Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Australian literature'
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Tindall, Alexis. "Creating Australia : cultural representations and national identity in contemporary Australian literature /." Title page, contents and conclusion only, 1999. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09AR/09art588.pdf.
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Young, Penelope M. "Witch images in Australian children's literature." University of Southern Queensland, Faculty of Education, 2001. http://eprints.usq.edu.au/archive/00001527/.
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In this dissertation it is argued that the European witch trials that took place between 1450 and 1700 have resulted in a legacy of stereotypical themes in Australian children's literature. Those accused of witchcraft were almost always women who were old, without protection, and physically ugly. They were accused of consorting with the devil, making harmful spells, flying through the night on a magic staff and exhibiting malevolent intent towards others. An analysis of this period forms the contextual framework for identifying themes that appear in contemporary Australian children's literature. A survey of twenty-three books, identified as stories about witches, was conducted to ascertain whether the stereotypical witch from the European witch-hunts continues to be characterised in Australian children's literature. The findings suggest that the witch figure in Australian children's literature mirrors the historical evidence from the European witch trials, but has evolved into a more powerful and proactive character than that identified in the historical literature. The characterisation of the witch in the books for older readers is powerful and evil, compared to the witch as a trivial and diminished figure in the books for younger readers. Gender is also a major influence in the characterisation of the witch, with all readers exposed to themes that may influence their expectations regarding the behaviour and role of women. The representation of the witch in the books reinforces the misogyny of the witchcraft era, and weaves patterns of meaning in the texts that construct undesirable female images. Readers of all ages can link these images to the social world beyond the text.
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Bracalente, Elisa. "In the shadow of the Australian legend: Re-reading Australian literature." Thesis, Bracalente, Elisa (2011) In the shadow of the Australian legend: Re-reading Australian literature. PhD thesis, Murdoch University, 2011. https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/13239/.
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The Australian legend worked as a romantic myth of survival, a foundational grand narrative that legitimised white Australian belonging to the land. The construction of an identity based on the bush ethos and on those values and characteristics recognised as quintessentially Australian helped in the creation of an imagined community. This myth carried a racist underpinning which limited the typical Australian to the category 'white'. Drawing on Foucault 18s discourse analysis I argue that the legend is a discourse, grounded in an untheorised whiteness which defines Australianness. The national identity was modelled on the exclusion of the 'other' from any sense of belonging because Australianness was simply a substitute for whiteness. This exclusion worked on two levels; while it ensured cohesion among whites against a common enemy, it also provided a sense of belonging that could not be questioned because the 'real' Australians, the indigenous people as the common enemy, were left out of a definition of Australianness. Over time this discourse evolved slightly, altering its characteristics, but maintaining its power position and ensuring that its core whiteness remained unaltered. Despite the current claim of a multicultural nation, in fact, the legend is still central to Australian identity and still constitutes the defining characteristic of Australianness. Thus even in a multicultural context where 'white' Australians claim to be just one category among others, they are the ones who define the 'rules' that govern who belongs and who may be granted recognition. In this thesis the evolution of the Australian legend is analysed through readings of key literary texts. While before Federation literature was the major instrument for the construction of the legend and a sense of national identity through an uncritical celebration of the foundational myth, later writing engaged in a critique of the legend and the discourses constructed around it. Contemporary white authors have exposed the discourses of terra nullius and the violence at the foundation of the nation, thus deconstructing the legend. However, their critique is still influenced by their privileged white perspective so that even in their dismantling of the legend there is an implicit celebration of it. It is only when indigenous authors challenge the legend that we find a more radical challenge to the legend and the discourse of whiteness which underpin it. Even then, as argued in this thesis, the legend permeates Australian life and continues to play a role in one 18s understanding of 'Australianness'.
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Paull, James School of English UNSW. "An ambivalent ground: re-placing Australian literature." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of English, 2007. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/28330.
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Narratives of place have always been crucial to the construction of Australian identity. The obsession with identity in Australia betrays longstanding uncertainty. It is not difficult to interpret in this uncertainty a replaying of the deeper insecurities surrounding the settler community's legal and more broadly cultural claims to the land. Such insecurities are typically understood negatively. In contrast, this thesis accepts the uncertainty of identity as an activating principle, appropriate to any interpretation of the narratives and themes that inform what it means to be Australian. Fundamental to this uncertainty is a provisionality in the post-colonial experience of place that is papered over by misleadingly coherent spatial narratives that stem from the imperial inheritance of Australian mythology. Place is a model for the tension between the coherence of mythic narratives and the actual rhizomic formlessness of daily life. Place is the ???ground??? of that life, but an ambivalent ground. An Ambivalent Ground approaches postcolonial Australia as a densely woven text. In this text, stories that describe the founding of a nation are enveloped by other stories, not so well known, that work to transform those more familiar narratives. ???Re-placing Australian literature??? describes the process of this transformation. It signifies an interpretative practice which seeks to recuperate the open-ended experience of place that remains disguised by the coherent narratives of nationhood. The process of ???re-placing??? Australian literature shifts the understanding of nation towards a landscape that speaks not so much about identity as about the constitutive performances of everyday life. It also converges with the unhomely dimension that is the colonist's ambiguous sense of belonging. We can understand this process with an analogy used in this thesis, that of music ??? the colonising language, and noise ??? the ostensibly inchoate, unformed background disruptive to cultural order yet revealing the spatial realities of place. Traditionally, cultural narratives in Australia have disguised the much more complex way in which place noisily disrupts and diffracts those narratives, and in the process generates the ambivalence of Australian identity. Rather than a text or a narrative, place is a plenitude, a densely intertwined performance space, a performance that constantly renders experience ??? and its cultural function ??? transgressive. The purpose of this thesis is not to displace stereotypical narratives of nationhood with yet another narrative. Rather, it offers the more risky proposition that provisionality and uncertainty are constitutive features of Australian social being. The narrative in the thesis represents an aggregation of such an ambivalent ground, addressing the persistent tension between place and the larger drama of colonialist history and discourse.
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Faithfull, Denise. "Adaptations : Australian literature to film, 1989-1998." Thesis, Connect to full text, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1771.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sydney, 2001.Title from title screen (viewed January 22, 2009) Submitted in fullfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philososphy to the Dept. of English, University of Sydney. Includes bibliography. Also available in print form.
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Faithfull, Denise. "Adaptations Australian literature to film, 1989-1998 /." Connect to full text, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1771.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sydney, 2001.Title from title screen (viewed January 22, 2009) Submitted in fullfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philososphy to the Dept. of English, University of Sydney. Includes bibliography. Also available in print form.
