Jenny L. White, C. Stanciu, S. Lim, S. Hilger, Amy K. Kaminsky
{"title":"Notes on contributors","authors":"Jenny L. White, C. Stanciu, S. Lim, S. Hilger, Amy K. Kaminsky","doi":"10.1017/qre.2019.36","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2019.36","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41491,"journal":{"name":"Queensland Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"293 - 294"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/qre.2019.36","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46517859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This article is an intervention in debates about the reputation of Australian writers, with specific reference to the career of Thea Astley (and, as a ‘benchmark’, Randolph Stow). It argues that the terrain in which reputations are made and books are valued is complex and uneven, particularly when viewed from regional perspectives. The aim is to shift the focus in ‘reception’ from single fields, such as book sales, literary prizes, critical attention and international recognition, to show a more complex literary ecology within which authors might simultaneously ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ in different ways. The data supporting this claim come from a variety of sources, including newspaper databases, schools and libraries, although the article is ‘preliminary’ in the sense that it does not investigate the substance of the quantitative data compiled — for example, it does not consider in depth the reviews or kinds of stories that were carried in the press. The discussion of reputation aims to keep Astley’s oeuvre and style in view, in order to consider why and how Astley might be ‘neglected’ and how this neglect might be addressed.
{"title":"Topographies of reception: Thea Astley","authors":"L. Dale","doi":"10.1017/qre.2019.26","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2019.26","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article is an intervention in debates about the reputation of Australian writers, with specific reference to the career of Thea Astley (and, as a ‘benchmark’, Randolph Stow). It argues that the terrain in which reputations are made and books are valued is complex and uneven, particularly when viewed from regional perspectives. The aim is to shift the focus in ‘reception’ from single fields, such as book sales, literary prizes, critical attention and international recognition, to show a more complex literary ecology within which authors might simultaneously ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ in different ways. The data supporting this claim come from a variety of sources, including newspaper databases, schools and libraries, although the article is ‘preliminary’ in the sense that it does not investigate the substance of the quantitative data compiled — for example, it does not consider in depth the reviews or kinds of stories that were carried in the press. The discussion of reputation aims to keep Astley’s oeuvre and style in view, in order to consider why and how Astley might be ‘neglected’ and how this neglect might be addressed.","PeriodicalId":41491,"journal":{"name":"Queensland Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"203 - 216"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/qre.2019.26","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44055197","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Beginning as early as A Descant for Gossips (1960), gay men and gay love come and go in Thea Astley’s prose oeuvre. The responses that these characters and this topic invite shift with point of view and under the impact of varied themes. Astley’s treatment refuses to be contained, either by traditional Catholic doctrines about sex or by Australia’s delay in decriminalising homosexual acts. Driven by love for her gay older brother Philip, whose death from cancer corresponded with her final allusions to gay love in The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996), Astley’s only constant message on this, as on other topics, is humans’ responsibility to treat each other with kindness. This essay draws on Karen Lamb’s biography and on writings and reminiscences by Philip Astley’s family and fellow Jesuits to reveal his significance as his sister sought to resolve through her fiction the conflict between an inculcated Catholic idolisation of purity and her own hard-won understanding and acceptance of gay men.
