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Spirit Wrestlers is a haunting, poetic novel by one of Australia's finest writers. It tells of the arrival in rural Australia of a cult religious group and of the effect the group's mysterious, closed existence has on surrounding communities and individual lives. Two teenagers, Johann and Ivan, the local and the newcomer, discover things in common, and differences. A decade on, Johann is involved in the Vietnam War, and Ivan has escaped into the corruption of city life. Their reunion forms the climax of the novel, a parallel to the Biblical story of Jacob wrestling the Angel. And then there is Olga, Ivan's young sister, who is now grown up. A novel about faith, and competing faiths, acts of terror and acts of peace, Spirit Wrestlers speaks straight to the heart about our unsettled, dangerous world.
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"This book analyses the character of Jonathan in 1 Sam 13-2 Sam 1 and in contemporary fiction. The first part of each chapter is devoted to the literary portrayal of Jonathan in the final form of the biblical text. It seeks to establish an interpretation that allows Jonathan to be read as a psychologically cohesive character. This part raises a series of questions. What kind of man is Jonathan who shows initiative, daring, and clear leadership ability (1 Sam 13-14), yet also is willing to lay down his crown before the usurper David's feet in humble submission (1 Sam 18-23)? What kind of son is Jonathan who rebels against Saul and takes David's part in the conflict between the two men, yet re...
Reading Across the Pacific is a study of literary and cultural engagement between the United States and Australia from a contemporary interdisciplinary perspective. The book examines the relations of the two countries, shifting the emphasis from the broad cultural patterns that are often compared, to the specific networks, interactions, and crossings that have characterised Australian literature in the United States and American literature in Australia. In the 21st century, both American and Australian literatures are experiencing new challenges to the very different paradigms of literary history and criticism each inherited from the 20th century. In response to these challenges, scholars of both literatures are seizing the opportunity to reassess and reconfigure the conceptual geography of national literary spaces as they are reformed by vectors that evade or exceed them, including the transnational, the local and the global. The essays in Reading Across the Pacific are divided into five sections: 'National literatures and transnationalism', 'Poetry and poetics', 'Literature and popular culture', 'The Cold War', and 'Publishing history and transpacific print cultures'.
In the only full critical study of Les Murray's work, Steven Matthews provides a complete account of the poet's career to date. A controversial figure, Murray's version of Australian republicanism has caused heated argument about the future direction of his country as it moves away from its colonial past. With detailed readings of major poems, and literary and cultural contexts surrounding the work, Matthews gives an overview of Murray's place in Australian literature and national thought.
This book sets out to navigate questions of the future of Australian poetry. Deliberately designed as a dialogue between poets, each of the four clusters presented here—“Indigeneities”; “Political Landscapes”; “Space, Place, Materiality”; “Revising an Australian Mythos”—models how poetic communities in Australia continue to grow in alliance toward certain constellated ideas. Exploring the ethics of creative production in a place that continues to position capital over culture, property over community, each of the twenty essays in this anthology takes the subject of Australian poetry definitively beyond Eurocentrism and white privilege. By pushing back against nationalizing mythologies that have, over the last 200 years since colonization, not only narrativized the logic of instrumentalization but rendered our lands precarious, this book asserts new possibilities of creative responsiveness within the Australian sensorium.
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In 'A Circle Around My Grandmother', Thomas Shapcott charts life via the geography of the body, its delicacy and disintegration. An unexpected 'initiation into the world of tubes and needles' is the point of origin of Shapcott's travail, the work of negotiating the detritus of memory, confronting the mystery of the body, and accepting the happenstance of ancestry. The possibilities of revelation and renewal impel a circuitous drift towards the ancestral, from Ipswich to Ireland, mapping the external manifestation of the inner, familial inheritance. Characteristically steady and supple, 'A Circle Around My Grandmother' is Shapcott's evocative testament to the universality of family, the idea of home and the nature of time and mortality. The rich and intensely personal life material of one of Australia's most significant and prolific writers, this is Shapcott at his most complex and complete.