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Feros, Kate. "Counter-discourse in Australian political literature : the picaresque /." St. Lucia, Qld, 2003. http://www.library.uq.edu.au/pdfserve.php?image=thesisabs/absthe17430.pdf.
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Atkinson, Karen. "'Windsong': Place, memory and stories in Australian literature." Thesis, Atkinson, Karen (2015) 'Windsong': Place, memory and stories in Australian literature. PhD thesis, Murdoch University, 2015. https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/29145/.
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The production and transmission of stories, whether oral or written, is essential in the making and holding of collective memory. Stories become especially important to communities that have been displaced, where familiar places have been degraded, or even destroyed. At the same time as landscapes are shifting geographically and culturally, memory is implicated in public discourses that endorse forgetting. If we are to nurture and value our histories and collective memories, the connections between words and places are a vital aspect of story making. In considering then the importance of this interconnectedness of language with both place and memory, I draw on applicable philosophical research and, through a novella and five case studies of contemporary novels, examine representations of the landscape in Australian culture.
The dissertation comprises an exegesis and a creative work that function together to re-imagine place through multiple points of view and multiple voices. My novella ‘Windsong’ offers an account of the tension between emplacement and remembering, and is deeply concerned with the cultural construction of landscape, collective amnesia, and how memories of the past become central to the identities of the characters and their sense of belonging and loss.
Working in tandem with the explorations of memory and landscape in ‘Windsong’, the case studies in the exegetical component of the dissertation analyze the features of literary imaginative worldframes, paying particular attention to how cultural memory is, as Edward Casey describes it, emplaced (1993, 31), and how both memory and cultural identity are formed and maintained through narrative. Frequently bound up in representations of the landscape, much Australian writing points to a sense of exile, with the natural environment commonly figuring as a threat to be conquered or possessed. The exegesis draws on a range of texts that offer rich ground for the examination of the praxis of place in Australian writing, including consideration of the ways in which the preoccupations of the European colonizers have become embedded in many contemporary literary representations of the Australian landscape, and how the representation of place in storytelling might manifest through the interactions of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal writers engaging in intercultural dialogue. This dissertation draws attention to a growing interest within Australian literary studies in writing at the borders and margins of homelands, and argues that the inseparable nature and intrinsic liminality of place and memory presents storytellers with possibilities for reimagined landscapes expressed through a multiplicity of co-existing voices.
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Dai, Yin. "The representation of Chinese people in Australian literature." Thesis, Dai, Yin (1994) The representation of Chinese people in Australian literature. PhD thesis, Murdoch University, 1994. https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/52952/.
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This thesis is concerned with the representation of Chinese people in Australian literature from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. The range of texts selected for consideration includes many that have long been out of print, and so a major aim of this thesis is to bring these texts into visibility under the single theme of "The Representation of Chinese People in Australian Literature", a topic to which, as far as I know, no full length study has yet been devoted.
Australian literary writings in the period of early colonization share the basic discourses inherited from Europe, creating themes and images of Chinese people according to the European myth of the 'yellow peril ' , which has influenced the perceptions of Chinese people by the 'West' for centuries. Central to this thesis is the argument that in Australian literature, the formation of perceptions and images of Chinese people follows the Western principles of ·the theory of orientalism, as formulated by Edward Said.
The first known significant cultural contact between Australia and China took place when a considerable number of Chinese migrants entered Australia from the time of the 1840's. This contact was immediately interpreted as a cultural invasion by the then dominant literary discourse. It is argued here that the anti-Chinese attitudes which are heavily reflected in early literature and conventionally attributed to Australian racism, are the products of Western cultural hegemony, of which racism is a part. The anti-Chinese notions of early nationalism reflected in literature are also rooted in the discourse that spreads the fear of cultural contamination. Chapter One of the thesis produces a general profile of this situation by presenting relevant readings.
In this situation, themes and images of Chinese invaders are formed to define the nature of Australia's Chinese contact. Images of negative and aggressive Chinese people are created according to the format of the traditional myth of the 'yellow peril', instead of through practical experiences. Chapter Two surveys a range of such images of invaders and draws the conclusion that those images are the products of texualization of orientalist discourse which can create 'truth' by textual accumulation, as in the case of Chinese goldminers.
Chinese people are variously stereotyped by fictional texts. A selection of short stories published in The Bulletin around the turn of the century are brought together in Chapter Three to illustrate the formation of several stereotypes. This part of the thesis argues that various stereotypes of the Chinese can form a system of images which is centred on the vision of ? Chinese disease'. I explain this vision as a symbolic expression of the fear of a threatening and contaminating alien culture. I argue that the themes, images, representations and attitudes generated by this vision are all claiming a single idea which is that Australia is, and should remain. an extension of Europe.
Nevertheless, in the history of Australian literary perceptions of China and its people. alternative perspectives have existed alongside the 'yellow peril myth. By surveying a range of texts collected in Chapter Four, the thesis brings this trend to people's notice. In some early sea romances, bush legends, and adventure stories of pioneering life, certain representations of Chinese people cannot be simply categorized as orientalist products, because these representations in relation to the Chinese reflect the consciousness of an independent Australia, which opposes, to some degree. Western discourses of power and cultural hegemony.
It is noticed in this study that literary writings after the 1920's express stronger interest in. and pay more attention to aspects of Chinese culture, especially when the topic of the Australian nation is addressed. Chapter Five deals with this issue by presenting a collection of novels that narrate relationships between Australia and China in terms of cultural identity. This part of the thesis demonstrates that when Australia is seen as an independent cultural entity, its location in the orientalist world map can be shifted. Such texts exhibit Australia's movement away from the West towards Asia.
Texts presented in the thesis so far indicate a duality in perceptions of China in that it is seen as either the yellow peril' or as a civilized entity associated in a positive way with the idea of an Australian cultural utopia. Chapter Six illustrates this duality by showing how the representation of gender differences can contribute to the construction of opposing images of China. In other words, perceptions of Chinese people can be highly contradictory even within an individual text.
Contemporary texts demonstrate a critical break-through in relation to orientalist discourse. Texts selected for Chapter Seven are presented to show significant elements of change in Australian discourses on China. These texts are considered multiculturalist writings which are recognized by this thesis as providing the basis for reconstructing the Australian legend in such a way that Chinese people are included as an aspect of contemporary Australian social reality.
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Ellison, Elizabeth Rae. "The Australian beachspace : flagging the spaces of Australian beach texts." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2013. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/63468/1/Elizabeth_Ellison_Thesis.pdf.
