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1
Bode, Katherine. "In/visibility : women looking at men's bodies in and through contemporary Australian women's fiction /." [St. Lucia, Qld.], 2005. http://adt.library.uq.edu.au/public/adt-QU20060120.161127/index.html.
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Nanlohy, Elizabeth Mavis, and mikewood@deakin edu au. "Fundamentalism meets feminism: Postmodern confrontation in the work of Janette Turner Hospital." Deakin University. School of Literary and Communication Studies, 2000. http://tux.lib.deakin.edu.au./adt-VDU/public/adt-VDU20060720.090953.
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Skyes, Gillian E. "The new woman in the new world : fin-de-siècle writing and feminism in Australia." Phd thesis, Faculty of Arts, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/16473.
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Anderson, Emma Kate School of English UNSW. "Representations of female sexuality in chick-lit texts and reading Anais Nin on the train." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of English, 2006. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/27319.
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My critical essay uses Foucault???s theory of discursive formation to chart the emergence of the figure of the single modern woman as she is created by the various discourses surrounding her. It argues that representations of the single modern woman continue a tradition of perceiving the female body as a source of social anxiety. The project explores ???chick-lit??? as a site within the discursive formation from which the single modern woman emerges as a paradoxical figure; the paradoxes fundamentally linked to her sexuality. This essay, then, essentially seeks to investigate representations of female sexuality within chick-lit, exposing for scrutiny the paradoxes inherent in and around the figure of the single modern woman. My fictional piece is a work of erotica. It is divided into four sections: The Reader, The Writer, The Muse and The Critic. Essentially it explores the relationships between female sexuality and literature; between female sexuality and feminist, post-feminist and patriarchal values and between literature and issues of truth, perspective and representation. The two works complement each other to illuminate the paradox of female sexuality: one from a theoretical perspective and the other from a fictional perspective. The critical work focuses on female sexuality and its relationship to, and development within, the current social context. Chick-lit, as a new and immensely popular genre of fiction which holistically explores the lives of single modern women was useful for examining the relationship between the sexual persona of the single modern woman and society. The fiction is concerned with a narrower focus: specifically the sexual life of the single modern woman. Through the creative process, it became apparent that working within the genre of ???erotica??? would be not only more useful than working within chick-lit, but more powerful in exploring the themes I was interested in. The creative work draws on numerous points of interest raised in the critical work from, for example, the grander notions of the relationship between object and discourse ??? in this case female sexuality and literature ??? and the female body as a source of social fascination and anxiety to finer observations such as what it means to have sex ???like a man.??? In essence, the creative work seeks to examine the many faces of the single modern woman as a sexual being and to illuminate, on an intimate level, the many conflicts between and surrounding those faces and to suggest that while paradox remains in female sexual ideology, the single modern woman will remain suspended in a kind of sexual paralysis.
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McFarland, Michele. "The intellectual life of Catherine Helen Spence." Thesis, University of Ballarat, 2004. http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/60437.
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This thesis will argue that Catherine Helen Spence, a writer, preacher and reformer who migrated from Scotland to Australia in 1839, performed the role of a public intellectual in Australia similar to that played by a number of women of letters in Victorian England. While her ideas were strongly influenced by important British and European nineteenth-century intellectual figures and movements, as well as by Enlightenment thought, her work also reflects the different socio-political, historical and cultural environment of Australia. These connections and influences can be seen in her engagement with what were some of the "big ideas" of the nineteenth century, including feminism, socialism, religious scepticism, utopianism and the value of progress. In arguing that Spence was a public intellectual, I will consider the ways in which she used the literary genres of fiction and journalism, as well as her sermons, to try to help her fellow citizens make sense of the world, attempting to organise and articulate some of the significant ideas affecting the political, social and cultural climates in which they lived. Through the exploration of Spence's intellectual work, I will show how she can be regarded as making a significant contribution to nineteenth-century Australian intellectual life, one that has been under-recognised and under-valued.Doctor of Philosophy
6
Spear, Peta. "Libertine : a novel & A writer's reflection : the Libertine dynamic : existential erotic and apocalyptic Gothic /." View thesis, 1998. http://library.uws.edu.au/adt-NUWS/public/adt-NUWS20030909.143230/index.html.
