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Australian literature


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Australian literature began soon after the settlement of the country by Europeans. Common themes include indigenous and settler identity, alienation, exile and relationship to place - but it is a varied and contested area.

Contents

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[edit] Early works

Joseph Furphy

Early popular works tended to be of the 'ripping yarn' variety, telling tales of derring-do against the new frontier of the Australian outback. Writers such as Rolf Boldrewood, Marcus Clarke and Joseph Furphy embodied these stirring ideals in their tales and, particularly the latter, tried to accurately record the vernacular language of the common Australian. These novelists also gave valuable insights into the penal colonies which helped form the country and also the early rural settlements.

Australia’s first novel, Quintus Servinton: A Tale founded upon Incidents of Real Occurrence1831. It was written by the convicted English forger Henry Savery and published anonymously though the authorship became a public secret. It is regarded as a thinly disguised autobiography designed to demonstrate how his fictional equivalent was different from the general convict population.[1] was written and published in Tasmania in

In 1838 The Guardian: a tale by Anna Maria Bunn was published in Sydney. It was the first Australian novel printed and published in mainland Australia and the first Australian novel written by a woman. It is a Gothic romance.[1]

[edit] Poetry

Poetry played an important part in the founding of Australian literature. Henry Lawson, son of a Norwegian sailor born in 1867, was widely recognised as Australia’s poet of the people and, in 1922, became the first Australian writer to be honoured with a state funeral. Two poets who are amongst the great Australian poets are Christopher Brennan and Adam Lindsay Gordon; Gordon was once referred to as the "national poet of Australia" and is the only Australian with a monument in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey in England.

Both Gordon’s and Brennan's (but particularly Brennan’s) works conformed to traditional styles of poetry, with many classical allusions, and therefore fell within the domain of high culture. However, at the same time Australia was blessed with a competing, vibrant tradition of folk songs and ballads. Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson were two of the chief exponents of these popular ballads, and ‘Banjo’ himself was responsible for creating what is probably the most famous Australian verse, Waltzing Matilda. Romanticised views of the outback and the rugged characters that inhabited it played an important part in shaping the Australian nation’s psyche, just as the cowboys of the American Old West and the gauchos of the Argentine pampa became part of the self-image of those nations.

Prominent Australian poets of the twentieth century include A. D. Hope, Judith Wright, Gwen Harwood, Kenneth Slessor, Les Murray and more recently John Forbes and John Tranter. More recent and emerging Australian poets include Judith Beveridge.

Contemporary Australian poetry is mostly published by small, independent book publishers. However, other kinds of publication, including new media and online journals, spoken word and live events, and public poetry projects are gaining an increasingly vibrant and popular presence. Red Room Company is a major exponent of innovative projects.

[edit] Writing and Identity

Barbara Baynton

A complicated, multi-faceted relationship to Australia is displayed in much Australian writing, often through writing about landscape. Barbara Baynton's short stories from the late 1800s/early 1900s convey people living in the bush, a landscape that is alive but also threatening and alienating. Kenneth Cook's Wake in Fright (1961) portrayed the outback as a nightmare with a blazing sun, from which there is no escape. Colin Thiele's novels reflected the life and times of rural and regional Australians in the 20th century, showing aspects of Australian life unknown to many city dwellers.

What it means to be Australian is another issue that Australian literature explores. Miles Franklin struggled to find a place for herself as a female writer in Australia, fictionalising this experience in My Brilliant Career (1901). Marie Bjelke Petersen's popular romance novels, published between 1917 and 1937, offered a fresh upbeat interpretation of the Australian bush. The central character in Patrick White's The Twyborn Affair tries to conform to expectations of pre-WWII Australian masculinity but cannot, and instead, post-war, tries out another identity - and gender - overseas. Peter Carey has toyed with the idea of a national Australian identity as a series of 'beautiful lies', and this is a recurrent theme in his novels. Andrew McGahan's PraiseChristos Tsiolkas's Loaded (1995) introduced a 'gritty realism' take on questions of Australian identity in the 1990s, though an important precursor to such work was Helen Garner's Monkey Grip (1977). (1992) and

Australian literature has had several scandals surrounding the identity of writers. The 1944 Ern Malley affair led to an obscenity trial and is often blamed for the lack of modernist poetry in Australia. To mark the 60th anniversary of the Ern Malley affair another Australian writer, Leon Carmen, set out to make a point about the prejudice of Australian publishers against white Australians. Unable to find publication as a white Australian he was an instant success using the false Aboriginal identity of Wanda Koolmatrie with My Own Sweet Time. In the 1980s Streten Bozik also managed to become published by assuming the Aboriginal identity of B Wongar.In the 1990s, Helen Darville used the pen-name “Helen Demidenko” and won major literary prizes for her Hand that Signed the Paper before being discovered, sparking a controversy over the content of her novel, a fictionalised and highly tendentious account of the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine. Mudrooroo - previously known as Colin Johnson - was acclaimed as an Aboriginal writer until his Aboriginality came under question (his mother was Irish/English and his father was Irish/African-American, however he has strong connections with Aboriginal tribes); he now avoids adopting a specific ethnic identity and his works deconstruct such notions.