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The Australian beach is a significant component of the Australian culture and a way of life. The Australian Beachspace explores existing research about the Australian beach from a cultural and Australian studies perspective. Initially, the beach in Australian studies has been established within a binary opposition. Fiske, Hodge, and Turner (1987) pioneered the concept of the beach as a mythic space, simultaneously beautiful but abstract. In comparison, Meaghan Morris (1998) suggested that the beach was in fact an ordinary or everyday space. The research intervenes in previous discussions, suggesting that the Australian beach needs to be explored in spatial terms as well as cultural ones. The thesis suggests the beach is more than these previously established binaries and uses Soja's theory of Thirdspace (1996) to posit the term beachspace as a way of describing this complex site. The beachspace is a lived space that encompasses both the mythic and ordinary and more.
A variety of texts have been explored in this work, both film and literature. The thesis examines textual representations of the Australian beach using Soja's Thirdspace as a frame to reveal the complexities of the Australian beach through five thematic chapters. Some of the texts discussed include works by Tim Winton's Breath (2008) and Land's Edge (1993), Robert Drewe's short story collections The Bodysurfers (1987) and The Rip (2008), and films such as Newcastle (dir. Dan Castle 2008) and Blackrock (dir. Steve Vidler 1997).
Ultimately The Australian Beachspace illustrates that the multiple meanings of the beach's representations are complex and yet frequently fail to capture the layered reality of the Australian beach. The Australian beach is best described as a beachspace, a complex space that allows for the mythic and/or/both ordinary at once.
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Blackmore, Ernie. "Speakin' out blak an examination of finding an "urban" Indigenous "voice" through contemporary Australian theatre /." Click here for electronic access to document: http://www.library.uow.edu.au/adt-NWU/public/adt-NWU20080111.121828/index.html, 2007. http://www.library.uow.edu.au/adt-NWU/public/adt-NWU20080111.121828/index.html.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2007."Including the plays Positive expectations and Waiting for ships." Title from web document (viewed 7/4/08). Includes bibliographical references: leaf 249-267.
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Kato, Megumi Humanities & Social Sciences Australian Defence Force Academy UNSW. "Representations of Japan and Japanese people in Australian literature." Awarded by:University of New South Wales - Australian Defence Force Academy. School of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2005. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/38718.
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This thesis is a broadly chronological study of representations of Japan and the Japanese in Australian novels, stories and memoirs from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. Adopting Edward Said???s Orientalist notion of the `Other???, it attempts to elaborate patterns in which Australian authors describe and evaluate the Japanese. As well as examining these patterns of representation, this thesis outlines the course of their development and change over the years, how they relate to the context in which they occur, and how they contribute to the formation of wider Australian views on Japan and the Japanese. The thesis considers the role of certain Australian authors in formulating images and ideas of the Japanese ???Other???. These authors, ranging from fiction writers to journalists, scholars and war memoirists, act as observers, interpreters, translators, and sometimes ???traitors??? in their cross-cultural interactions. The thesis includes work from within and outside ???mainstream??? writings, thus expanding the contexts of Australian literary history. The major ???periods??? of Australian literature discussed in this thesis include: the 1880s to World War II; the Pacific War; the post-war period; and the multicultural period (1980s to 2000). While a comprehensive examination of available literature reveals the powerful and continuing influence of the Pacific War, images of ???the stranger???, ???the enemy??? and later ???the ally??? or ???partner??? are shown to vary according to authors, situations and wider international relations. This thesis also examines gender issues, which are often brought into sharp relief in cross-cultural representations. While typical East-West power-relationships are reflected in gender relations, more complex approaches are also taken by some authors. This thesis argues that, while certain patterns recur, such as versions of the ???Cho-Cho-San??? or ???Madame Butterfly??? story, Japan-related works have given some Australian authors, especially women, opportunities to reveal more ???liberated??? viewpoints than seemed possible in their own cultural context. As the first extensive study of Japan in Australian literary consciousness, this thesis brings to the surface many neglected texts. It shows a pattern of changing interests and interactions between two nations whose economic interactions have usually been explored more deeply than their literary and cultural relations.
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Beasley, Brian Glen. "'Death charged missives': Australian literary responses to the Spanish Civil War." University of Southern Queensland, Faculty of Arts, 2006. http://eprints.usq.edu.au/archive/00003199/.
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[Abstract]: ‘Spanish Civil War’ is an important, absent signifier in Australian history, letters, writing and cultural politics of the 1930s. I argue that despite the glossing over of the importance of Spain’s war in the period, events in Spain had a pervasive influence on Australian society, and writers in particular – on their political re-alignments, on their nationalist and internationalist cultural outlooks, and on their common acceptance that they lived in an essentially tragic age. Consequently, the critical neglect of Spain and its impact on Australian cultural affairs in the 30s is unwarranted.My thesis research has covered a very wide range of texts: the ephemeral pamphlet, the small circulation journal, poetry, agitprop, the mainstream novel, the ‘mass declamation’ and the associated ‘new media’ of the 30s – photography and film. It has also looked at different groups or cultural networks in the period, all of which (despite their disparate politics) saw Spain as a central cause: the Catholic Church, the Communist Party, anti-fascist and peace movements amongst others.The theoretical dimension of my work is driven by Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘structure of feeling’, first formulated in his study The Long Revolution then developed in a series of subsequent works. The generous range of texts I study conforms to Williams’ theory of ‘structure of feeling’, arguing that to understand the ‘field’ of a period, one should survey the interconnectivity of all its texts. Also drawing on Williams’ theory, I read the structured feeling of the 30s as essentially tragic: revealing exactly how Spain focalised fears and apparently symbolised the impasse of ‘modernity’ itself – Spain was a spectacle that graphically demonstrated how the inner destructiveness of technological modernity had tragically cancelled the possibility of progress and the arrival of variously imagined utopias.
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Huntsman, L. F. "In margins and in longings ...: the beach in Australian life and literature." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/12333.
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Flavell, Helen. "Writing-between : Australian and Canadian ficto-criticism /." Access via Murdoch University Digital Theses Project, 2005. http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/adt/browse/view/adt-MU20051222.114143.
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Hawkes, Lesley. "Transporting the imaginary : representations of the railway in Australian literature." Thesis, University of Queensland, 2005. http://www.library.uq.edu.au/pdfserve.php?image=thesisabs/absthe18917.pdf.
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au, Casella2@westnet com, and Antonio Casella. "An Olive Branch for Sante (A novel) ; and The Italian Diaspora in Australia and Representations of Italy and Italians in Australian Narrative." Murdoch University, 2006. http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/adt/browse/view/adt-MU20070427.120048.
