Literatura académica sobre el tema "Australian fiction"

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.

This study analyses the ways in which motherhood is represented in a corpus of contemporary, critically acclaimed Australian adolescent fiction. The 18 texts in the research corpus were those short-listed by the Children's Book Council of Australia for its annual Book of the Year: Older Readers award in the years 1992 to 1994 inclusive. The publicity, prestige and power attached to these awards means that short-listed books, taken to be 'good' books for children and adolescents, are often used as educational resources in Australian schools, particularly to support teaching and learning activities in literacy and English education. Recognising adolescent fiction as a potentially significant site of contestation over the social justice ideals that inform Australia's national curriculum documents, the study sought to document the ways in which these texts are implicated in the production and reproduction of ideologies of motherhood. The study was informed by the understanding that meanings are not inherent to texts, but are constructed by readers as they adopt particular subject positions in relation to texts and enter into what, in effect, are social relationships with them. From this perspective, the analysis required attention not only to textual features of the research corpus, but also to the various other resources on which readers might reasonably draw to construct meanings. This meant attending to intertextuality, that is, the relationships between the fictional narratives on which the study focused and other cultural texts, including the visual and spoken texts of everyday life, and to the ways in which readers are encouraged or required to draw on these intertexts as meaning-making resources. The study recognised that readers' primary mean-making resources are common-sense ideologies, understood as the widely shared and taken-for-granted understandings about the social world that inform much of the everyday social action and interaction among members of a society. The study was also underpinned by an understanding of motherhood as a social construct rather than an essentially biologically determined state, and therefore as having meanings that are subject to contestation and revision. To establish the range of contemporary understandings about motherhood on which readers might draw to make sense of textual representations of motherhood, the study drew on the findings of recent research into the discursive construction of motherhood, with particular attention to what currently prevails as common sense. These common-sense understandings about motherhood, together with the alternative discourses on which readers might draw to construct meaning, subsequently informed the analyses of the research corpus. Given the size of the corpus, only six of the texts were selected for close attention. The analyses of these texts were supplemented with less detailed analyses of the remainder of the corpus, focusing on the themes that emerged most powerfully from the first six analyses. While some attention was given to the linguistic features of the texts, the analytical process focused most closely on their narrative features and the ways in which particular narrative strategies work to limit the range of possible meanings that readers can construct by rendering some meanings more 'obvious' than others. Particular attention was given to the focalising strategies through which fictional narratives exert much of their power to persuade readers to adopt certain subject positions rather than others, and hence to construct meaning in certain ways, with consequences in terms of the production and reproduction of ideologies. The analyses revealed that prevailing common-sense ideologies of motherhood are not significantly challenged by the ways in which motherhood is represented in the research corpus. While there are points in some of the narratives that might serve as platforms from which to construct alternative understandings about motherhood, particularly for those readers who are equipped with critical reading strategies, the narratives never actively and unequivocally encourage readers to challenge common-sense understandings. Rather, their major contribution to contemporary ideological struggles over the meaning of motherhood is directed towards ensuring continued widespread acceptance of the discursively constructed 'truths' that work to legitimate a social order in which the lives of girls and women are regulated on the basis of their categorisation as potential or actual mothers. The study concluded that the texts in the research corpus are actively engaged in undermining contemporary social struggles for social justice and equity. The study's findings have a number of significant implications for theory development, policy, practice and future research, both within and beyond the field of education, and these are discussed in the final chapter. In particular, the findings are relevant to literacy education, where they highlight the need for educators to develop and implement critical literacy pedagogies that draw students' attention to the textual workings of ideology. The findings suggest that what students need, arguably more than they need 'good' literature, are meta-level reading skills and strategies with which they can resist being manipulated by texts, whether they are fictional narratives of the kind analysed for this study or the various other written, spoken and visual texts that are typically encountered in everyday social life.<br>Thesis (PhD Doctorate)<br>Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)<br>School of Cognition, Language and Special Education<br>Full Text

Given the growing interest in fiction writing in Australia, seen in the rise in the number of festivals, writers' centres, how-to books, biographies and creative writing classes, it is surprising that very little research has been done within Australia on the nature of literary creativity itself. A review of international literature on creativity from areas such as the arts, history, psychology, sociology, cultural studies, business and education shows movement away from traditional and conventional ideas of creativity that focus primarily on the individual, towards more contextual approaches that reconceptualise creativity as the result of a dynamic system at work. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's tripartite model of creativity, which includes a field of experts, a domain of knowledge and an individual author, has been successfully applied to the arts and sciences in North America. It is argued that the systems model is also relevant to Australian fiction writing, a term which is used here to include novels in literature, popular fiction and genre fiction categories. This thesis is primarily based on in-depth interviews with 40 published Australian fiction writers. With over 400 publications between them, the individual writers interviewed represent a broad cross section of Australian fiction categories at both the national and international level. In addition to literary writers like Carmel Bird and Venero Armanno, this sample also incorporates writers in other genres such as Di Morrissey and Nick Earls (popular fiction), Paul Collins (science fiction and fantasy), Anna Jacobs (romance), Peter Doyle (crime) and Libby Gleeson and Gary Crew (children's and young adult fiction). Although the individual writers possess unique combinations of characteristics, biographies and processes, their collective responses demonstrate common participation in systemic processes of creativity. By analysing these responses in terms of Csikszentmihalyi's systems model, this thesis presents evidence that demonstrates a system of creativity at work in Australian fiction. The analysis of the collected data provides evidence, firstly, of how writers adopt and master the domain skills and knowledge needed to be able to write fiction through processes of socialisation and enculturation. Secondly, it is also the contention of this thesis that the individual's ability to contribute to the domain depends not only on traditional biological, personality and motivational influences but also socially and culturally mediated work practices and processes. Finally, it is asserted that the contribution of a field of experts is also crucial to creativity occurring in Australian fiction writing. This social organisation, comprised of all those who can affect the domain, is important not only for its influence on and acceptance of written works but also for the continuation of the system itself. The evidence shows that the field supports further writing as well as writing careers with many authors becoming members of the field themselves. In sum, the research demonstrates that, rather than being solely the property of individual authors, creativity in Australian fiction writing results from individuals making choices and acting within the boundaries of specific social and cultural contexts.

This thesis offers a critical survey and a comprehensive bibliography of the Australian short story in the 1980s. Conceived partly as an continuation of Stephen Torre’s study of Australian short fiction of the 1940-1980 period, it starts where Torre’s thesis stopped, focusing on Australian short story writing published in the ten years between 1981 and 1990. Torre has summed up the 1940-1980 period as ‘a time of development and innovation’ in the history of Australian short fiction. In comparison, the 1980s is probably best described as a decade of unprecedented expansion and diversification. During that time, Australian short fiction broke away from its earlier domination by monolithic traditions and became a much more eclectic and pluralistic form. Contributing to this eclecticism and plurality were five different streams of story writing created by five separate groups of writers. Due to constraints of space, the critical text of the thesis examines only four of them.