摘要早在1960年的《流言的诅咒》（A Descant for Gossips）中，男同性恋和同性恋爱情就出现在西娅·阿斯特利的散文作品中。这些人物和这个话题引起的反应随着观点的变化和不同主题的影响而变化。无论是传统的天主教性教义，还是澳大利亚推迟将同性恋行为合法化，阿斯特利的待遇都无法得到遏制。出于对同性恋哥哥菲利普的爱，阿斯特利在《雨影的多重影响》（1996年）中对同性恋爱情的最后暗示与他因癌症去世的哥哥菲利普一致，她在这方面和其他话题上唯一不变的信息是，人类有责任善待彼此。这篇文章借鉴了凯伦·兰姆的传记，以及菲利普·阿斯特利的家人和其他耶稣会士的著作和回忆，揭示了他的重要性，因为他的妹妹试图通过小说解决天主教对纯洁的崇拜与她自己来之不易的对男同性恋的理解和接受之间的冲突。
{"title":"‘To my brother’: Gay love and sex in Thea Astley’s novels and stories","authors":"Cheryl Taylor","doi":"10.1017/qre.2019.32","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2019.32","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Beginning as early as A Descant for Gossips (1960), gay men and gay love come and go in Thea Astley’s prose oeuvre. The responses that these characters and this topic invite shift with point of view and under the impact of varied themes. Astley’s treatment refuses to be contained, either by traditional Catholic doctrines about sex or by Australia’s delay in decriminalising homosexual acts. Driven by love for her gay older brother Philip, whose death from cancer corresponded with her final allusions to gay love in The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996), Astley’s only constant message on this, as on other topics, is humans’ responsibility to treat each other with kindness. This essay draws on Karen Lamb’s biography and on writings and reminiscences by Philip Astley’s family and fellow Jesuits to reveal his significance as his sister sought to resolve through her fiction the conflict between an inculcated Catholic idolisation of purity and her own hard-won understanding and acceptance of gay men.","PeriodicalId":41491,"journal":{"name":"Queensland Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"269 - 284"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/qre.2019.32","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42351914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Thea Astley is a figure who is strongly associated with music, both in her life interests and in her writing rhythms and allusions; this article investigates the uses of music in her 1972 novel The Acolyte. Drawing on a recent genre of critical musicology that understands music to be a social practice, The Acolyte is read in relation to mid-twentieth-century cultural debates around the development of a distinctive Australian classical music. Centring on the blind pianist turned composer Jack Holberg, The Acolyte is grounded in the Gold Coast hinterland as an inspiring and generative landscape, in contrast with the desolate outback favoured in national mythologies. Holberg’s ‘Gold Coast Symphony’, arguably the turning point of the novel, imaginatively writes this coastal fringe of urban debauchery into the vernacular of classical music through its performance in conservative 1960s Brisbane. In this article, I read The Acolyte as a novel positioned within an Australian musicological history that intersects with the poetics of place, the politics of gender and sexuality, and ongoing national formations through cultural production.
{"title":"Reading the ‘Gold Coast Symphony’ in Thea Astley’s The Acolyte","authors":"Alison Bartlett","doi":"10.1017/qre.2019.29","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2019.29","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Thea Astley is a figure who is strongly associated with music, both in her life interests and in her writing rhythms and allusions; this article investigates the uses of music in her 1972 novel The Acolyte. Drawing on a recent genre of critical musicology that understands music to be a social practice, The Acolyte is read in relation to mid-twentieth-century cultural debates around the development of a distinctive Australian classical music. Centring on the blind pianist turned composer Jack Holberg, The Acolyte is grounded in the Gold Coast hinterland as an inspiring and generative landscape, in contrast with the desolate outback favoured in national mythologies. Holberg’s ‘Gold Coast Symphony’, arguably the turning point of the novel, imaginatively writes this coastal fringe of urban debauchery into the vernacular of classical music through its performance in conservative 1960s Brisbane. In this article, I read The Acolyte as a novel positioned within an Australian musicological history that intersects with the poetics of place, the politics of gender and sexuality, and ongoing national formations through cultural production.","PeriodicalId":41491,"journal":{"name":"Queensland Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"232 - 244"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/qre.2019.29","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47940894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