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This PhD presentation comprises two pieces of work:
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The Italian Diaspora in Australia and Representations of Italy and Italians in Australian Narrative ( Research thesis)
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An Olive Branch for Sante (A novel)
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In the Introduction of my research titled: Diaspora: A Theoretical Review, I look at the evolution of diasporic Studies and how the great movements of people that have occurred in the past one hundred and fifty years have altered our perception of what is undoubtedly a global phenomenon.
In Chapter One, which I have titled: In Search of an Italian Diaspora in Australia, I consider the kinds of socio-cultural nuclei that have evolved among the Italian population of Australia, out of the mass migration which occurred largely in the post war years. I discuss Italian migration as a whole, the historical and political conditions which brought about mass migration and the subsequent dispersion of Italian nationals, their regrouping into various clusters and how these fit into the patchwork that is the contemporary Australian society. Finally I review the conditions in the host country which facilitated or hindered particular socio-cultural formations and how these may differ from those occurring in other countries
Chapter Two deals with, The Narrative of Non-Italian Writers. The chapter looks at the images and myths of Italy perpetrated in the literature written by English-speaking authors over the centuries. I begin with the legacy left by British writers such as E.M. Forster, then move on to Australian writers of non-Italian background, such as Judah Waten, Nino Culotta (John O' Grady) and Helen Garner. In Chapter Three: Italo-Australian Writers, I focus on two writers: Venero Armanno and Melina Marchetta, both born in Australia of Italian parents. This section ties in with the earlier discourse on the continuity of the Italian Diaspora in Australia, into the second and subsequent generations.
In Chapter Four, titled: Literature of Nostalgia: The Long Journey, I will reflect upon my own journey as a writer, beginning with my earlier work, including the short stories and the plays, and concluding with a close look at the present novel, which is a companion piece to the research.
The novel complements the research in that it deals with the eternal issues of migration: displacement, change and identity. The protagonists are two young people: Ira-Jane and Sante. The first is not a migrant, but she is touched by migration, insofar as an old Italian couple play grandparents to her, in the early years of her life. When they return to Sicily the child is left with her neglectful and unstable mother. At age twenty-four Ira-Jane goes to Sicily on an assignment, and there she tries to get in touch with her 'grandparents'. She meets up with eighteen-year-old Sante who turns out to be her half brother. The novel's structure juxtaposes two countries, two cultures, two way of looking at the world. It sets up a series of contrasts: the old society and the new, past and present, tradition and innovation, stability and change, repression and freedom. The end of the novel proposes a symbolic bridging between two countries, which are similar in some ways, very different in others. It offers not a solution but a different approach to the eternal dilemma of people living in a diaspora, inhabiting an indefinite space between two countries and for whom home will always be somewhere else.
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Geddes, Robert John William. "The unsettled colony : contruction of aboriginality in late colonial South Australian popular historical fiction and memoir /." Title page, contents and conclusions only, 2000. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09AR/09arg295.pdf.
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Barker, Elaine M. "Civilization in the wilderness : the homestead in the Australian colonial novel, 1830-1860 /." Title page, contents and abstract only, 1989. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09ARM/09armb255.pdf.
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Hawkes, Lesley. "Transporting the imaginary : representations of the railway in Australian literature /." [St. Lucia, Qld.], 2005. http://www.library.uq.edu.au/pdfserve.php?image=thesisabs/absthe18917.pdf.
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Darwin, Pamela. "South Australian childhood 1840-1900 : a gap in the literature /." Title page, contents and introduction only, 1999. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09AR/09ard228.pdf.
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Sedgwick, Enid. "Kulturelle Beziehungen : German-Australian literary links in Catherine Martin's An Australian girl and Henry Handel Richardson's Maurice Guest." University of Western Australia. European Languages and Studies Discipline Group. German Studies, 2009. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2009.0140.
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This thesis demonstrates the close links between Australian literature and German thought and culture in Catherine Martin's An Australian Girl (1890) and Henry Handel Richardson's Maurice Guest (1908), and thereby provides a fuller understanding of the sophisticated literary and intellectual purposes of these two works. In examining the German elements in each novel, and the contexts from which much of that material is drawn, this study seeks to supplement the scholarly explanations provided in the two Academy Editions of these works. While Maurice Guest has received serious scholarly attention, An Australian Girl has been accorded relatively little. Despite generally favourable reviews on publication, both appear to have been undervalued over time. The study begins with a brief historical survey of German migration to Australia and the contribution German migrants made to the intellectual life and culture of the evolving nation. The examination of Catherine Martin's work includes: biographical details, particularly concerning her contact with German culture; an analysis of the form of the novel and a comparison of An Australian Girl with Goethe's Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister with regard to form, theme and characterisation; an analysis of German philosophical elements in the novel; and Martin's presentation of social conditions in Germany in 1888-90, and their role in the novel as a whole. The examination of Henry Handel Richardson's work encompasses: biographical details; the genesis of Maurice Guest; differences between the reception of the novel in England and Germany; the genre to which the novel belongs and parallels with Künstlerromane; an analysis of Richardson's description of the physical, historical and intellectual milieu of Leipzig, and its role in the novel; and finally her integration of German social customs and the German language into the text. Use has been made of five primary sources which have not been used before in any detail with regard to these aspects of either author: additional material from the Mount Gambier Border Watch; The Hatbox Letters, the family history of the Martin and Clarke families; the German translation of Maurice Guest; German reviews of Maurice Guest; and the correspondence between Richardson and her French translator Paul Solanges. The key argument of this thesis is that the German influence on both form and content, in the case of An Australian Girl, and on style and content, in the case of Maurice Guest, is deep and various, and that these German elements have proved to be an impediment to a full understanding and appreciation of these novels for many Anglo-Saxon readers and reviewers. In the two novels Martin and Richardson provide pointers to Australia's earlier interaction with the wider world and display a level of sophistication which makes these works worthy of greater recognition than they currently enjoy.
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Dahlstrom, James. "Imagining Australia: The Struggle to Locate Australian Identity in Peter Carey’s Early Fiction." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/15356.
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In this thesis, I examine in Peter Carey’s early fiction the portrayal of Australia’s struggle to imagine a unique identity for itself. Three different, but overlapping, approaches will be woven together to serve as a lens through which his work can be read. First, it will be useful to situate the work within the context of Australian history and popular culture, which suggests an obsessive search for an “authentic” Australian identity, as well as the theoretical work on the social construction of such identities. Second, I will draw upon the work of Benedict Anderson, paired with that of Pheng Cheah, as a means of discussing the comparative process by which national identities are imagined and how those imagined identities emerge in cultural productions. In particular, I examine the typically unique characteristics and ideologies that are used as a basis when imagining national identities, as many of Australia’s are shared with both Britain and America. I will therefore engage with concepts like “totality,” “unisonance” and “seriality” as a means of discussing Carey’s work. Moreover, I will be utilising Louis Althusser’s concept of national ideology as a means of explicating Anderson’s and Cheah’s work. Finally, since the intersection between the national and the transnational is often conceived of in post-colonial language, especially in terms of Australia’s relationship to Britain and the United States, this thesis will draw on the work of post-colonial theorists like Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Homi K. Bhabha, and Edward Said.
