image of person or book cover 6458907633410791664.jpg
This image has been sourced from Wikipedia
y separately published work icon The Twyborn Affair single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 1979... 1979 The Twyborn Affair
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Eddie Twyborn is bisexual and beautiful, the son of a Judge and a drunken mother. With his androgynous hero - Eudoxia/Eddie/Eadith Twyborn - and through his search for identity, for self-affirmation and love in its many forms, Patrick White takes us into the ambiguous landscapes, sexual, psychological and spiritual, of the human condition.' (From the publisher's website.)

Adaptations

form y separately published work icon The Twyborn Affair David Britton , United Kingdom (UK) : British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) , 2009 8145637 2009 single work radio play

'As the London Blitz begins, a tangled tale of sexual identity unfolds in this first-ever dramatisation of Nobel Prize-winner Patrick White 's 1979 novel.'

Source:

Radio Times, 24 September 2009, p.120.

Notes

  • Dedication: To Jim Sharman.
  • Epigraph:

    'What else should our lives be but a series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have noy yet become.' - David Malouf

    'My suspicion is that in Heaven the Blessed are of the opinion that the advantages of that locale have been overrated by theologians who were never actually there. Perhaps even in Hell the damned are not always satisfied.' -Jorge Luis Borges

    'Sometimes you'll see someone with nothing on but a bandaid.' -Diane Arbus

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Jonathan Cape ,
      1979 .
      image of person or book cover 6458907633410791664.jpg
      This image has been sourced from Wikipedia
      Extent: 432p.
      Note/s:
      • Published 29 September 1979.
      ISBN: 0224017330
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Viking ,
      1980 .
      image of person or book cover 7339120092436072887.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 432p.
      Note/s:
      • Published 22 April 1980.
      ISBN: 0670737895
    • Ringwood, Ringwood - Croydon - Kilsyth area, Melbourne - East, Melbourne, Victoria,: Harmondsworth, Middlesex,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Penguin ,
      1981 .
      image of person or book cover 5324240941938467675.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 432p.
      Reprinted: 1985 , 1988 , 1993
      Note/s:
      • 1981 issue printed in Australia,
      ISBN: 0140055444
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Vintage UK ,
      1995 .
      image of person or book cover 4593584818003091145.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 432p.
      Reprinted: 2000
      ISBN: 0099458217
Alternative title: Fallet Twyborn
Language: Swedish
    • Stockholm,
      c
      Sweden,
      c
      Scandinavia, Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Forum ,
      1981 .
      image of person or book cover 7703607254468650561.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 486p.
      ISBN: 9137074016

Other Formats

  • Braille.
  • Sound recording.

Works about this Work

Sexuality in Patrick White’s Fiction Hong Chen , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel 2023; (p. 135-147)

'This chapter will build on recent work by Elizabeth McMahon and Christos Tsiolkas to situate Australia’s first Nobel Prize winner as a queer modernist with his own distinct political valence. Written by the foremost Chinese scholar of Australian literature, Chen Hong, this chapter explores Whites epochal career. It covers White’s novelistic oeuvre from The Aunt’s Story (1948) through to his late queer masterpiece, The Twyborn Affair (1979).' (Publication abstract)

y separately published work icon Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction : An Abject Dictatorship of the Flesh Bridget Grogan , Leiden : Brill , 2019 15911959 2019 multi chapter work criticism

'In Reading Corporeality in Patrick White's Fiction: An Abject Dictatorship of the Flesh, Bridget Grogan combines theoretical explication, textual comparison, and close reading to argue that corporeality is central to Patrick White's fiction, shaping the characterization, style, narrative trajectories, and implicit philosophy of his novels and short stories. Critics have often identified a radical disgust at play in White's writing, claiming that it arises from a defining dualism that posits the 'purity' of the disembodied 'spirit' in relation to the 'pollution' of the material world. Grogan argues convincingly, however, that White's fiction is far more complex in its approach to the body. Modeling ways in which Kristevan theory may be applied to modern fiction, her close attention to White's recurring interest in physicality and abjection draws attention to his complex questioning of metaphysics and subjectivity, thereby providing a fresh and compelling reading of this important world author.'