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Spear, Peta. "Libertine : a novel and A writer's reflection : the Libertine dynamic: existential erotic and apocalyptic Gothic." Thesis, View thesis, 1998. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/26115.
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This thesis comprises two works: a novel ‘Libertine’ and a monograph ‘A writer’s reflection’. ‘Libertine’contemplates the eroticising and brutalising of being, and sex as currency, as need and as sacrament. It is set in a city where war is the norm, nightmare the standard, and ancient deities are called upon to witness the new order of killing technologies. The story is narrated by a woman chosen to be the consort of the General, a despostic war leader who believes that he has been chosen by the goddess Kali. She journeys deep into a horror which exists not only around her, but also within her. ‘Libertine’, by melding the erotic and the Gothic, tells the story of a woman enacting the role cast for her in the complex theatres of war. ‘A writer’s reflection’ discusses the themes of the novel, introducing the notion of existential erotica. The existential experience particular to the expression of the erotic being is discussed, and the dilemma which arises from a self yearning to merge ecstatically with an/other in order to obtain a heightened or differently valued self. This theme is elaborated in ‘Libertine’ with regard to subjectivity and the broader issues of nausea, horror and choice, drawing on the conventions of Gothic literature and apocalyptic visioning. This visioning, as eroticised death worship, is found in a Sadian credo of cruelty, the tantric rituals of Kali devotion, and the annihilating erotic excess propounded by Bataille. The monograph illustrated that ‘Libertine’ is not a re-representation of these elements, but an original contribution to the literature of erotica.
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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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Brooklyn, Bridget. "Something old, something new : divorce and divorce law in South Australia, 1859-1918." Title page, contents and summary only, 1988. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phb872.pdf.
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Clarke, Patricia, and n/a. "Life Lines to Life Stories: Some Publications About Women in Nineteenth-Century Australia." Griffith University. School of Arts, Media and Culture, 2004. http://www4.gu.edu.au:8080/adt-root/public/adt-QGU20040719.150756.
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This thesis consists of an introduction and six of my books, published between 1985 and 1999, on aspects of the history of women in nineteenth-century Australia. The books are The Governesses: Letters from the Colonies 1862-1882 (1985); A Colonial Woman: The Life and Times of Mary Braidwood Mowle 1827-1857 (1986); Pen Portraits: Women Writers and Journalists in Nineteenth Century Australia (1988); Pioneer Writer: The Life of Louisa Atkinson, Novelist, Journalist, Naturalist (1990); Tasma: The Life of Jessie Couvreur (1994); and Rosa! Rosa! A Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist (1999). At the time they were published each of these books either dealt with a new subject or presented a new approach to a subject. Collectively they represent a body of work that has expanded knowledge of women's lives and writing in nineteenth-century Australia. Although not consciously planned as a sequence at the outset, these books developed as a result of the influence on my thinking of the themes that emerged in Australian social and cultural historical writing during this period. The books also represent a development in my own work from the earlier more documentary-based books on letters and diaries to the interpretive challenge of biographical writing and the weaving of private lives with public achievements. These books make up a cohesive, cumulative body of work. Individually and as a whole, they make an original contribution to knowledge of the lives and achievements of women in nineteenth-century Australia. They received critical praise at the time of publication and have led to renewed interest and further research on the subjects they cover. My own knowledge and expertise has developed as a result of researching and writing them. The Governesses was not only the first full-length study of a particular group of letters but it also documented aspects of the lives of governesses in Australia, a little researched subject to that time. A Colonial Woman, based on a previously unpublished and virtually unknown diary, pointed to the importance of 'ordinary' lives in presenting an enriched view of the past. Pen Portraits documented the early history of women journalists in Australia, a previously neglected subject. Three of the women I included in Pen Portraits, Louisa Atkinson, Tasma and Rosa Praed, the first two of whom were pioneer women journalists as well as novelists, became the subjects of my full-length biographies. In my biographies of women writers, Pioneer Writer, Tasma, and Rosa! Rosa!, I recorded and interpreted the lives of these important writers placing them in the context of Australian cultural history as women who negotiated gender barriers and recorded this world in their fiction. My books on Louisa Atkinson and Tasma were the first full-length biographies of these significant but largely forgotten nineteenth-century women writers, while my biography of Rosa Praed was the first for more than fifty years. Each introduced original research that changed perceptions of the women's lives and consequently of attitudes to their creative work. Each provided information essential for further research on their historical significance and literary achievements. Each involved extensive research that led to informed interpretation allowing insightful surmises essential to quality biography.