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Osaghae, Esosa O. "Mythic reconstruction : a study of Australian Aboriginal and African literatures /." Access via Murdoch University Digital Theses Project, 2006. http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/adt/browse/view/adt-MU20070928.143608.
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Bailey, Raymond Frederick. "Some preoccupations of Australian literary criticism 1945-83." Thesis, University of London, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.282412.
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Windsor, Robert. "Uses of Aboriginality : popular representations of Australian Aboriginality /." Title page, contents and abstract only, 2001. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phw766.pdf.
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Armellino, Pablo. "Ob-scene spaces in Australian narrative an account of the socio-topographic construction of space in Australian literature." Stuttgart Ibidem-Verl, 2009. http://d-nb.info/994959613/04.
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Heuschele, Margaret, and n/a. "The Construction of Youth in Australian Young Adult Literature 1980-2000." University of Canberra. Creative Communication, 2007. http://erl.canberra.edu.au./public/adt-AUC20081029.171132.
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Adolescence is an incredibly complex period of life. During this time young people are searching for and wanting to create their own unique identity, however being confronted with a plethora of roles and directions is challenging and confusing. These challenges are reflected in the vast array of young adult literature being presented to young people today. As a result young adult literature has the potential to function as scaffolding to assist teenagers in the struggles of adolescence by serving as an important source of information about the world and the people in it. Teenage novels also give young people the opportunity to try on different identities and vicariously experience consequences of actions while developing their own distinctive personality and character.
As this study reveals, the Australian young adult novel has undergone considerable developments, with 1989 serving as a milestone year in which writers and publishers turned in new directions. In general, Australian young adult novels have changed from books set predominately in rural areas, incorporating major themes of child abuse, death, friendship and survival with introverted characters aged between twelve and sixteen in the early 1980s to novels with urban settings, a large increase in books about crime, dating, drugs and mental health and sexually active, extroverted characters aged between fourteen and eighteen in the late 1990s.
To chart the progression of these changes and gain an understanding of the messages young adults receive from adolescent novels an evaluative framework was developed. The framework consists of two main sections. The first part applies to the work as a whole,
obtaining data about the novel such as plot, style, setting, temporal context, use of humour,
issues within the text and ending, while the second part collects information about character demographics including gender, age, occupational status, family type, sexual orientation, relationships with family and authority figures, personality traits and outlook for character. To qualitatively and quantitatively assess the construction of youth in Australian young adult literature a random selection of 20 per cent of Australian young adult books published in each year from 1980 to 2000 were analysed using the evaluative framework, with 186 novels being studied altogether.
During the 1990s in particular, Australian young adult literature was heavily criticised for being too bleak, too dark, presenting a picture of life that was all gloom and doom. This research resoundingly dismisses this argument by showing that rather than being a negative influence on the lives of young people, Australian books for young people present a comprehensive portrayal of youth. They probe the entire gamut of teenage experiences, both the good and the bad, providing a wide range of scenarios, roles, relationships and characters for young people to explore. Therefore Australian young adult literature provides an important source of information and support for the psycho-social development of young people during the formative years of adolescence.
This research is significant because it gives hard evidence to support the promotion of a representative selection of Australian young adult novels both in the classroom and in home, school and public libraries. By establishing the available range of contemporary Australian young adult literature through this study, young adult readers, teachers and librarians can be confident in the knowledge that appropriate titles are accessible which meet the needs and interests of young people. Consequently, the substantial amount of data gathered from this
study will considerably add to the knowledge and understanding ofAustralian young adult novels to date and provide an excellent starting point for further research in the future.
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Piper, Jennifer Ann. "White, Carey and Nolan : national myth in Australian literature and painting." Thesis, Open University, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.446272.
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Pissa-ard, Isaraporn. "Depictions of Thailand in Australian and Thai writings:Reflections of the Self and Other." University of Sydney, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/6409.
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Doctor of Philosophy(PhD)This thesis offers both an examination of the depiction of Thailand in Australian novels, short stories and poems written in the 1980s and after, and an analysis of modern Thai novels and short stories that reflect similar themes to those covered in the Australian literature. One Australian film is also examined as the film provides an important framework for the analysis of some of the short stories and novels under consideration. The thesis establishes a dialogue between Thai and Australian literatures and demonstrates that the comparison of Australian representations of Thailand with Thai representations challenges constructively certain dominant political and social ideologies that enhance conservatism and the status quo in Thailand. The author acknowledges that the discussion of the representations of Thailand in contemporary Australian novels and short stories needs to take into account the colonial legacy and the discourse of Orientalism that tends to posit the ‘East’ as the ‘West’’s ‘Other’. Textual analysis is thus informed by post-colonial and cross-cultural theories, starting from Edward Said’s powerful and controversial critique of Western representation of the East in Orientalism. The first part of the thesis examines Australian crime stories and shows how certain Orientalist images and perceptions persist and help reinforce the image of the East and its people as the antithesis of the West. From Chapters Three through Six, however, more literary works by Australian authors are examined. The important finding is that most of the Australian authors under consideration attempt, though not always successfully, to resist and challenge the Eurocentric stereotypes of Asia and Asians that dominated Australian literature in earlier periods. This difference between contemporary Australian authors and their predecessors seems to reflect modern Australia’s endeavor to distinguish itself from the rest of the Western world and to redefine its relationship with Asia. As literary representations cannot be separated from socio-political contexts, the thesis also includes discussion of the Thai social and political history and, where appropriate, shows how colonialism and neo-colonialism exert their impact on modern Thailand.
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Henningsgaard, Per Hansa. "Outside traditional book publishing centres : the production of a regional literature in Western Australia." University of Western Australia. English and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2008. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2008.0255.