writingwas throughher short story collectionHunting theWildPineapple (1979), and as I closed the book I wondered why she had focused on the grotesque and extreme elementsof thenorth,andonthestrange livesof failinganddisappointedpeople.But the characters burrowed intomypsyche, as did the themes and ideasAstleywas exploring, and I recognised uncomfortably familiar shapes and echoes of a not-too-distant past. Susan Sheridan insightfully examines the legacy of Astley’swriting and its confronting themes inThe Fiction of TheaAstley. Astley’s use of satire imaginatively playswith language to probe, through her distinctive use of small communities of characters, the paucity of existence and struggle for meaning in what at first appears to be an outlier Australiainherstories.Sheridanshowsthatthisisatrope, thattheregionalstandsforthe national, and read thisway connects the specific to amuchwider discourse. She rightly identifiesAstley asone ofAustralia’smost innovativewriters, linking her stylistic use of metaphor and irony, and what she terms ‘compressed prose’, to utilise landscape and place ‘to mirror and intensify the emotional states of the characters’ (2016, p. 7). The fecundityof the landscapereflects theemotionsandrelationshipsdepicted in the stories. Sheridan’s approach is to group Astley’s novels by theme, comparing the development of ideas through the use of literary experimentation in the novels. She points out how unique Astley was in her treatment of the aftermath of the colonial project and its reverberations within society. Her ideas around masculinity and its destructive force not only found expression in the North Queensland context where I first encountered it, but was evident in a running thread throughout all her work. Sheridan explores the evolution of Astley’s response to the patriarchal society in which she grew up and which informed her depiction of character, and how her growing awareness of feminism was reflected in that evolving use of character. Astley was not afraid to investigate difficult territory such as the dynamic coexistence between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in North Queensland and in Vanuatuan postcolonial society. She explores the attempts of these groups to remake and understand themselves in a place permanently damaged by the violence of the past, which consequently left all these divergent cultures irrevocably altered. It is an important question around our collective identity with which we, as a nation, still have not come to terms. Astley’s writing in this space and Sheridan’s sensitive examination of these issues in Astley’s work make an important contribution to the work of understanding the impact of our shared past.
写作是通过她的短篇小说集《猎杀野菠萝》（1979）完成的，当我合上书时，我想知道她为什么关注当时的怪诞和极端元素，以及失败和有针对性的人的奇怪生活。但角色深入了我的心灵，阿斯特利探索的主题和理念也是如此，我认出了不太遥远的过去令人不安的熟悉形状和回声。Susan Sheridan在《TheaAstley小说》中深刻地审视了Astley写作的遗产及其面临的主题。Astley对讽刺的使用富有想象力地玩弄了语言，通过她对小人物群体的独特使用，探究了在最初看来是一个异类的澳大利亚历史中存在的匮乏和意义的斗争。Sheridanshowthatthisisatrope，theregionals stands for national，and read this way connecting the specific to amuchider discussion。她正确地将阿斯特利视为澳大利亚最具创新性的作家之一，将她对隐喻和讽刺的风格使用与她所称的“压缩散文”联系起来，利用风景和地点“反映和强化人物的情感状态”（2016，第7页）。丰富多彩的景观反映了故事中描绘的情感和关系。Sheridan的方法是按主题对Astley的小说进行分组，通过在小说中使用文学实验来比较思想的发展。她指出，阿斯特利在处理殖民项目的后果及其在社会中的反响方面是多么独特。她关于男子气概及其破坏力的想法不仅在我第一次遇到它的北昆士兰背景下得到了表达，而且在她的所有作品中都表现得很明显。Sheridan探讨了Astley对父权社会的反应的演变，她在父权社会中长大，父权社会为她对性格的描述提供了依据，以及她日益增长的女权主义意识如何反映在对性格的不断演变的使用中。Astley不怕调查困难的领域，比如北昆士兰土著和非土著人民之间的动态共存以及瓦努阿图安后殖民社会。她探讨了这些群体试图在一个被过去的暴力永久破坏的地方重塑和理解自己，从而使所有这些不同的文化发生了不可逆转的变化。这是一个围绕我们集体身份的重要问题，作为一个国家，我们仍然没有接受这个问题。Astley在这一领域的写作以及Sheridan在Astley作品中对这些问题的敏感审视，为理解我们共同过去的影响做出了重要贡献。
{"title":"Thea Astley, Selected Poems, edited by Cheryl Taylor, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2017, 167 pp., ISBN 9 7807 0225 9791, A$24.95.","authors":"Ariella van Luyn","doi":"10.1017/qre.2019.37","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2019.37","url":null,"abstract":"writingwas throughher short story collectionHunting theWildPineapple (1979), and as I closed the book I wondered why she had focused on the grotesque and extreme elementsof thenorth,andonthestrange livesof failinganddisappointedpeople.But the characters burrowed intomypsyche, as did the themes and ideasAstleywas exploring, and I recognised uncomfortably familiar shapes and echoes of a not-too-distant past. Susan Sheridan insightfully examines the legacy of Astley’swriting and its confronting themes inThe Fiction of TheaAstley. Astley’s use of satire imaginatively