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Clarke, Patricia. "Life Lines to Life Stories: Some Publications About Women in Nineteenth-Century Australia." Thesis, Griffith University, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10072/365578.
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This thesis consists of an introduction and six of my books, published between 1985 and 1999, on aspects of the history of women in nineteenth-century Australia. The books are The Governesses: Letters from the Colonies 1862-1882 (1985); A Colonial Woman: The Life and Times of Mary Braidwood Mowle 1827-1857 (1986); Pen Portraits: Women Writers and Journalists in Nineteenth Century Australia (1988); Pioneer Writer: The Life of Louisa Atkinson, Novelist, Journalist, Naturalist (1990); Tasma: The Life of Jessie Couvreur (1994); and Rosa! Rosa! A Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist (1999).
At the time they were published each of these books either dealt with a new subject or presented a new approach to a subject. Collectively they represent a body of work that has expanded knowledge of women's lives and writing in nineteenth-century Australia. Although not consciously planned as a sequence at the outset, these books developed as a result of the influence on my thinking of the themes that emerged in Australian social and cultural historical writing during this period. The books also represent a development in my own work from the earlier more documentary-based books on letters and diaries to the interpretive challenge of biographical writing and the weaving of private lives with public achievements. These books make up a cohesive, cumulative body of work. Individually and as a whole, they make an original contribution to knowledge of the lives and achievements of women in nineteenth-century Australia. They received critical praise at the time of publication and have led to renewed interest and further research on the subjects they cover. My own knowledge and expertise has developed as a result of researching and writing them. The Governesses was not only the first full-length study of a particular group of letters but it also documented aspects of the lives of governesses in Australia, a little researched subject to that time. A Colonial Woman, based on a previously unpublished and virtually unknown diary, pointed to the importance of 'ordinary' lives in presenting an enriched view of the past. Pen Portraits documented the early history of women journalists in Australia, a previously neglected subject. Three of the women I included in Pen Portraits, Louisa Atkinson, Tasma and Rosa Praed, the first two of whom were pioneer women journalists as well as novelists, became the subjects of my full-length biographies. In my biographies of women writers, Pioneer Writer, Tasma, and Rosa! Rosa!, I recorded and interpreted the lives of these important writers placing them in the context of Australian cultural history as women who negotiated gender barriers and recorded this world in their fiction. My books on Louisa Atkinson and Tasma were the first full-length biographies of these significant but largely forgotten nineteenth-century women writers, while my biography of Rosa Praed was the first for more than fifty years. Each introduced original research that changed perceptions of the women's lives and consequently of attitudes to their creative work. Each provided information essential for further research on their historical significance and literary achievements. Each involved extensive research that led to informed interpretation allowing insightful surmises essential to quality biography.Thesis (PhD Doctorate)
Doctor of Philosophy by Publication (PhD)
School of Arts, Media and Culture
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Pratt, Catherine Cecilia English Australian Defence Force Academy UNSW. "Gender ideology and narrative form in the novels of Henry Handel Richardson." Awarded by:University of New South Wales - Australian Defence Force Academy. School of English, 1994. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/38688.
