Novel Politics : Studies in Australian Political Fiction
Carlton
:
Melbourne University Press
,
2020
18807115
2020
multi chapter work
criticism
'Percy Bysshe Shelley once described poets as the 'unacknowledged legislators of the world'. If this is true, Australian political scientists have shown curiously little interest in the role that literary figures play in the nation's political life.
'Novel Politics takes the relationship between literature and politics seriously, analysing the work of six writers, each the author of a classic text about Australian society. These authors bridge the history of local writing, from pre-Federation colonial Australia (Catherine Spence, Rosa Praed and Catherine Martin) to the contemporary moment (Tim Winton, Christos Tsiolkas and Kim Scott). Novel Politics unpicks the many political threads woven into these books, as they document the social world as it exists, while suggesting new possibilities for the nation's future. As political commentators of a particular kind, all six authors offer unique insights into the deeper roots of politics in Australia, beyond the theatre of parliament and out into the wider social world, as imagined by its dreamers and criticised by its most incisive discontents.'(Publication summary)
'Through an examination of works by four late nineteenth-century women writers ... which explores their differing intersections with medievalism as a temporal discourse, this essay will discuss the discourse's unique capacity to probe colonial gender and colonial ideologies via its oscillation between premodernity and modernity' (p.70).
'The anonymous writer of this novel has evidently started with the intention of presenting to the public a new and original type of Australian heroine. We have met with Australian girls (in books) whose principal characteristics were a tendency to use slang on every possible occasion, a predeliction for riding barebacked on unmanageable horses, and their somewhat hazy notion as the manners considered becoming in a young English lady; but never, in books or out of them, did we encounter the prototype of Stella Courtland the "Australian Girl", who had Kant's "Kritik of Pure Reason" at her fingers' ends, and spoke and wrote interminable pages of reflections on life, death and theological doctrines. As far as looks go, this unique young person, was quite on par with the average heroine, no less than 13 lines being devoted to the description of her eyes alone...'
'Through an examination of works by four late nineteenth-century women writers ... which explores their differing intersections with medievalism as a temporal discourse, this essay will discuss the discourse's unique capacity to probe colonial gender and colonial ideologies via its oscillation between premodernity and modernity' (p.70).
