Elvis Down Under : Simulations of a US Pop Icon in Australian Fiction single work   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2010... 2010 Elvis Down Under : Simulations of a US Pop Icon in Australian Fiction
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'This paper will examine a selection of Australian fiction which features Elvis Presley, or a Presley manqué, as a character. This will include novels and short fiction by Debra Adelaide (A Household Guide to Dying), Julie Capaldo (Weather), Nick Cave (And the Ass Saw the Angel), Gail Jones ('Heartbreak Hotel') and Dorian Mode (A Cafe in Venice). The paper will investigate the capacity of a ubiquitous pop icon such as Presley to absorb and reflect socio-cultural meanings that transcend national boundaries while at the same time affirming elements of national character. In doing so it will consider the meaning and function of trans-national celebrity in a globalised world, and explore why it is that Australian authors—and readers—find a resonance in the figure of Elvis Presley that is seemingly missing from the pop-iconography of their own country.' (Author's abstract)

Notes

  • Epigraph:

    Elvis will not leave the building because his image remains, if anything, overflowing with meaning and historicity. -Thomas C. Carlson

    Elvis is such a packed cultural symbol. - Shady Cosgrove

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Reading Across the Pacific : Australia-United States Intellectual Histories Robert Dixon (editor), Nicholas Birns (editor), Sydney : Sydney University Press , 2010 Z1754436 2010 anthology criticism 'Reading Across the Pacific is a study of literary and cultural engagement between the United States and Australia from a contemporary interdisciplinary perspective. The book examines the relations of the two countries, shifting the emphasis from the broad cultural patterns that are often compared, to the specific networks, interactions, and crossings that have characterised Australian literature in the United States and American literature in Australia.
    In the twenty-first century, both American and Australian literatures are experiencing new challenges to the very different paradigms of literary history and criticism each inherited from the twentieth century. In response to these challenges, scholars of both literatures are seizing the opportunity to reassess and reconfigure the conceptual geography of national literary spaces as they are reformed by vectors that evade or exceed them, including the transnational, the local and the global.
    The essays in Reading Across the Pacific are divided into five sections: National Literatures and Transnationalism, Poetry and Poetics, Literature and Popular Culture, The Cold War, and Publishing History and Transpacific Print Cultures' (Source: Publisher's website).         Sydney : Sydney University Press , 2010     pg. 177-193
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Last amended 23 Feb 2011 13:39:29
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