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This thesis is a feminist reading of the work of Henry Handel Richardson (1870-1946), which considers her four major novels: Maurice Guest (1908), The Getting of Wisdom (1910), The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930), and The Young Cosima (1939). It proposes that Richardson foregrounds the work of gender ideology in her novels, and that her work is also conscious about its own fictional procedures. This thesis argues that Richardson consciously examines the ideological aspect of narrative modes, such as naturalism, the Bildungsroman, and popular romance. Moreover, it illustrates her attempts to invent narrative strategies which subvert the conventional assumptions about gender inherent in those forms. ???Gender Ideology and Narrative Form??? draws on recent theoretical approaches to narrative, ideology, subjectivity, and dialogism, to argue that Richardson makes the ideological shaping of her stories most visible through manipulations of genre, plot, narrative voice, and point of view. Aspects of ideology examined include the Victorian and late-Victorian equation of masculinity with public rationality, mind, public achievement, and genius: and, on the other hand, the association of femininity with the body, passion, and private or domestic spaces. The thesis also considers some of the values and assumptions about gender implicit in nineteenth-century scientific thinking. Henry Handel Richardson has been viewed as a conservative writer, in both aesthetic and political terms. By contrast, I suggest that she resists the moral and representational codes of the realist or naturalist form, and that her uncompromising oppositional strategy achieves a number of radical results. It exposes and criticises the masculinist bias of certain representational methods; it offers new ways of representing female experience; and it insists that the private sphere must be treated also as a political space in which crucial power relationships are at work. My approach to Henry Handel Richardson???s fiction opens new ways to see her work as the product of a distinctive feminist consciousness.
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Rukavina, Alison Jane. "Cultural Darwinism and the literary canon, a comparative study of Susanna Moodie's Roughing it in the Bush and Caroline Leakey's The broad arrow." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp01/MQ61491.pdf.
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Hawryluk, Lynda J. "Semi-detached." Thesis, View thesis, 1997. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/28403.
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This collection of short stories is about being a twenty-something in the 90s, trying to get by, have a little fun and make somewhat of a mark in the process. It’s about the process of growing up, and the seemingly desperate need to hold onto all those youthful pursuits. It’s about finding out that life as an adult tries to suck the life out of you, rather than allowing you to suck the life out of it. That constant struggle, the battle of wills between attending to your needs or just satisfying your wants. This is a time for you when your needs and wants are siblings, bickering in the back of the car on a long drive up the coast. The characters in these stories are having their good time while it lasts. Avoiding the inevitable: maturity, responsibility, adulthood. And so they should. After all, these aren’t called ‘the best years of our lives’ for nothing. The stories celebrate your life as a twenty-something.
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Conte, Susannah. "The Fifth Sparrow: In Memory of Mollie Skinner." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2018. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/2080.
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This thesis offers a case study in adapting Australian literary biography to the theatre, specifically in the form of a one woman show or monologue performance. The thesis consists of a novel play script, together with exegetical writing which outlines the source materials used and the process and themes under consideration. These themes include those of family (specifically a difficult relationship with her mother), love (including a lesbian affair), life as an aspiring writer, and the protagonist’s difficult to shake sense of damage, pain and struggle. The play offers a portrait of West Australian writer Mollie Skinner (1876- 1955). Sources included her autobiography (both the original manuscript and that edited and published by Mary Durack), Mollie’s novels and her letters—particularly her extensive correspondence with the British author D.H. Lawrence, who she met in WA—and secondary writings. Skinner’s writing has been described as akin to an “untended garden,” rich in imagery, but scattered and often difficult to follow. In recognition of this, my play takes the form of a series of vignettes and images, a succession of heightened moments, choreographed with sound and movement elements for dramatic impact. Mollie’s life thereby emerges as one marked by pain and suffering, yet suffused with rich language and visions. Although Mollie was more than just a friend of D.H. Lawrence, it is nevertheless clear that the better known author offered her support and encouragement that few others did. Together with her Sybil these two figures emerge as Mollie’s only true loves and companions, figures physically separated from her, yet who enabled her life and many of her joys. Skinner emerges then as a modest but indomitable spirt, poised on the veranda, looking at the world through her failing eyesight; touched by the beauty of it all.