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This thesis provides a study of book publishing as it contributes to the production of a regional literature, using Western Australian publishing and literature as illustrative examples of this dynamic. 'Regional literature' is defined in this thesis as writing possessing cultural value that is specific to a region, although the writing may also have national and international value. An awareness of geographically and culturally diverse regions within the framework of the nation is shown to be derived from representations of these regions and their associated regional characteristics in the movies, television and books. In Australia, literature has been the primary site for expressions of regional difference. Therefore, this thesis analyses the impact of regionalism on the processes of book production and publication in Western Australias three major publishing houses a trade publishing house (Fremantle Press), an Indigenous publishing house (Magabala Books), and an academic publishing house (University of Western Australia Press). Book history, print culture studies and publishing studies, along with literary studies and cultural studies, roughly approximate a disciplinary map of the types of research that constitute this thesis. By examining regional literature in the context of its 'field of cultural production', this thesis maintains that regionalism and regional literature can avail themselves of a fresh perspective that shows them to be anything but marginal or exclusive. Regionalism has been a topic of peripheral interest, at least as far as scholarly research and academia are concerned, because those who are most likely to be affected by and thus interested in the topic, are also those who are most disempowered as a result of its attendant dynamics. However, as this thesis clearly demonstrates, access (or a lack thereof) to the field of cultural production (which in the case of print culture includes writers, literary agents, editors, publishers, government arts organisations, the media, schools, book clubs, and book retailers, just to name a few) plays a significant role in establishing and shaping an identity for marginalised 3 constituencies. The implications for this research are far-ranging, since both Western Australia and Australia can be understood as peripheries dominated in their different spheres (the 'national' and the 'international', respectively) by literary cultures residing elsewhere. Furthermore, there are parallels between this dynamic and the dynamic responsible for producing postcolonial literatures. The three publishing houses detailed in this thesis are disadvantaged by many of the factors associated with their distance from the traditional centres of book publishing, while at the same time producing a regional literature that serves as a platform from which the state broadcasts its distinctive contributions to the cultural landscape and to a wider understanding of concepts such as space, place and belonging. These publishing houses changed the way in which Australians and others have come to know and think about 'Australia', re-routing public consciousness and the national imagination.
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Barry, Michael, and n/a. "The long fall : Australian speculative fiction for adolescents as 'literature of anxiety'." University of Canberra. Creative Communication & Culture Studies, 2001. http://erl.canberra.edu.au./public/adt-AUC20060607.165243.
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Cowden, Stephen. "The search for an indigenous white identity in Australian literature 1885-1945." Thesis, University of Kent, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.298164.
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Thistleton-Martin, Judith. "Black face white story : the construction of Aboriginal childhood by non-Aboriginal writers in Australian children's fiction 1841-1998 /." View thesis, 2002. http://library.uws.edu.au/adt-NUWS/public/adt-NUWS20031024.100333/index.html.
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Godinho, Sally C. "The portrayal of gender in the Children's Book Council of Australia honour and award books, 1981-1993." Connect to thesis, 1996. http://repository.unimelb.edu.au/10187/1121.
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This study examines the portrayal of gender in Australian Children’s Book Council award and honour books in the Younger Reader and Older Reader categories over the years 1981-1993. Its purpose is to discover whether the books portray females and males in equally positive ways, which both reflect their changing roles in our society and provide models for gender construction to young readers. This is done by means of a qualitative analysis of the text from selected books, supported by a quantitative analysis in the form of frequency counts of gender representations. Relevant Government policies and feminist ideologies which have influenced them are reviewed, and compared with the study’s findings to ascertain how far the CBC books’ gender portrayals are in line with current education policies and research. The findings suggest a review of CBC judging criteria, and highlight the need for a critical literacy approach in classroom literacy teaching. Recommendations for the broadening of research in literature are made.
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Weeda-Zuidersma, Jeannette. "Keeping mum : representations of motherhood in contemporary Australian literature - a fictocritical exploration." University of Western Australia. School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2007. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2007.0054.
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[Truncated abstract] This thesis argues that the non-representation and under-representation of mothering in contemporary Australian literature reflects a much wider cultural practice of silencing the mother-as-subject position and female experiences as a whole. The thesis encourages women writers to pay more attention to the subjective experiences of mothering, so that women’s writing, in particular writing on those aspects of women’s lives that are silenced, of which motherhood is one, can begin to refigure motherhood discourses. This thesis examines mother-as-subject from three perspectives: mothering as a corporeal experience, mothering as a psychological experience, and the articulations and silences of mothering-as-subject. It engages with feminist, postmodern and fictocritical theories in its discussion of motherhood as a discourse through these perspectives. In particular, the thesis employs the theoretical works of postmodern feminists Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva in this discussion . . . A fictional narrative also runs through the critical discussion on motherhood. This narrative, Catherine’s Story, gives a personal and immediate voice to the mother-as-subject perspective. In keeping with the nature of fictocriticism, strict textual boundaries between criticism and fiction are blurred. The two modes of writing interact and in the process inform and critique each other.
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Grossman, Michèle 1957. "Entangled subjects : talk and text in collaborative indigenous Australian life-writing." Monash University, School of Literary, Visual and Performance Studies, 2004. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/5269.
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Pissa-ard, Isaraporn. "Depictions of Thailand in Australian and Thai writings:Reflections of the Self and Other." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/6409.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis offers both an examination of the depiction of Thailand in Australian novels, short stories and poems written in the 1980s and after, and an analysis of modern Thai novels and short stories that reflect similar themes to those covered in the Australian literature. One Australian film is also examined as the film provides an important framework for the analysis of some of the short stories and novels under consideration. The thesis establishes a dialogue between Thai and Australian literatures and demonstrates that the comparison of Australian representations of Thailand with Thai representations challenges constructively certain dominant political and social ideologies that enhance conservatism and the status quo in Thailand. The author acknowledges that the discussion of the representations of Thailand in contemporary Australian novels and short stories needs to take into account the colonial legacy and the discourse of Orientalism that tends to posit the ‘East’ as the ‘West’’s ‘Other’. Textual analysis is thus informed by post-colonial and cross-cultural theories, starting from Edward Said’s powerful and controversial critique of Western representation of the East in Orientalism. The first part of the thesis examines Australian crime stories and shows how certain Orientalist images and perceptions persist and help reinforce the image of the East and its people as the antithesis of the West. From Chapters Three through Six, however, more literary works by Australian authors are examined. The important finding is that most of the Australian authors under consideration attempt, though not always successfully, to resist and challenge the Eurocentric stereotypes of Asia and Asians that dominated Australian literature in earlier periods. This difference between contemporary Australian authors and their predecessors seems to reflect modern Australia’s endeavor to distinguish itself from the rest of the Western world and to redefine its relationship with Asia. As literary representations cannot be separated from socio-political contexts, the thesis also includes discussion of the Thai social and political history and, where appropriate, shows how colonialism and neo-colonialism exert their impact on modern Thailand.
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Burns, Kathryn E. "This Other Eden: Exploring a Sense of Place in Twentieth-Century Reconstructions of Australian Childhoods." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1691.
