person or book cover
y separately published work icon Bite Your Tongue single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 2008... 2008 Bite Your Tongue
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Mrs Angel Rendle-Short said that a book given to her daughter, Francesca, as an English textbook at school would teach her to be a permissive rebel.' - Courier Mail, 1975.

'There are some things you should never speak about.

' In Francesca Rendle-Short's family, silence was golden. So to break ranks and tell stories about her peculiar family life and her mother's moral crusading should send this daughter straight to hell in a ball of smoke and flame along with all those books her mother wanted to burn.

'Set in 1970s Queensland and also contemporary times, Bite Your Tongue is an elegant mix of novel and memoir that is in turn harrowing and delightful. Can a daughter forgive her mother for making her a pawn in her conservative moral crusades? Can greater understanding reinstate love? What does a mother owe a daughter and a daughter a mother?

'Bite Your Tongue is the story of the deep bond that exists between a daughter and her mother, no matter how difficult that mother might be. It is also a story of acceptance.' (From the publisher's website.)

Notes

  • Book launched in Melbourne at Readings Carlton, 20 September 2011 and in Canberra at Electric Shadows Bookshop, 29 September 2011.
  • An autobiographical novel.
  • Dedication:
    For my mother, Angel
    1920-2006
  • Epigraph:
    'The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their
    wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.'

    -Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Bite Your Tongue Francesca Rendle-Short , Wollongong : 2008 Z1804123 2008 single work thesis Wollongong : 2008
    • North Melbourne, Flemington - North Melbourne area, Melbourne - North, Melbourne, Victoria,: Spinifex Press , 2011 .
      person or book cover
      Extent: 246p.
      Description: illus., facsims, ports
      Note/s:
      • Includes:
        • Dr Joy's Death List: Burn a Book a Day (p. 240)
        • List of Illustrations (p. 241)
        • Permissions (pp. 242-244)
      • Published October 6th 2011
      ISBN: 9781876756963 (pbk.), 9781742197890 (ebk.), 9781742197876 (ebk. : Dx reader), 9781742197869 (ebk. : Kindle), 9781742197852 (ebk. : pdf)
VIEW PUBLICATION DETAILS FOR ALL VERSIONS ()

Related Works

One Day in English Francesca Rendle-Short , 2011 single work extract novel
— Appears in: Verity La , November 2011;

An extract from Bite Your Tongue.
VIEW ALL RELATED WORKS (1)

Works about this Work

(Post-) Pastoral Iris Ralph , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Packing Death in Australian Literature : Ecocides and Eco-Sides 2020; (p. 44-66)
y separately published work icon Packing Death in Australian Literature : Ecocides and Eco-Sides Iris Ralph , London : Routledge , 2020 19932417 2020 multi chapter work criticism

'Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides addresses Australian Literature from ecocritical, animal studies, plant studies, indigenous studies, and posthumanist critical perspectives. The book’s main purpose is twofold: to bring more sustained attention to environmental, vegetal, and animal rights issues, past and present, and to do that from within the discipline of literary studies. Literary studies in Australia continue to reflect disinterest or not enough interest in critical engagements with the subjects of Australia’s oldest extant environments and other beings beside humans.

'Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides foregrounds the vegetal and nonhuman animal populations and contours of Australian Literature. Critical studies relied on in Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides include books by Simon C. Estok, Bill Gammage, Timothy Morton, Bruce Pascoe, Val Plumwood, Kate Rigby, John Ryan, Wendy Wheeler, Cary Wolfe, and Robert Zeller. The selected literary texts include work by Merlinda Bobis, Eric Yoshiaki Dando, Nugi Garimara, Francesca Rendle-Short, Patrick White, and Evie Wyld.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.
Australian Tongue and Ag-gag Law Iris Ralph , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology , no. 6 2016-2017; (p. 50-61) 'In this essay, I comment on two histories of animal farming in Australia in an ecocritical reading of several works of Australian literature: Tim Winton’s novel Shallows (1984), Susan Hawthorne’s collection of poetry, Cow (2011) and Francesca Rendle-Short’s novel Bite Your Tongue (2011). The first of those histories, the background of Shallows, refers to the whaling industry that operated in Western Australian waters up through the 1970s and the growing public awareness of that industry that eventually drove it to a halt in 1978, the year the main events of the novel take place. Cow and Bite Your Tongue, the texts that I mostly discuss, carry references to the history of industrial farming of cows in Australia, which, along with the industrial farming of other domesticated animal species, exploded after 1970 (in Australia and elsewhere in urban-industrialising countries), the same decade when Australians were beginning to rally behind animal rights activists’ opposition to whale slaughter. Today, almost half a century later, animal advocacy activists continue to raise pressing questions about animal species that are industrially farmed. They are doing so at the same time as the meat industry is attempting to restrict public access to and information about its operations. I address those questions in my reading of Hawthorne’s paean to cows and Rendle-Short’s references to the Moral Right movement in Queensland in the 1970s and attempts by its supporters to remove works of literature from school book shelves.' (Publication abstract)
Bite Your Tongue by Francesca Rendle-Short Bronwyn Lacken , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Reviews in Australian Studies , vol. 9 no. 1 2015;
— Review of Bite Your Tongue Francesca Rendle-Short , 2008 single work novel
Memory in a Curiously Conservative Queensland Marcus Breen , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Women’s Book Review , vol. 26 no. 1/2 2014;
— Review of Bite Your Tongue Francesca Rendle-Short , 2008 single work novel 'CAN full disclosure be fully rendered? The short answer is no. The longer, more engaging answer is that it is impossible to answer that question when the relationship with an author is embedded in one’s own experience. In fact, the measure of disclosure is indicated by the way gaps in a narrative are filled in with literary devices that hint at the emotional truth of the people in question. In this case, Francesca Rendle-Short and I share a connection in the fundamentalist Protestant history of Brisbane’s 1960s-1970s that cannot be boiled down to a single perspective.' (Author's introduction)
Untitled Kimberley Allsopp , 2011 single work review
— Appears in: Bookseller + Publisher Magazine , August vol. 91 no. 2 2011; (p. 29)
— Review of Bite Your Tongue Francesca Rendle-Short , 2008 single work novel
Daughters in a Family Minefield Diane Stubbings , 2011 single work review
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 10 September 2011; (p. 26)
— Review of Her Father's Daughter Alice Pung , 2011 single work autobiography ; Bite Your Tongue Francesca Rendle-Short , 2008 single work novel
Cover Notes Lucy Sussex , 2011 single work review
— Appears in: The Sunday Age , 18 September 2011; (p. 17)
— Review of Bite Your Tongue Francesca Rendle-Short , 2008 single work novel ; Death and the Spanish Lady Carolyn Morwood , 2011 single work novel
Moving Testaments to Forgiveness and Filial Love Thuy On , 2011 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 24 -25 September 2011; (p. 20-21)
— Review of Surviving Maggie John Fingleton , 2011 single work biography ; Bite Your Tongue Francesca Rendle-Short , 2008 single work novel
Non-Fiction Christina Houen , 2011 single work review
— Appears in: The Courier-Mail , 15 - 16 October 2011; (p. 23)
— Review of Bite Your Tongue Francesca Rendle-Short , 2008 single work novel
y separately published work icon Bite Your Tongue Francesca Rendle-Short , Wollongong : 2008 Z1804123 2008 single work thesis
The Big L-Word Nigel Featherstone , 2011 single work column
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 24 September 2011; (p. 12-13)
Writing in the Gaps Between : An Interview with Francesca Rendle-Short Nigel Featherstone (interviewer), 2011 single work interview
— Appears in: Verity La , November 2011;
Australian Tongue and Ag-gag Law Iris Ralph , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology , no. 6 2016-2017; (p. 50-61) 'In this essay, I comment on two histories of animal farming in Australia in an ecocritical reading of several works of Australian literature: Tim Winton’s novel Shallows (1984), Susan Hawthorne’s collection of poetry, Cow (2011) and Francesca Rendle-Short’s novel Bite Your Tongue (2011). The first of those histories, the background of Shallows, refers to the whaling industry that operated in Western Australian waters up through the 1970s and the growing public awareness of that industry that eventually drove it to a halt in 1978, the year the main events of the novel take place. Cow and Bite Your Tongue, the texts that I mostly discuss, carry references to the history of industrial farming of cows in Australia, which, along with the industrial farming of other domesticated animal species, exploded after 1970 (in Australia and elsewhere in urban-industrialising countries), the same decade when Australians were beginning to rally behind animal rights activists’ opposition to whale slaughter. Today, almost half a century later, animal advocacy activists continue to raise pressing questions about animal species that are industrially farmed. They are doing so at the same time as the meat industry is attempting to restrict public access to and information about its operations. I address those questions in my reading of Hawthorne’s paean to cows and Rendle-Short’s references to the Moral Right movement in Queensland in the 1970s and attempts by its supporters to remove works of literature from school book shelves.' (Publication abstract)
y separately published work icon Packing Death in Australian Literature : Ecocides and Eco-Sides Iris Ralph , London : Routledge , 2020 19932417 2020 multi chapter work criticism

'Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides addresses Australian Literature from ecocritical, animal studies, plant studies, indigenous studies, and posthumanist critical perspectives. The book’s main purpose is twofold: to bring more sustained attention to environmental, vegetal, and animal rights issues, past and present, and to do that from within the discipline of literary studies. Literary studies in Australia continue to reflect disinterest or not enough interest in critical engagements with the subjects of Australia’s oldest extant environments and other beings beside humans.

'Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides foregrounds the vegetal and nonhuman animal populations and contours of Australian Literature. Critical studies relied on in Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides include books by Simon C. Estok, Bill Gammage, Timothy Morton, Bruce Pascoe, Val Plumwood, Kate Rigby, John Ryan, Wendy Wheeler, Cary Wolfe, and Robert Zeller. The selected literary texts include work by Merlinda Bobis, Eric Yoshiaki Dando, Nugi Garimara, Francesca Rendle-Short, Patrick White, and Evie Wyld.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.
VIEW ALL WORKS ABOUT (19)

Awards

2011 shortlisted Colin Roderick Award
VIEW ALL AWARDS (1)
Last amended 30 Jul 2021 07:47:35
Subjects:
Settings:
  • Brisbane, Queensland,
  • 1970s
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