The aim of the play is thus to do justice to the spirit of Skinner, without presenting an exhaustive account of her entire life, and in doing so, to present her story to a new generation of West Australians.
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Holzer, Valarie. "Unveiling the female `I' : autobiographies by Australian women born in the 1920s." Thesis, 1991. https://eprints.utas.edu.au/20353/1/whole_HolzerValarie1992_thesis.pdf.
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This study fulfils the need for research into
autobiographies of writers who have a number ot common
traits which will provide specific conclusions about
the art of autobiography. Unveiling the Female ' I' ;
Autobiographies by Australian Women Born in the 1920s
looks at works by fourteen writers who share the same
nationality, gender and decade of birth.
The Introduction documents the elusiveness of
women's autobiographies and briefly surveys the
critical situation to date, noting the lack of
consensus in just what an autobiography is. Criteria
have been established for extracting women's
autobiographies from the large range of female
autobiographical writings and the validity of the
linguistic devices used to examine these works is
justified.
Working from the proposition by Chodorow that
women are defined through process and by "other".
Chapter 1 looks at character and style in four autobiographies
of childhood to establish how this
forms the identity ot Australian women born in the
1920s.
Chapter 2 discusses two autobiographies of
childhood which focus on other aspects of personal
development: Spence's Another October Child presents a
portrait of the development of a writer and Lindsay's Portrait of Pa is argued to be an autobiograpby of Jane
rather than a biography or Norman Lindsay.
The life stories of adults treated in Chapter 3
demonstrate the fallacy of the "quest" metaphor for female
writers and offer other life metaphors as more
appropriate for conveying their truths of identity.
The position of women in Australian society has
received close attention in recent years, and the
autobiographies by migrant and Aboriginal women which
are the topic of Chapter 4 illustrate their alienation
through their lack of cultural experience. Place
becomes cultural as well as physical for these women.
Dorothy Hewett's recently published Wild Card both
confirms and confounds the pattern of Australian
women's autobiography depicting the same period in a
highly and elaborately patterned way. Chapter 5
examines its statement about the role of truth in
autobiography.
Chapter 6 continues this direction and breaks new
ground by looking at the implications of "naming" and
photographs in both the structural and metaphoric
strands of the re-creation of identity.
The Conclusion considers how Australian women born
in the 1920s see their world and their values in
comparison with the male view of history. The study
draws together the threads of identity, world and truth
as represented in these self- life-writings.
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Eastman, B. "Nan Chauncy's Comfort me with applies : a diplomatic transcription." Thesis, 2001. https://eprints.utas.edu.au/19729/1/whole_EastmanBerenice2000_thesis.pdf.
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This thesis presents two parts: a transcription of Nan
Chauncy's only unpublished adult novel Comfort me: With
Apples and a short introduction to that text.
The transcription is presented as a diplomatic edition of
the typescript of the novel held in Nan Chauncy's papers in
the Tasmanian State Archives. This edition is collated with
a second typescript of the novel previously owned by the
author's brother and which is now called the Reedwind text.
The Reedwind text is now in the possession of the
candidate.
The transcribing of Comfort Me With Apples has been made in
accordance with the principles of textual editing outlined
by D.C. Greetham in Textual Scholarship: An Introduction
(New York: Garland, 1994). This edition of the text has
been produced for research purposes and is the only edition
available outside the TSA. The Introduction consists in a description of text and
provenance; a summary of the novel's parts; an analysis of
genre and literary evaluation; a biography of author and
chronology of works. Notes include a family tree and maps
of relevant geographical locations.
