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The articles discusses reading a group of women writers together as a manifestation of literary feminism. It focuses on Australian women born between 1912 and 1928 which were often overlooked in their own lifetime, particularly in the decades after the Second World War, and mostly did not know each other.
'What I aim to show in this essay is how and with what personal and political force the narrative re-presents the reading process itself, how it demands the reader's active co-operation and interpretation, to the point of entrapping us in blindness - or rather in a blind sightedness - that doubles that of its protagonist, Teresa Hawkins. In so doing, the novel performs the questions it poses about romance and realism, idealism and materialism, and conveys, inter alia, its response to mid-twentieth century debates about the literature of revolution.' (53-54)
The essay uses Bourdieu's theories to show the ways in which some key female characters in institutions in Lilley's Summer Heights High and Jolley's fiction support the workings of institutional patriarchal power. In the final section, the author draws on the concept of 'heterotopia', in order to discuss the ways in which 'these texts contest masculine institutional paradigms, and explore the limits and possibilities of the alternative views offered by these fictions' (74).
Using AustLit database records, the author examines the number and proportion of Australian novels published from 1930 to 2006 by wo/men, the genre of these novels, and possible trends revealed. The essay concentrates on the implications of a quantitive reassessment of Australian literary history for feminist understandings of that history.
'In this essay, I examine the ways in which Moreton's literary oeuvre figures Indigeneity through the trope of sovereignty while also foregrounding the gendered nature of Indigenous subjectivity' (108).
This essay 'offers some thoughts on the transformative possibility of the littoral in Beverley Farmer's novel The Seal Woman, and a brief discussion of Farmer's particular deployment of littoral as feminine or even feminist' (121).
Theorising the Madwoman : Fictocritical Incursions - A PerformanceLaura Deane,
2010single work criticism — Appears in:
TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs,Octobervol.
14no.
22010;'‘Theorising the madwoman : fictocritical incursions - a performance’ is an intervention into the politics of naming and writing about women’s madness in literature. Using fictocritical tactics, this article stages a dialogue between the madwoman and the critic to make visible ‘the fiction of the disembodied scholar’ deployed in textual criticism. Sometimes speaking as the madwoman, sometimes as the feminist critic, I aim to destabilise the voice of the objective scholar, while continuing to lay some claim to it. Polyvocal in arrangement, discordant and offbeat in its strategies, and fictocritical in its tactics and stylistics, this article is an incursion into, rather than an interpretation of, women’s madness. Using a hybrid of fictional strategies, feminist scholarship, and personal experience, I allow the madwoman to interrupt, challenge and resist the interpretive project, by careening into it. Provisional, disorderly and subversive, fictocriticism offers a way of thinking through, rather than thinking about women’s madness. It seems particularly suited to an investigation of the madwoman in literature, as it dramatises the very disorder and instability the madwoman is said to embody.' (Author's abstract)
Theorising the Madwoman : Fictocritical Incursions - A PerformanceLaura Deane,
2010single work criticism — Appears in:
TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs,Octobervol.
14no.
22010;'‘Theorising the madwoman : fictocritical incursions - a performance’ is an intervention into the politics of naming and writing about women’s madness in literature. Using fictocritical tactics, this article stages a dialogue between the madwoman and the critic to make visible ‘the fiction of the disembodied scholar’ deployed in textual criticism. Sometimes speaking as the madwoman, sometimes as the feminist critic, I aim to destabilise the voice of the objective scholar, while continuing to lay some claim to it. Polyvocal in arrangement, discordant and offbeat in its strategies, and fictocritical in its tactics and stylistics, this article is an incursion into, rather than an interpretation of, women’s madness. Using a hybrid of fictional strategies, feminist scholarship, and personal experience, I allow the madwoman to interrupt, challenge and resist the interpretive project, by careening into it. Provisional, disorderly and subversive, fictocriticism offers a way of thinking through, rather than thinking about women’s madness. It seems particularly suited to an investigation of the madwoman in literature, as it dramatises the very disorder and instability the madwoman is said to embody.' (Author's abstract)