playswith language to probe, through her distinctive use of small communities of characters, the paucity of existence and struggle for meaning in what at first appears to be an outlier Australiainherstories.Sheridanshowsthatthisisatrope, thattheregionalstandsforthe national, and read thisway connects the specific to amuchwider discourse. She rightly identifiesAstley asone ofAustralia’smost innovativewriters, linking her stylistic use of metaphor and irony, and what she terms ‘compressed prose’, to utilise landscape and place ‘to mirror and intensify the emotional states of the characters’ (2016, p. 7). The fecundityof the landscapereflects theemotionsandrelationshipsdepicted in the stories. Sheridan’s approach is to group Astley’s novels by theme, comparing the development of ideas through the use of literary experimentation in the novels. She points out how unique Astley was in her treatment of the aftermath of the colonial project and its reverberations within society. Her ideas around masculinity and its destructive force not only found expression in the North Queensland context where I first encountered it, but was evident in a running thread throughout all her work. Sheridan explores the evolution of Astley’s response to the patriarchal society in which she grew up and which informed her depiction of character, and how her growing awareness of feminism was reflected in that evolving use of character. Astley was not afraid to investigate difficult territory such as the dynamic coexistence between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in North Queensland and in Vanuatuan postcolonial society. She explores the attempts of these groups to remake and understand themselves in a place permanently damaged by the violence of the past, which consequently left all these divergent cultures irrevocably altered. It is an important question around our collective identity with which we, as a nation, still have not come to terms. Astley’s writing in this space and Sheridan’s sensitive examination of these issues in Astley’s work make an important contribution to the work of understanding the impact of our shared past.","PeriodicalId":41491,"journal":{"name":"Queensland Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"287 - 290"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/qre.2019.37","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46151027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I am honoured and delighted to have been invited, along with Associate Professor Jessica Gildersleeve, to edit this special issue of Queensland Review on the work of Thea Astley. I owe Jessica heartfelt thanks for her hard work and easy collegiality. Fifteen years since Astley’s death, the appearance of this collection of essays marks the development of a growing body of biographical and critical studies of her work. The essays complement Karen Lamb’s 2015 biography, Inventing Her Own Weather, and my critical monograph, The Fiction of Thea Astley (2016), as well as the collection of essays edited by myself and Paul Genoni, Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds (2006). Most recently, Thea Astley: Selected Poems appeared in 2017, edited by Cheryl Taylor (who has an essay in this issue) and published by the University of Queensland Press (Astley’s publisher for many years). Most of Astley’s novels and story collections are in print, and they are being read in new ways, with new eyes and in new contexts. Text Publishing has brought out reprints of four of the novels in its Classics series, with introductions by novelists of today. Kate Grenville on A Kindness Cup (1974) emphasises Astley’s pioneering role as a historical novelist, particularly her capacity for ‘saying the unsayable’ about the violence of colonialism. Chloe Hooper, introducing The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996), draws attention to the parallels between the account of the death of Cameron Doomadgee on Palm Island in 2005, which she covered in her book The Tall Man (2008), and Astley’s novel based on a massacre on the island in 1930 and its long-term after-effects. Emily Maguire writes of Astley’s last novel, Drylands (1999), that we are now living in the ‘bleak’ future world that it envisaged, where ‘so little that is punishable in any ethical society is punished in this one’ – but that Astley writes with ‘the skill of a novelist with both immense compassion and knife-thrower levels of nerve’. Emerging novelist Jennifer Down had not previously read Reaching Tin River (1990), and her introduction to the novel conveys her surprised pleasure at the economy of the writing and its qualities: ‘acerbic but never cynical, tender but never sentimental, ironic but never cruel’. Other recent readers, who offer comments on It’s Raining in Mango (1987) on the Goodreads website (where all Astley’s novels are listed), express surprise that an Australian novelist in the 1980s should have taken such a powerfully critical stance on racist and sexist violence, or presented a gay man as a major character. In an age