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Vines, HMM. "The secret life of us : Eve Langley and her family." Thesis, 2008. https://eprints.utas.edu.au/22212/1/whole_VinesHelenMargaretMcDonald2008_thesis.pdf.
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Eve Langley (1904-1974) is an enigmatic figure who made her mark on Australian literature with the publication of The Pea Pickers (1942). As Eve destroyed the original journals and letters upon which The Pea Pickers-and subsequent fiction-was based, her two published and ten unpublished novels stand as the only existing account of her life up until 1942. Although all researchers have been mindful of the hazards of reading the fiction as autobiography, in the absence of an alternative account of her "self," the fiction has segued into her biography and her biography has leached into readings of her fiction. In this thesis the often contradictory material available about Eve Langley from primary and secondary sources has been meticulously examined from the perspective of the distanced investigator, in order to provide a fuller history of the Langley family, and to deal with the fiction from a new critical perspective. I adopt the role of literary detective to unravel the story of Eve and her texts, a task made more complex by the Langley family's pervasive culture of secrecy.
My first chapter is a biography of the Langley family that is constructed through reference to historically verifiable, publicly available documents, and excludes the fiction as a source of biographical evidence. This family biography provides a back-ground for the chapters that follow. In the second chapter I provide a reading of Eve's texts, focusing on the representation of family. The third chapter deals with June Langley's commentary on the family, using a variety of sources. June was Eve's muse, audience and subject and later, biographer; the relationship between the two sisters was intense, fraught and significant. Drawing on anecdotal and documentary evidence, in the fourth chapter I put forward an overtly speculative but, I believe, persuasive explanation for Eve's unusual life and writing.
This thesis untangles the web of misrepresentation that has surrounded the enigmatic Eve Langley. As a "literary detective," my initial goal was to create borders between the life and the writing. Having met this objective, the imperative to maintain the separation diminished: the gaps, silences, and obfuscations by both Eve and June became increasingly transparent, leading to a re-evaluation of the relationship between the fiction and the life. The blurring that has confronted all critics has been addressed through the meticulous review of available sources, which has provided a framework for reading the fiction and the life.
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Chion, Loretta Ravera. "The female dilemma : subversion and art in some novels by Australian women writers." Master's thesis, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/139376.
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(9831512), Leonie Rowan. "Strategies of marginalisation and tactics of subversion: A study of some recent Australian women's writing." Thesis, 1994. https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/Strategies_of_marginalisation_and_tactics_of_subversion_A_study_of_some_recent_Australian_women_s_writing/13416824.
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This thesis is titled Strategies of Marginalisation and Tactics of Subversion: A Study of Some Recent Australian Women's Writing, and attempts to provide definitions of strategies and tactics which illustrate how both terms relate to, or operate within, specific literary narratives. I will conduct readings of six texts: Jessica Anderson's An Ordinary Lunacy and The Impersonators, Thea Astley's A Kindness Cup and Beachmasters, Drusilla Modjeska's Poppy and Ruby Langford's Don't Take Your Love to Town. Throughout, I will concern myself with five major points: readings of Astley's, Anderson's, Modjeska's and Langford's texts which focus on the politics of their narratives' practices of inclusion and exclusion; the distinction between narratives which reinscribe marginality and those which displace traditional and reductive notions of race and gender; the difficulty of speaking about either race or gender without participating in the construction or perpetuation of essentialising definitions of either; the problematic nature of accepting the inviolable distinction between centre and margin; and the ways in which so-called marginalised groups can, and do, 'speak for themselves', and thereby subvert or render meaningless mainstream definitions of their own lives, and the centre/margin opposition on which these definitions are predicated. In the first chapter I will introduce the theories that I intend to work with and discuss where the texts that I will be reading are located on a continuum of narrative styles. In Chapter Two I will analyse the ways in which reviewers and critics have tended to produce Astley, Anderson, Modjeska or Langford as either 'mainstream' or 'special interest' authors. In Chapters Three and Four I will outline my understanding of strategies of marginalisation, and detail the ways in which reductive definitions of gender are naturalised in both An Ordinary Lunacy and The Impersonators as a consequence of a lack, in each text, of any workable alternative to the extant hegemony. Then, in Chapters Five and Six I will focus on the ways in which Aboriginals and Pacific Islanders have been routinely positioned on the edge of dominant discourse, and discuss the ways in which A Kindness Cup and Beachmasters ultimately reinscribe the 'naturalised' separation of white from black by demonstrating the political and social incompetence of the indigenous peoples. In Chapter Seven I will foreground my understanding of tactics of subversion and discuss counternarratives which can be used to resist explanations that seek to construct various groups or individuals as 'victims'. In Chapters Eight and Nine I will then conduct readings of Modjeska's Poppy and Langford's Don't Take Your Love to Town in order to illustrate some of the diverse ways in which tactics of subversion can function in literary texts. I will conclude by re-stating the difference between narratives which silence and elide the voices of the 'other,' and narratives in which the 'other' speak for themselves.
