Cirrus@Austlit

'In 'Preying on the Past: Contexts of Some Recent Neo-Historical Fiction', Peter Pierce argues that, over the last five or so decades, Australian historical fiction has turned away from 'unconstrained and idealistic affirmations about Australia's future' to empathise instead with those figures in the historical landscape who were previously marginalised: 'victims of imperialism, patriarchy, racism, capitalism' (p.307).
This trend is particularly applicable to historical literature for younger readers, which now often tries to renegotiate history by providing a counterpoint to the metanarratives of the past (Stephens 2003, xii-xiii). Reflecting and responding to developments in the disciplines of historiography and, more generally, the humanities, texts in this genre are representative of the attempt to interrogate monolithic versions of Australian history - often called the 'three cheers' view - in which positivity, achievement and the peaceful settlement of the nation are key themes.
At issue in these novels is thus the redressing of past wrongs, particularly with respects to the violent aspects of colonisation when so many members of the Indigenous population either died or were forcibly displaced. Each of the three adolescent novels I focus upon in this paper - Melissa Lucashenko's Killing Darcy (1998), Gary Crew's No Such Country (1991) and Mark Svendsen's Poison Under Their Lips (2001) - is equally idiosyncratic in its approach to narrativising Australia's problematic colonial past' (Author's abstract).

'Images of alienation in young adult fictions are common, arguably because they mirror the cultural discourses around adolescence as displaced between two (constructed) 'knowable' states: childhood and adulthood. The connection between displacement and melancholy in texts for young adults provides a vast array of narrative symbolism that often blurs reality and fantasy as knowable versus unknowable states respectively. Sonya Hartnett's approach to adolescent introspection and states of melancholy-depression is often confrontational and her (critically acclaimed) young adult fiction interleaves often destructive narratives of incest, familial violence, murder and suicide with contemporary and historical landscapes.
The Ghost's Child (2007), is a fictionalized and historicized account of individual alienation and sadness whereby, melancholy and depression serve as powerful forces (of lossdesire) able to induce spectral presences in the life of the protagonist in ways that allow fantasy to become a means to negotiate loss and combat alienation. The overt psychological dimensions of the narrative are obviated through images of melancholy, madness, abjection and death.
This paper initiates a discussion of the text's psychoanalytic connotations through the ideas of both Freud and Kristeva. However, in order to question if/how the narrative moves beyond the traditional parameters that construct melancholy as either a clinical pathology or a useful literary/aesthetic device, melancholy is also discussed through the ideas of Gilles Deleuze. The incorporation of Deleuze's work enables a way to re-think conventional representations of the melancholic as an essentially abject and marginalised subject position' (Author's abstract).

'Although Said is writing about literal geographies here as well as cultural mappings of them, I open with his claims in order to initiate my consideration of the ways in which 'Shakespeare' as a discourse (Freedman 1989, p.245) and Shakespeare's historical and geographical contexts have been made over into culturally-contested terrain within contemporary children's literature for the purposes of constructing and controlling social space and subjectivities.
Historically, both the discourse of 'Shakespeare' and the depiction of William Shakespeare as a character have been deployed as structuring logics for narratives about the inherent value of Shakespeare, and in turn, for discussions of not just the legitimacy but the necessity of young people's subordination of self to Shakespeare. Gregory Rogers's The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard (2004) not only participates in that tradition of children's literature which deploys Shakespeare as a colonising discourse but also disrupts the norms of the tradition in two important ways' (Author's abstract).