'I Am No Longer a Fiction but a Real Human Being' : The Modernist Queer Body in Patrick White's The Twyborn Affair (1979) Dylan Rowen , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Hecate , vol. 44 no. 1/2 2018; (p. 59-75)

'This article explores how Patrick White is both an inheritor and a precursor of modernism and its queer and gendered legacies within mid-twentieth century Australia; these experimental legacies are still felt today, with queer authors producing even queerer texts amid the Australian literary landscape. Focusing upon his novel The Twyborn Affair (1979), I argue that White's use of modernist aesthetics enables him to achieve a complete corporeal identity by writing the queer body as, paradoxically, both fragmentary and fluid. His prose both resituates gendered binaries and boundaries, and enables ways of navigating the epistemological trauma enacted upon the queer self by heteronormativity. Attending to the fragmentation and fluidity that White's modernism unleashes, this paper is especially interested in the becoming of a queer self, and it seeks to salvage moments of queer desire from a fractured identity in contention with the conformity demanded by mandatory heterosexuality. These legacies that White leaves for us are especially pertinent to our present as his deconstruction of binary notions of gender and queer narratives "opens up" spaces where an articulation of an Australian queer self can recognise its inherently transgressive agency.'  (Publication abstract)

Modernist Fiction/Alternative Modernisms : Australia, Canada, New Zealand Anouk Lang , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Oxford History of the Novel in English : The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific Since 1950 2017; (p. 190-204)

'What is it about modernism, that multivalent category riven with internal contradictions, that makes literary criticism continue to value it as a category?...' (Introduction)

The Boredom and Futility of War in Patrick White's Fiction Annalisa Pes , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Le Simplegadi , April no. 15 2016; (p. 65-73)
This article investigates the representation of war in terms of uselessness and waste in the fiction of Patrick White, with a particular emphasis on the short story “After Alep”, written in 1945 when the writer was enrolled in the RAF as an Intelligence Officer. By analysing the story in the light of White’s approach to the war as to “the most horrifying and wasteful period” of his life (Marr 1992: 493), the article attempts to demonstrate how the narrative devices used by White contribute to demythologize the rhetoric of the war and of war heroes in a way that may be instrumental in conveying a message of peace out of the ultimate sense of futility transmitted by any war.
Recent Fiction : Futurism and Other Projections Peter Pierce , 1980 single work review
— Appears in: Meanjin , Winter vol. 39 no. 2 1980; (p. 260-269)

— Review of A Woman of the Future David Ireland , 1979 single work novel ; Long Live Sandawara : A Novel Colin Johnson , 1979 single work novel ; Confederates Thomas Keneally , 1979 single work novel ; Hemlock R. A. Nicholls , 1979 single work novel ; The Twyborn Affair Patrick White , 1979 single work novel
[Review] The Twyborn Affair P. Ableman , 1979 single work review
— Appears in: The Spectator , 29 September 1979; (p. 24-25)

— Review of The Twyborn Affair Patrick White , 1979 single work novel
[Review] The Twyborn Affair Manning Clark , 1979 single work review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 13 October 1979; (p. 20)

— Review of The Twyborn Affair Patrick White , 1979 single work novel
Patrick White's latest novel: a rich and enigmatic triptych J. Davidson , 1979 single work review
— Appears in: The National Times , 24 November no. 458 1979; (p. 54-55)

— Review of The Twyborn Affair Patrick White , 1979 single work novel
An Affair to Truly Remember Geoffrey Dutton , 1979 single work review
— Appears in: The Bulletin , 27 November vol. 100 no. 5188 1979; (p. 86,88-89)

— Review of The Twyborn Affair Patrick White , 1979 single work novel
Patrick White's Aesthetic Noel Macainsh , 1984 single work criticism
— Appears in: LiNQ , [Triple Issue] vol. 12 no. 1-3 1984; (p. 55-70) The Pathos of Distance 1992; (p. 304-319)
Mandala Symbolism in the Novels of Patrick White Shaik Samad , 1995-1996 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Commonwealth Review , vol. 7 no. 1 1995-1996; (p. 117-123)
Patrick White: An International Perspective John Colmer , 1991 single work criticism
— Appears in: Breaking Circles 1991; (p. 182-196)
Constructing the Post-Colonial Male Body Bill Ashcroft , 1998 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Body in the Library 1998; (p. 207-223)

Discusses the representations of the male body and identity in Australian art and literature.

y separately published work icon Lady Spy, Gentleman Explorer : The Life of Herbert Dyce Murphy : The Most Extraordinary Australian You've Never Heard Of Heather Rossiter , Milsons Point : Random House Australia , 2001 Z1205997 2001 single work biography
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