)
Shirley Hazzard : Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist
Amherst
:
Cambria Press
,
2012
Z1869117
2012
multi chapter work
criticism
'This study brings together Hazzard's highly regarded literary fiction and her impassioned, polemical critiques of the United Nations through the rubrics of her humanist thought and her deep commitment to internationalist, cosmopolitan principles. Chapter 1 provides the first critical analysis of Hazzard's public writings, paying particular attention to their rhetorical and poetic structures and their moral appeals. Olubas then works through each of Hazzard's published works of fiction in turn.In chapter 2, she analyses the two collections of short stories through their shared concern with the question of institutions--bureaucracy and marriage--in modern life. Chapter 3 turns to Hazzard's two early novels, both set in Italy, and examines the appeal made in each to Romantic poetry, and to the ways narrative, desire and death play out across the stories of love. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to Hazzard's two great novels, The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire, respectively. The Transit of Venus is analysed as a melodrama, with particular focus on its complex narrative manipulation of concealment and revelation, and the ethical drive of its central love story. The final chapter focuses on the interplay of love and war in The Great Fire, and argues that this novel returns Hazzard's readers to her own journey, her departure from Australia at the pivotal points of post-war Asia: colonial Hong Kong and post-nuclear Hiroshima.' Source: http://www.cambriapress.com/ (Sighted 22/06/2012).