{"title":"Introduction: The work of Thea Astley","authors":"S. Sheridan","doi":"10.1017/qre.2019.25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2019.25","url":null,"abstract":"I am honoured and delighted to have been invited, along with Associate Professor Jessica Gildersleeve, to edit this special issue of Queensland Review on the work of Thea Astley. I owe Jessica heartfelt thanks for her hard work and easy collegiality. Fifteen years since Astley’s death, the appearance of this collection of essays marks the development of a growing body of biographical and critical studies of her work. The essays complement Karen Lamb’s 2015 biography, Inventing Her Own Weather, and my critical monograph, The Fiction of Thea Astley (2016), as well as the collection of essays edited by myself and Paul Genoni, Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds (2006). Most recently, Thea Astley: Selected Poems appeared in 2017, edited by Cheryl Taylor (who has an essay in this issue) and published by the University of Queensland Press (Astley’s publisher for many years). Most of Astley’s novels and story collections are in print, and they are being read in new ways, with new eyes and in new contexts. Text Publishing has brought out reprints of four of the novels in its Classics series, with introductions by novelists of today. Kate Grenville on A Kindness Cup (1974) emphasises Astley’s pioneering role as a historical novelist, particularly her capacity for ‘saying the unsayable’ about the violence of colonialism. Chloe Hooper, introducing The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996), draws attention to the parallels between the account of the death of Cameron Doomadgee on Palm Island in 2005, which she covered in her book The Tall Man (2008), and Astley’s novel based on a massacre on the island in 1930 and its long-term after-effects. Emily Maguire writes of Astley’s last novel, Drylands (1999), that we are now living in the ‘bleak’ future world that it envisaged, where ‘so little that is punishable in any ethical society is punished in this one’ – but that Astley writes with ‘the skill of a novelist with both immense compassion and knife-thrower levels of nerve’. Emerging novelist Jennifer Down had not previously read Reaching Tin River (1990), and her introduction to the novel conveys her surprised pleasure at the economy of the writing and its qualities: ‘acerbic but never cynical, tender but never sentimental, ironic but never cruel’. Other recent readers, who offer comments on It’s Raining in Mango (1987) on the Goodreads website (where all Astley’s novels are listed), express surprise that an Australian novelist in the 1980s should have taken such a powerfully critical stance on racist and sexist violence, or presented a gay man as a major character. In an age","PeriodicalId":41491,"journal":{"name":"Queensland Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"199 - 202"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/qre.2019.25","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44923425","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Over a fifty-year period, from 1944 to 1994, Thea Astley published a number of critical writings, including essays, newspaper articles and reviews, and short reflections and meditations on her craft. Despite a renewed interest in Astley’s work, however, most critical interrogations of her oeuvre focus on her novels, and more recently her poetry. As a result, Astley’s critical writing has not been afforded the same breadth and depth of investigation as her fiction. This lacuna is troubling, since Astley’s critical works are important not only for their insight, but for what they reveal about Astley’s self-representation, and in particular the dual identity that she embodied as both a teacher and a satirist. This article argues that these dual roles emerge clearly in Astley’s essays and in fact are inextricable from many of her works. Further, the tensions between these two personae — Astley as teacher and Astley as satirist — reveal natural overlaps with her imaginative writing, and reflect her changing ideas about fiction writing, literature, and education.