Other writers have felt that, whatever Australia was, it needed to be escaped. Clive James, Robert Hughes, Barry Humphries and Germaine Greer are all Australian writers who left Australia in the 1960s for England and America. Greer, author of The Female Eunuch, has spent much of her career in England and has been a fierce critic of her native land, and she does not return there often.

[edit] Other developments

David Malouf

Australian literature can be thought of as coming of age in 1973 when Patrick White became the first (and so far only) Australian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. (2003 laureate John M. Coetzee lives in Adelaide, South Australia, but was born in South Africa and is not widely regarded as Australian.) Other notable writers to have emerged since the 1970s include Peter Carey, Kate Grenville, David Malouf, Janette Turner Hospital, Marion Halligan, Christopher Koch, Alex Miller, Shirley Hazzard, Richard Flanagan and Tim Winton.

James Clavell in The Asian Saga discusses an important feature of Australian literature: its portrayal of far eastern culture, from the admittedly even further east, but nevertheless western cultural viewpoint, as Nevil Shute did. Clavell was also a successful screenwriter and along with such writers as Thomas Keneally, who won the Booker Prize for Schindler's Ark (the book Schindler's List is based on), has expanded the topics of Australian literature far beyond that one country. Other novelists to use international themes are Gerald Murnane and Brenda Walker.

[edit] Aboriginal writing

The voices of indigenous Australians have begun to be noticed and include the playwright Jack Davis, Kevin Gilbert, and poet and activist Oodgeroo Noonuccal. Sally Morgan's My Place was considered a breakthrough memoir in terms of bringing indigenous stories to wider notice.

The allegedly indigenous writer Mudrooroo was later shown not to be indigenous, but of Irish, English, and African-American descent. [2]

Writers coming to prominence in the 21st century include Alexis Wright and Tara June Winch.

[edit] Science fiction and fantasy

Main article: Australian science fiction

[edit] Crime

The Crime fiction genre is currently thriving in Australia, most notably through books written by Kerry Greenwood, Shane Maloney, Peter Temple, Barry Maitland and Peter Corris, among others.

[edit] History

History has been an important discipline in the development of Australian writing. A significant milestone was the historian Manning Clark's six volume History of Australia, which is regarded by some as the definitive account of the nation. Also important was art critic Robert Hughes' much-debated history The Fatal Shore.

[edit] Literary journals

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Most recent Australian literary journals have originated from universities - and specifically English or Communications departments. They include:


Other journals include:

A number of newspapers also carry literary review supplements:

Established online journals include:

[edit] Awards

Current literary awards in Australia include:

Australian authors are also eligible for a number of other significant awards such as:

See the List of Australian literary awards for a more comprehensive listing of Australian literary awards.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Turcotte, G. (1998). "Australian Gothic" (pdf - 12 pages). Faculty of Arts - Papers. University of Wollongong. http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1060&context=artspapers. Retrieved 2008-01-09.
  2. ^ The Literary Encyclopedia

[edit] Bibliography

Spielmann:Another 'Aboriginal' Confesses Hoax,South Coast Today, 1997 Laura Browder: Slippery characters: ethnic impersonators and American identities, 2000

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Women's writing in English


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Women's writing as a discrete area of literary studies is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their gender, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study. "Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men."[1] It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her gender: her position as a woman within the literary marketplace. Women's writing, as a discrete area of literary studies and practice, is recognized explicitly by the numbers of dedicated journals, organizations, awards, and conferences which focus mainly or exclusively on texts produced by women. The majority of English literature programmes offer courses on specific aspects of literature by women, and women's writing is generally considered an area of specialization in its own right.

Contents

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[edit] The exemplary tradition

The idea of discussing women's cultural contributions as a separate category has a long history. Lists of exemplary women can be found as far back as the 8th century BC, when HesiodCatalogue of Women (attr.), a list of heroines and goddesses. Plutarch listed heroic and artistic women in his Moralia. In the medieval period, Boccaccio used mythic and biblical women as moral exemplars in De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women) (1361-1375), directly inspiring Christine de Pisan to write The Book of the City of Ladies (1405). British writers, as in so many other instances, embraced the classical models and made them their own. Some of the British catalogues were moral in tone but others focused on accomplishments as well as virtues. There are many examples in the eighteenth century of exemplary catalogues of women writers, including George Ballard's Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writing or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences (1752), John Duncombe's Feminiad, a catalogue of women writers, and the Biographium faemineum: the female worthies, or, Memoirs of the most illustrious ladies, of all ages and nations, who have been eminently distinguished for their magnanimity, learning, genius, virtue, piety, and other excellent endowments.[2] And as long as there has been this laudatory trend there has been a counter-trend of misogynist writings, perhaps exemplified by Richard Polwhele's The Unsex'd Females, a critique in verse of women writers at the end of the eighteenth century with a particular focus on Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle. compiled