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Brett, Doris. "Eating the underworld : a memoir in three voices." Thesis, 2002. https://vuir.vu.edu.au/15430/.
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Cesare Pavese, the Italian poet, said 'We do not remember days, we remember moments.' In creating the story of our days, some of us will remember different moments from the same events and others will remember the same moments
differently.
To decide to tell one's story publicly, is a difficult decision. To decide to tell a story that involves others is even more difficult. Despite the fact that my sister
and later my father have put themselves into the public arena with regard to family matters, I have felt intense discomfort in writing about my family. I am still wrestling with the ethical issues of telling stories about families. I can't come up with easy answers. The best that I can do is to recognise the complexity of the ways in which people remember and interpret their lives and know that I can speak only for my memories and understandings and that others will have different ones.
There are three voices - each of different tempo and texture - weaving together in this narrative. There is the voice of the diarist, the voice of the poet and the voice
of fairytale and myth. In my imagination, I am sitting with them at one of those old-fashioned dressing tables, backed by a hinged, three-sided mirror. The kind I was fascinated by as a child. You can look at yourself full on, turn sideways and be startled by a profile you never get to see. If you lean more deeply into the mirror, you can see that even more foreign-familiar territory - the back of your
head. You can gaze, glance, skip, backwards and forwards, return to what catches your eye and watch it widen as the mirrors shift at your conmand. And always, the unspoken amazement - Is that me? Is that really me? - as you see for
the first time, the multitude of disparate, odd-seeming selves that go to make up the one whole you.
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Hawryluk, Lynda J., University of Western Sydney, and Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. "Semi-detached." 1997. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/28403.
Full textAbstract:
This collection of short stories is about being a twenty-something in the 90s, trying to get by, have a little fun and make somewhat of a mark in the process. It’s about the process of growing up, and the seemingly desperate need to hold onto all those youthful pursuits. It’s about finding out that life as an adult tries to suck the life out of you, rather than allowing you to suck the life out of it. That constant struggle, the battle of wills between attending to your needs or just satisfying your wants. This is a time for you when your needs and wants are siblings, bickering in the back of the car on a long drive up the coast. The characters in these stories are having their good time while it lasts. Avoiding the inevitable: maturity, responsibility, adulthood. And so they should. After all, these aren’t called ‘the best years of our lives’ for nothing. The stories celebrate your life as a twenty-something.Master of Arts (Hons) Writing
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Brayshaw, Meg. "Reflectant tides : the aqueous poetics of Sydney in women's fiction, 1934-1947." Thesis, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.7/uws:49608.
Full textAbstract:
In Sydney, the period between the two world wars was a time of rapid change, when ‘modern’ was considered a goal to which the city and its people should strive. The 1930s were bookended by the opening of the Harbour Bridge in 1932 and the 1938 Sesquicentenary of the First Fleet’s landing, two events that figured Sydney as the triumphant end point of a narrative of national, white Australian progress.