{"title":"Double trouble: The teacher/satirist duality in Thea Astley’s critical writings","authors":"Kate Cantrell, L. Hawkes","doi":"10.1017/qre.2019.28","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2019.28","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Over a fifty-year period, from 1944 to 1994, Thea Astley published a number of critical writings, including essays, newspaper articles and reviews, and short reflections and meditations on her craft. Despite a renewed interest in Astley’s work, however, most critical interrogations of her oeuvre focus on her novels, and more recently her poetry. As a result, Astley’s critical writing has not been afforded the same breadth and depth of investigation as her fiction. This lacuna is troubling, since Astley’s critical works are important not only for their insight, but for what they reveal about Astley’s self-representation, and in particular the dual identity that she embodied as both a teacher and a satirist. This article argues that these dual roles emerge clearly in Astley’s essays and in fact are inextricable from many of her works. Further, the tensions between these two personae — Astley as teacher and Astley as satirist — reveal natural overlaps with her imaginative writing, and reflect her changing ideas about fiction writing, literature, and education.","PeriodicalId":41491,"journal":{"name":"Queensland Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"218 - 231"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/qre.2019.28","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41675022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This article reads Thea Astley’s final novel in the context of rhetoric about the death of Australian literature that has been a mainstay of our national culture almost since its inception. In the early 2000s, a new round of obituarists argued that the global publishing industry, critical trends and changing educational pedagogies were eroding Australia’s literary identity. Drylands, published in 1999, can be considered a slightly prescient participant in this conversation: it is subtitled A Book for the World’s Last Reader, seemingly framing the novel in a polemics of decline. My reading, however, sees the book as the product of two correlated yet combative literary projects: the attempt by its primary narrator, Janet Deakin, to write a book after what she sees as the likely death of reading and writing; and Astley’s more nuanced exploration of the role of literature in settler colonial modernity. Reading across the seven narratives that constitute the book, I argue that Drylands performs the fraught relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the context of writing about the systemic violence of the settler colonial state, questioning literary privilege, exclusivity and complicity in ways that remain relevant to debates regarding Australian literature today.
摘要本文从澳大利亚文学之死的修辞语境中解读了西娅·阿斯特利的最后一部小说。澳大利亚文学自诞生以来一直是我们民族文化的支柱。21世纪初，新一轮的讣告者认为，全球出版行业、批评趋势和不断变化的教育教学法正在侵蚀澳大利亚的文学身份。1999年出版的《旱地》(Drylands)可以被认为是这场对话中稍微有先见之明的参与者:它的副标题是《献给世界上最后的读者的书》(a Book for the World’a Last Reader)，似乎将小说置于衰落的论战中。然而，从我的阅读来看，这本书是两个相互关联但又相互冲突的文学项目的产物:它的主要叙述者珍妮特·迪肯(Janet Deakin)在她认为阅读和写作可能会消亡之后，试图写一本书;阿斯特利对文学在定居者殖民现代性中的作用进行了更为细致的探索。通过阅读全书的七个叙事，我认为《旱地》在描写移民殖民国家的系统性暴力的背景下，表现了道德与美学之间令人担忧的关系，质疑文学特权、排他性和共谋性，这些方式与今天关于澳大利亚文学的辩论仍然相关。
{"title":"The death of Australian literature in Thea Astley’s Drylands","authors":"Meg Brayshaw","doi":"10.1017/qre.2019.31","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2019.31","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article reads Thea Astley’s final novel in the context of rhetoric about the death of Australian literature that has been a mainstay of our national culture almost since its inception. In the early 2000s, a new round of obituarists argued that the global publishing industry, critical trends and changing educational pedagogies were eroding Australia’s literary identity. Drylands, published in 1999, can be considered a slightly prescient participant in this conversation: it is subtitled A Book for the World’s Last Reader, seemingly framing the novel in a polemics of decline. My reading, however, sees the book as the product of two correlated yet combative literary projects: the attempt by its primary narrator, Janet Deakin, to write a book after what she sees as the likely death of reading and writing; and Astley’s more nuanced exploration of the role of literature in settler colonial modernity. Reading across the seven narratives that constitute the book, I argue that Drylands performs the fraught relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the context of writing about the systemic violence of the settler colonial state, questioning literary privilege, exclusivity and complicity in ways that remain relevant to debates regarding Australian literature today.","PeriodicalId":41491,"journal":{"name":"Queensland Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"256 - 268"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/qre.2019.31","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44307446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Girl with a monkey","authors":"Kate Cantrell","doi":"10.1017/qre.2019.27","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2019.27","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41491,"journal":{"name":"Queensland Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"217 - 217"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/qre.2019.27","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41448200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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