Women writers themselves have long been interested in tracing a "woman's tradition" in writing. Mary Scott's The Female Advocate: A Poem Occasioned by Reading Mr Duncombe's Feminead (1774) is one of the best known such works in the eighteenth century, a period that saw a burgeoning of women's publishing. In 1803, Mary Hays published the six volume Female Biography. Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) exemplifies the impulse in the modern period to explore a tradition of women's writing. Woolf, however, sought to explain what she perceived as an absence; by the mid-century scholarly attention turned to finding and reclaiming "lost" writers.[3] And there were many to reclaim: it is common for the editors of dictionaries or anthologies of women's writing to refer to the difficulty in choosing from all the available material.[4]

[edit] Currently

Women's writing came to exist as a separate category of scholarly interest relatively recently. In the West, the second wave of feminism prompted a general reevaluation of women's historical contributions, and various academic sub-disciplines, such as women's history and women's writing, developed in response to the belief that women's lives and contributions have been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest. Virginia Blain et al. characterize the growth in interest since 1970 in women's writing as "powerful"[5]. Much of this early period of feminist literary scholarship was given over to the rediscovery and reclamation of texts written by women. Studies like Dale Spender's Mothers of the Novel (1986) and Jane Spencer's The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986) were ground-breaking in their insistence that women have always been writing. Commensurate with this growth in scholarly interest, various presses began the task of reissuing long-out-of-print texts. Virago Press began to publish its large list of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century novels in 1975 and became one of the first commercial presses to join in the project of reclamation. In the 1980s Pandora Press, responsible for publishing Spender's study, issued a companion line of eighteenth-century novels by written by women.[6]biographical dictionaries of women writers due to a perception, according to one editor, that "[m]ost of our women are not represented in the 'standard' reference books in the field."[7]. More recently, Broadview Press continues to issue eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, many hitherto out of print, and the University of Kentucky has a series of republications of early women's novels. There has been commensurate growth in the area of

Trade publishers have similarly focused on women's writing: since the 1970s there have been a number of literary periodicals such as Fireweed and Room of One's Own which are dedicated to publishing the creative work of women writers. There are a number of dedicated presses, such as the Second Story Press and the Women's Press. In addition, collections and anthologies of women's writing continue to be published by both trade and academic presses.

The widespread interest in women's writing developed alongside, influenced, and was influenced by, a general reassessment and expansion of the literary canon. Interest in post-colonial literatures, gay and lesbian literature, writing by people of colour, working people's writing, and the cultural productions of other historically marginalized groups has resulted in a whole scale expansion of what is considered "literature," and genres hitherto not regarded as "literary," such as children's writing, journals, letters, travel writing, and many others[8] are now the subjects of scholarly interest. Most genres and sub-genres have undergone a similar analysis, so that one now sees work on the "female gothic"[9] or women's science fiction, for example.

The question of whether or not there is a "women's tradition" remains vexed; some scholars and editors refer to a "women's canon" and women's "literary lineage," and seek to "identify the recurring themes and to trace the evolutionary and interconnecting patterns" in women's writing[10], but the range of women's writing across time and place is so considerable that, according to some, it is inaccurate to speak of "women's writing" in a universal sense: Claire Buck calls "women's writing" an "unstable category."[11] Further, women writers cannot be considered apart from their male contemporaries and the larger literary tradition. Recent scholarship on race, class, and sexuality in literature further complicate the issue and militate against the impulse to posit one "women's tradition." Some scholars maintain a commonality, however: editors Virginia Blain et al. argue that "the inter-nationality of the entries" in The Feminist Companion to Literature in English "confirms our sense both of a common literary inheritance differently managed in its several locations and of a tradition in women's writing based on common experience and spanning geographical and cultural boundaries."[12] More cautiously, Roger Lonsdale allows that "it is not unreasonable to consider" women writers "in some aspects as a special case, given their educational insecurities and the constricted notions of the properly 'feminine' in social and literary behaviour they faced."[13]. Using the term "women's writing" implies, then, the belief that women in some sense constitute a group, however diverse, who share a position of difference based on gender. Blain et al. lay out their determination to include "not only English women, but women writing in English in several national traditions, including African, American, Asian, Australian, Canadian, Caribbean, New Zealand, South Pacific, the British Isles."[5] This approach implies that although gender dynamics vary from time and place, the dynamic of difference itself is persistent, and further, that those differences present opportunities for fruitful inquiry.

