Cirrus@Austlit

'Antagonism among girls and women in fairy tales has been the subject of much critical and popular discussion over recent decades. Significantly less attention, however, has been paid to the frequent absence of collaborative female relationships in traditional fairy tales and their contemporary retellings. Holding re-visioned fairy tales to be a type of feminist creative praxis, this thesis investigates how mutually beneficial relationships between female characters may be constructed within such narratives. "Never Afters" is a collection of six re-visions, written as sequels to well-known fairy tales from the Western European corpus. Situated within a genre that commonly isolates female characters or foregrounds female antagonism, each re-vision employs one (or more) of five key strategies that are used by contemporary authors to imagine collaborative female relationships within retold fairy tales: inversion, insertion/deletion, expansion, fusion, and extrapolation. The exegesis contextualises my creative work and assesses the strengths and limitations of each strategy by critically examining how they are used in contemporary fairy tales by authors including Emma Donoghue, Theodora Goss, Angela Slatter, Aimee Bender, and Kelly Link. I demonstrate that expansion, fusion, and extrapolation best allow authors to introduce new female characters and fresh feminist perspectives that move away from female exceptionalism and instead foreground female collaboration and friendship as potent sources of narrative power. The exegesis further argues that the cognitive sciences, and schema theories in particular, may offer insights as to why collaborative female relationships have received such scant representation. Using case studies of my own creative praxis, I explore the ways in which female isolation and acrimony are re-inscribed in contemporary work and recommend the adoption of new frameworks through which creative writers may critically and reflexively interrogate their tacit storytelling knowledge.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This thesis investigates the research question: What is the role of speculative fiction in a climate changed world? The short story collection: Capitalocene Dreams: Dark Tales of Near Futures explores life on the fringes of disintegrating Australian enclaves during the dying days of neoliberal excess. The exegesis: The 21st Century Catastrophe: Hyper-capitalism and Severe Climate Change in Science Fiction, contrasts ecocatastrophe science fiction of the sixties and seventies with contemporary climate or Anthropocene fiction.'

Source: Curtin University.

‘Genre Worlds: Australian Popular Fiction in the Twenty-First Century’ is a research project funded by an ARC Discovery Project Grant between 2016 and 2018 (DP160101308). 

The research project aims to systematically examine 21st-century Australian popular fiction, the most significant growth area in Australian trade publishing since the turn of the century. Its three areas of investigation are: the publishing of Australian popular fiction; the interrelationships between Australian popular fiction and Australian genre communities; and the textual distinctiveness of Australian popular novels in relation to genre. Research will centre on thirty novels across three genres (fantasy, romance and crime), building a comprehensive picture of the practices and processes of Australian popular fiction through detailed examination of trade data, close reading of texts, and interviews with industry figures.'

Source: Project website.