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A history still in the making -- Australian women writers through their letters, diaries and fictions have created a new world of literature. Dale Spender in this lively and provocative history of white women's literature presents a fresh and forthright view of the achievements of convict writers to writers and feminists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Butcher Shop first appeared in 1926. Despite big overseas sales it was banned in New Zealand and later Australia for being disgusting, indecent and communistic &– in other words for promoting revolutionary ideas about women and for a bold portrayal of the brutality of farm life. On one level, the novel is a fast-paced account of how passion and jealousy destroy the lives of a rich and cultured farming family; on another it is a fierce polemic for the freedom of women, which in its frankness was years ahead of its time.
"In August 1896 Randolph Biddow's family join him on the sugar-cane plantations of North Queensland. For his wife Blanche, it is an exile in the wilderness; but for their maid Cindie, it is an exciting world of tropical forests, rewarding work and new relationships - with white people, Pacific Islanders and Aborigines alike. Teaching herself the sugar trade Cindie rises from servant to independent woman. By the early 1900s she is the indispensible manager of Biddow's expanded property but her complete happiness is marred by the jealousy and hatred of Blanche. First published in 1949 this is a ... chronicle of plantation life and its challenges, of the racial tensions among workers and the politicking of landowners faced with the economic impact of the Commonwealth Bill. ..."--Back cover.
By the Book is an indispensable history of the literature of Queensland from its establishment as a separate colony in the mid-nineteenth century through major economic, political and cultural transformations to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Queensland figures in the Australian imagination as a frontier, a place of wild landscapes and wilder politics, but also as Australia's playground, a soft tourist paradise of warm weather and golden beaches. Based partly on real historical divergences from the rest of Australia, these contradictory images have been questioned and scrutinised in Queensland literature for 150 years, and writers today maintain that complicated imaginative relat...
The Intimate Archive examines the issues involved in using archival material to research the personal lives of public people, in this case of Australian writers Marjorie Barnard (1897-1987), Aileen Palmer (1915-1988) and Lesbia Harford (1891-1927). The book provides an insight into the romantic experiences of the three women, based on their private letters, diaries and notebooks held in public institutions. Maryanne Dever, Ann Vickery and Sally Newman consider the ethical dilemmas that they faced while researching private material, in particular of making conclusions based on material that was possibly never intended by its subjects to be consumed publically. In this sense, the book is both an introverted contemplation of private affairs and an extroverted meditation on the right to acquire and assume intimate knowledge.
This book traces the enduring relationship between history, people and place that has shaped the character of a single region in a manner perhaps unique within the New Zealand experience. It explores the evolution of a distinctive regional literature that both shaped and was shaped by the physical and historical environment that inspired it. Looking westwards towards Australia and long shut off within New Zealand by the South Island’s rugged Southern Alps, the West Coast was a land of gold, coal and timber. In the 1950s and 1960s, it nurtured a literature that embodied a sense of belonging to an Australasian world and captured the aspirations of New Zealand’s emergent radical nationalism. More recent West Coast writers, observing the hollowing out of their communities, saw in miniature and in advance the growing gulf between city and regional economies aligned to an older economic order losing its relevance. Were they chronicling the last hurrah of a retreating age or crafting a literature of regional resistance?
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Australia's leisure culture is legendary, and as millions of British viewers of Neighbours, fans of Yothu Yindi or drinkers of Castlemaine XXXX would attest, Australian popular culture is popular outside of Australia. Australian Popular Culture is an exciting collection of essays bringing together new perspectives on the nature and meaning of a nation's changing life. The collection also explores the idea of popular culture at large. Leading authors represent a range of approaches, backgrounds and fields to explore subjects of wide interest within the categories of 'the everyday', 'the mass media' and 'critical theory'. Chapters are devoted to the Aussie Back Yard; Vegemite; postage stamps; Australian Rules football; the introduction of television; Crocodile Dundee; The Lindy Chamberlain Affair; Spycatcher; Domesticity, leisure and love and Postmodernism and Australian Culture.
George Orwell argued that one of the four great motives for a prose writer was the desire ‘to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after’. This book contains exciting new work by established and emerging scholars that explores political literature over the last century and a half. It shows how, from The Communist Manifesto to the dystopian future of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, writers have attempted to alter people’s ideas, not always successfully. Eighteen chapters deal with a global array of writers and topics, from 1890s Australian bohemians and the anti-Peronism of Argentina’s Julio Cortázar ...