[edit] The "exemplary women" tradition

[edit] Resources

  • Abel, Elizabeth, Writing and Sexual Difference. University of Chicago Press, 1982.
  • Allison, Dorothy. Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature. New York: Firebrand Books, 1994.
  • Ayres, Brenda, Silent Voices: Forgotten Novels by Victorian Women Writers. Westport, CT: Praeger Pub, 2003.
  • Backscheider, Paula R., and John Richetti, eds. Popular Fiction by Women, 1660-1730. Oxford: OUP, 1996.
  • Eagleton, Mary, ed., Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
  • Fetterley, Judith, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Indiana University Press, 1978.
  • Figes, Eva,Sex and Subterfuge: Women Writers to 1850. The Macmillan Press, 1982.
  • Ferguson, Mary Anne, [compiler]. Images of Women in Literature, 3rd Edition, Houghton-Mifflin Co. 1981. ISBN 0-395-29113-5
  • Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979. ISBN 0-300-08458-7
  • Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, eds., The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. London: Virago Press, 1989.
  • Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. 2 Vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.
  • Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, eds., Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.
  • Greer, Germaine, et al., eds. Kissing the Rod: an anthology of seventeenth-century women's verse. Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1988.
  • Hobby, Elaine, Virtue of Necessity: English women's writing 1649-1688. London: Virago Press, 1988. ISBN 0-86068-831-3
  • Lonsdale, Roger ed. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
  • Moi, Toril, Sexual/ Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen, 1987. ISBN 0-415-02974-0; ISBN 0-415-28012-5 (second edition).
  • Robertson, Fiona, ed. Women's Writing, 1778-1838. Oxford: OUP, 2001.
  • Russ, Joanna. How to Suppress Women's Writing. Austin: U of Texas Press, 1983.
  • spender, dale, Mothers of the Novel: 100 good women writers before Jane Austen. London and New York: Pandora, 1986. ISBN 0863580815
  • Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of their own: from Charlotte Bronte to Doris Lessing. London: Virago Press, 1977.
  • Spacks, Patricia Meyer, The Female Imagination: A Literary and Psychological Investigation of women's writing. George Allen and Unwin, 1976.
  • Spencer, Jane, The Rise of the Woman Novelist. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. ISBN 0-631-13916-8
  • Todd, Janet, Feminist Literary History: A Defence. Cambridge: Polity Press / Basil Blackwell, 1988.
  • Todd, Janet, The Sign of Angellica: women, writing and fiction, 1660-1800. London: Virago Press, 1989. ISBN 0-86068-576-4

[edit] Series of republications

  • Feminist Press: New York-based press which began reprinting books by American women in 1972
  • Persephone Books : London-based press which "reprints forgotten classics by twentieth-century (mostly women) writers. The titles are chosen to appeal to busy women who rarely have time to spend in ever-larger bookshops and who would like to have access to a list of books designed to be neither too literary nor too commercial."
  • Virago Press since 1975 has republished over 500 post-1800 classics of women's literature (see list and timeline) in their series Virago Modern Classics.
  • Pandora Press "Mothers of the Novel" series:
Mary Brunton, Discipline. Orig. pub. 1815. 1986. ISBN 0863581056
Mary Brunton, Self-control. Orig. pub. 1810/11. 1986. ISBN 086358084X
Maria Edgeworth, Belinda. Orig. pub. 1801. 1986. ISBN 0863580742
Maria Edgeworth, Helen. Orig. pub. 1834. 1987. ISBN 0863581048
Maria Edgeworth, Patronage. Orig. pub. 1814. 1986. ISBN 0863581064
Eliza Fenwick, Secrecy, or The Ruin of the Rock. Orig. pub. 1795. 1988. ISBN 0863583075
Sarah Fielding, The Governess, or The Little Female Academy. Orig. pub. 1749. 1987. ISBN 086358182X
Mary Hamilton, Munster Village. Orig. pub. 1778. 1987. ISBN 0863581331
Mary Hays, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney. Orig. pub. 1796. 1987. ISBN 0863581323
Eliza Haywood, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. Orig. pub. 1751. 1986. ISBN 0863580904
Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story. Orig. pub. 1791. 1987. ISBN 0863581366
Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, or the Adventures of Arabella. Orig. pub. 1752. 1986. ISBN 0863580807
Sydney Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl. Orig. pub. 1806. 1986. ISBN 0863580971
Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray, or The Mother and Daughter. Orig. pub. 1804. 1986. ISBN 0863580858
Frances Sheridan, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph. Orig. pub. 1761. 1987. ISBN 086358134X
Charlotte Turner Smith, The Old Manor House. Orig. pub. 1793. 1987. ISBN 0863581358

[edit] Web-based projects

[edit] Scholarly journals which publish research on women's writing mainly or exclusively

[edit] Literary and review journals of women's writing

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