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This thesis explores the sense of place formed during childhood, as remembered by adult Australians who reconstruct their youth through various forms of life writing. While Australian writers do utilize traditional tropes of Western autobiography, such as the mythology of Eden and the Wordsworthian image of the child communing with Nature, these themes are frequently transformed to meet a uniquely Australian context. Isolation and distance from Europe, and the apparent indifference of our landscape towards white settlement, have received much critical attention in Australian studies generally and, indeed, broadly influence the formation of children’s sense of place across the continent. However, writers are also concerned with the role of place on a more local level. Through a comparison of writing from Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria, this thesis explores regional landscape preoccupations that create an awareness of local identity, variously contributing to or frustrating the child’s sense of belonging. Western Australian writing is dominated by images of isolation, the fragility of white settlement in a dry land lacking fresh water, and a pervasive beach culture. A strong sense of the littoral pervades writing from this region. Queensland’s frontier mythology is of a different flavour: warm and tropical, nature here is exuberant, constantly threatening to overwhelm culture, already perceived as transient due to the flimsy aspect of the “Queenslander” house. Writing from Victoria, to some extent, tends to more closely follow English models, juxtaposing country and city environments, although there is a distinctly local flavour to many representations of urban Melbourne and its flat, grid-like organization. As Australian society becomes more concentrated on the coastal fringe, the beach is an increasingly significant environment. Though more prominent in writing from some regions than others, coastal imagery broadly reflects the modern Australian’s sense of inhabiting a liminal zone with negotiable boundaries.
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Weeda-Zuidersma, Jeannette Weeda-Zuidersma Jeannette. "Keeping mum representations of motherhood in contemporary Australian literature : a fictocritical exploration /." Connect to this title online, 2006. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2007.0054/.
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Althans, Katrin [Verfasser]. "Darkness Subverted : Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film / Katrin Althans." Bonn : Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Bonn, 2021. http://d-nb.info/1229086420/34.
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Svensson, Anette. "A translation of worlds : Aspects of cultural translation and Australian migration literature." Doctoral thesis, Umeå universitet, Institutionen för språkstudier, 2010. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-32103.
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This study explores the exchange of cultural information that takes place in the meeting between immigrant and non-immigrant characters in a selection of Australian novels focusing on the theme of migration: Heartland (1989) by Angelika Fremd, A Change of Skies (1991) by Yasmine Gooneratne, Stella’s Place (1998) by Jim Sakkas, Hiam (1998) by Eva Sallis and Love and Vertigo (2000) by Hsu-Ming Teo. The concept cultural translation functions as a theoretical tool in the analyses. The translation model is particularly useful for this purpose since it parallels the migration process and emphasises the power relations involved in cultural encounters. Within the framework of the study, cultural translation is defined as making an unfamiliar cultural phenomenon familiar to someone. On the intratextual level of the text, the characters take on roles as translators and interpreters and make use of certain tools such as storytelling and food to effect translation. On the extratextual level, Fremd, Gooneratne, Sakkas, Sallis and Teo represent cultural translation in the four thematic areas the immigrant child, storytelling, food and life crisis. The first theme, the immigrant child, examined in chapter one, explores the effects of using the immigrant child as translator in communication situations between immigrants and representatives of Australian public institutions. In these situations, the child becomes the adult’s interpreter of the Australian target culture. The role as translator entails other roles such as a link to and a shield against the Australian society and, as a result, traditional power relations are reversed. Chapter two analyses how the second theme, storytelling, is presented as an instrument for cultural education and cultural translation in the texts. Storytelling functions to transfer power relations and resistance from one generation to the next. Through storytelling, the immigrant’s hybrid identity is maintained because the connection to the source culture is strengthened, both for the storyteller and the listener. The third theme, food as a symbol of cultural identity and as representation of the source and target cultures, is explored in chapter three. Source and target food cultures are polarised in the novels, and through an acceptance or a rejection of food from the source or target cultures, the characters symbolically accept or reject a belonging to that particular cultural environment. A fusion between the source and target food cultures emphasises the immigrant characters’ cultural hybridity and functions as a strategic marketing of culturally specific elements during which a specific source culture is translated to a target consumer. Finally, the fourth theme, life crisis, is analysed in chapter four where it is a necessary means through which the characters experience a second encounter with Australia and Australians. While their first encounter with Australia traps the characters in a liminal space/phase that is signified by cultural distancing, the second encounter offers a desire and ability for cultural translation, an acceptance of cultural hybridity and the possibility to become translated beings – a state where the characters are able to translate back and forth between the source and target cultures.
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Heley, Matthew. "Men made out of words : reading men writing masculinities in Australian literature /." Title page, table of contents and abstract only, 1996. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09ARM/09armh474.pdf.
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Massey, Geraldine. "Reading the environment : narrative constructions of ecological subjectivities in Australian children's literature." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2009. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/31766/1/Geraldine_Massey_Thesis.pdf.
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Ways in which humans engage with the environment have always provided a rich source of material for writers and illustrators of Australian children's literature. Currently, readers are confronted with a multiplicity of complex, competing and/or complementing networks of ideas, theories and emotions that provide narratives about human engagement with the environment at a particular historical moment. This study, entitled Reading the Environment: Narrative Constructions of Ecological Subjectivities in Australian Children's Literature, examines how a representative sample of Australian texts (19 picture books and 4 novels for children and young adults published between 1995 and 2006) constructs fictional ecological subjects in the texts, and offers readers ecological subject positions inscribed with contemporary environmental ideologies. The conceptual framework developed in this study identifies three ideologically grounded positions that humans may assume when engaging with the environment. None of these positions clearly exists independently of any other, nor are they internally homogeneous. Nevertheless they can be categorised as: (i) human dominion over the environment with little regard for environmental degradation (unrestrained anthropocentrism); (ii) human consideration for the environment driven by understandings that humans need the environment to survive (restrained anthropocentrism); and (iii) human deference towards the environment guided by understandings that humans are no more important than the environment (ecocentrism). iv The transdisciplinary methodological approach to textual analysis used in this thesis draws on ecocriticism, narrative theories, visual semiotics, ecofeminism and postcolonialism to discuss the difficulties and contradictions in the construction of the positions offered. Each chapter of textual analysis focuses on the construction of subjectivities in relation to one of the positions identified in the conceptual framework. Chapter 5 is concerned with how texts highlight the negative consequences of human dominion over the environment, or, in the words of this study, living with ecocatastrophe. Chapter 6 examines representations of restrained anthropocentrism in its contemporary form, that is, sustainability. Chapter 7 examines representations of ecocentrism, a radical position with inherent difficulties of representation. According to the analysis undertaken, the focus texts convey the subtleties and complexities of human engagement with the environment and advocate ways of viewing and responding to contemporary unease about the environment. The study concludes that these ways of viewing and responding conform to and/or challenge dominant socio-cultural and political-economic opinions regarding the environment. This study, the first extended work of its kind, makes an original contribution to ecocritical study of Australian children's literature. By undertaking a comprehensive analysis of how texts for children represent human engagement with the environment at a time when important environmental concerns pose significant threats to human existence, I hope to contribute new knowledge to an area of children's literature research that to date has been significantly under-represented.