This period also saw the publication of a number of novels by Australian women writers that took the contemporary city as their setting and scrutinised urban modernity as a state of being and an ideological position. This thesis takes as its focus five novels that depict and debate the multiple and often combative discourses of modernity that flowed through Australia’s first and most populous urban centre in the interwar period: Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) by Christina Stead, Jungfrau (1936) by Dymphna Cusack, Waterway (1938) by Eleanor Dark, Foveaux (1939) by Kylie Tennant, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947; 1983) by M. Barnard Eldershaw. Through close reading within and across the novels, I argue that this generation of women writers pioneered a distinctly Australian, modern urban poetics that is best described as aqueous. Responding to Sydney as a dynamic estuarine environment, each writer mobilises water as location and literary device, infusing the modern city’s spaces and processes with productively aqueous qualities of changeability and circulation, unsettlement and motility.
Making heuristic use of a Benjaminian framework for dialectical urban thinking, I read this aqueous poetics of Sydney against the narrative of progress epitomised by the Bridge and Sesquicentenary, arguing that in contradistinction to this narrative, the novels present an Australian urban modernity of material emplacement in an unpredictably watery sphere, where history settles and sediments, multiple ideological schemas flow into one another, and relations between bodies, space and power generate constant contestation.
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Burston, Mary Ann. "Looking for home in all the wrong places: nineteenth-century Australian-Irish women writers and the problem of home-making." Thesis, 2009. https://vuir.vu.edu.au/30089/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines the writing of Irish identity in Australia to explore how nineteenth-century
Australian-born women writers negotiated their Irish emigrant heritage. A gap in knowledge
about Irish women's emigrant experiences and those of their descendants provides an opportunity
to investigate the translation of the Irish emigrant experience from the perspectives of first-born
Australian daughters. A critical analysis of the writing histories of Mary Eliza Fullerton, Mary
Grant Bruce and Marie Pitt (McKeown) will demonstrate the fragility of national identity in terms
of the cultural and symbolic language used to define Irish emigrant and Australian settler culture
identity between the late nineteenth-to-mid-twentieth centuries. The thesis provides an alternative
reading of national cultures and histories to show how each writer used images of Irish national
culture to clarify and elaborate notions of home in their Australian writing.
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Spear, Peta, University of Western Sydney, and School of Communication and Media. "Libertine : a novel and A writer's reflection : the Libertine dynamic: existential erotic and apocalyptic Gothic." 1998. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/26115.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis comprises two works: a novel ‘Libertine’ and a monograph ‘A writer’s reflection’. ‘Libertine’contemplates the eroticising and brutalising of being, and sex as currency, as need and as sacrament. It is set in a city where war is the norm, nightmare the standard, and ancient deities are called upon to witness the new order of killing technologies. The story is narrated by a woman chosen to be the consort of the General, a despostic war leader who believes that he has been chosen by the goddess Kali. She journeys deep into a horror which exists not only around her, but also within her. ‘Libertine’, by melding the erotic and the Gothic, tells the story of a woman enacting the role cast for her in the complex theatres of war. ‘A writer’s reflection’ discusses the themes of the novel, introducing the notion of existential erotica. The existential experience particular to the expression of the erotic being is discussed, and the dilemma which arises from a self yearning to merge ecstatically with an/other in order to obtain a heightened or differently valued self. This theme is elaborated in ‘Libertine’ with regard to subjectivity and the broader issues of nausea, horror and choice, drawing on the conventions of Gothic literature and apocalyptic visioning. This visioning, as eroticised death worship, is found in a Sadian credo of cruelty, the tantric rituals of Kali devotion, and the annihilating erotic excess propounded by Bataille. The monograph illustrated that ‘Libertine’ is not a re-representation of these elements, but an original contribution to the literature of erotica.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)