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Thompson, Jay. "Sex and power in Australian writing during the Culture Wars, 1993-1997 /." Connect to thesis, 2009. http://repository.unimelb.edu.au/10187/6714.
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I address a selection of texts published in Australia between 1993 and 1997 which engage with feminist debates about sex and power. These texts are important, I argue, because they signpost the historical moment in which the culture wars and globalisation gained force in Australia. A key word in this thesis is ‘framing’. The debates which my texts engage with have (much like the culture wars in general) commonly been framed as conflicts between polarised political factions. These political factions have, in turn, been framed in terms of generations; that is, an ‘older’ feminism is pitted against a ‘newer’ feminism. Each generation of feminists supposedly holds quite different views about sex. I argue that my texts actually provide an insight into how various feminist perspectives on sex diverge and intersect with each other, as well as with certain New Right discourses about sex. My selected texts also suggest how the printed text has helped transport feminism within and outside AustraliaMy texts fit into two broad genres, fiction and scholarly non-fiction. The texts are: Helen Garner’s The First Stone (1995), Sheila Jeffreys’ The Lesbian Heresy (1993), Catharine Lumby’s Bad Girls (1997), Linda Jaivin’s Eat Me (1995) and Justine Ettler’s The River Ophelia (1995). I engage with various critical responses to these texts, including reviews, essays and interviews with the authors. I draw also from a range of theoretical sources. These include analyses of the culture wars by the American theorist Lillian S. Robinson and the Australian scholars McKenzie Wark, David McKnight and Mark Davis. Davis has provided a useful overview of how the metaphor of ‘generational conflict’ circulated in Australian culture during the 1990s. I draw on Arjun Appadurai’s model of “global cultural flows” and Ann Curthoys’ history of feminism in Australia. I engage with research into the increasingly ‘globalised’ nature of Australian writing, as well as a number of feminist works on the relationship between sex and power
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Muller, Vivienne. "Imagining Brisbane : narratives of the city 1975-1995 / by Vivienne Muller." [St. Lucia, Qld.], 2004. http://www.library.uq.edu.au/pdfserve.php?image=thesisabs/absthe18488.pdf.
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Fonteyn, David Michael English Media & Performing Arts Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences UNSW. "Ecological allegory: a study of four post-colonial Australian novels." Publisher:University of New South Wales. English, Media, & Performing Arts, 2009. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/43630.
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This thesis examines four novels as case studies of the mode of allegory in post-colonial Australian literature Allegory is a mode of fiction in which a hidden narrative is concealed below a surface narrative. Furthermore, when the hidden narrative is revealed, the surface narrative and its discursive codes become transformed. Post-colonial critics have argued that one aspect of post-colonial literature is the use of allegory in a way that the hidden narrative interpolates the surface narrative. This process of allegorical interpolation is one of the ways post-colonial literature is able to transform colonial discourses. Through an analysis of the four novels, I argue that allegory is a significant aspect of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian writing in its depiction of the natural environment and the settler nation. Bringing together ecological theory with post-colonial theories of allegory, I coin the term 'ecological allegory' to describe a specific type of allegory in which nature as subject becomes revealed within the 'hidden' narrative of the text. Through this process of interpolation, the literary representation of the land is being transformed as the natural environment is depicted as a dialogical subject. In the explication of the four novels as ecological allegories, I provide new readings of two canonical Australian texts, Remembering Babylon and Tourmaline, as well as, readings of two lesser known Indigenous Australian texts, Earth and Steam Pigs. I argue that theories of ecology provide a means for understanding the texts' representation of nature as subject. The allegorical mode of the novels offers a literary form whereby the natural environment as subject may be able to be represented in discursive language. Furthermore, in these allegories, the polysemy in the written mode of Australian literature is able to express the oral Indigenous worldview of Country, the land as a living entity. The claim that these texts are constructed as allegories, rather than simply reading the texts allegorically (known as allegoresis), combined with the methodology of ecological theory, to create a new term - ecological allegory - is an original way of reading Australian literature. Furthermore, my term 'ecological allegory' is an innovation in literary theory and its understanding of literary representations of the natural environment.
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Gibbons, Sacha R. J. "Aboriginal testimonial life-writing and contemporary cultural theory /." [St. Lucia, Qld.], 2005. http://www.library.uq.edu.au/pdfserve.php?image=thesisabs/absthe18737.pdf.
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Brennan, Bernadette M. "The wounds of possibility : reading absence and silence in some contemporary Australian writing." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/15855.
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Buchanan, David. "Contextual thesis Part I & Part II : Book of poems, "Looking off the Southern Edge" ; Stage play (full-length): Ecstasis." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2001. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/1015.
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This thesis, which accompanies my book of poems Looking Off the Southern Edge and my full-length stage play Ecstasis, is submitted in two parts: Part-I and Part-II. Part-l contextualises the writing practice of the above poems in considering the epistemological, autobiographical and landscape contexts of my poetry. Part-I then discusses how the poetry is involved in the process of decentring subjectivity within the southern India/Pacific arena. It should be pointed out that Part-I was submitted and marked last year, as the first year component of the Master of Arts (Writing) course. It is included this year because much of its thesis informs Part-II (and indeed is referred to and referenced by Part-II), especially in terms of my general theoretical approach to writing poems, plays, as well as the relevance of my music, painting and stained glass practices. Part II mostly addresses the writing of the play Ecstasis. I have however, discussed why I have re-edited, augmented and re-submitted my book of poems. I have then contextualised the writing of the play, by addressing the areas of Apophasis and the Aporia of 'the story', An Ecstatic Dramaturgy and the Undecidable Subject, and Ecstasis and an Endemic Specificity. This play was written, workshopped and enjoyed a partially moved reading (as late as the 11th, November) in the course of this year. While the writing of the piece is addressed under the previous headings, the workshopping and reading process is discussed in Workshopping the 'Spectacle Text' in the Co-operative Medium of 'Theatre. I have also included Appendix (i) in support of this process, in particular, the changes inspired by the reading. The conclusion discusses some of the boundaries for my writing of A Poetry and The Spectacle Text for theatre, and hints at the context required for any writing of experimentation in the southern Indian/Pacific arena.