Critical theories & approaches
Articles
- Good Readers and Good Citizens : Literature, Media and the Nation
In recent decades nationalism has sometimes been classed in the same category of immoral behaviours as racism and sexism. Reading from the historical and literary record, nationalism often appears to have been little other than racism and sexism. Race was…
1 October 1999 - New Directions : Introduction
The publication of two essays on 'the state of the discipline' (to borrow a title from the ADE Bulletin) is not a response to or an expression of millenial anxiety - but may be a marker of a kind…
1 October 1999 - ‘Unexpected Effects’ : Marked Men in Contemporary Australian Women’s Fiction
The author critiques the ways in which a set of novels by women writers published in the period 1980-2005 represent ‘wounded men’, and analyses the challenges which such texts pose for feminist critics.
1 October 2006 - A Governor, a Farmer, an Emperor : Rome and Australia in Geoffrey Lehmann1 May 1983
- Impossible Literary Histories
‘The extent to which a notional Australia is at stake in new ventures in Australian literary history is … a timely and productive question. These three new titles present quite varied versions of both literary history and any proffered “Australia”…
1 October 2010 - Australian Literary Criticism : Future Directions
Paper first presented at the Conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) in July 2000 in Hobart. It is concerned with “the future of literature and literary criticism in the university, and in particular with the…
1 May 2001 - The Artful Man : Theory and Authority in Brian Castro’s Fiction
The article discusses the critical reception of the work of Brian Castro, especially the responses to his use of critical theory in his novels. In analysing theory and authority in Castro’s novel Double-Wolf, Barker discovers a shift in his…
1 May 2002 - Theory as Fireworks : An Interview with Brian Castro1 May 2002
- Remember Love and Struggle? Reading Jean Devanny’s Sugar Heaven in Contemporary Australian Contexts
Devanny’s novel Sugar Heaven was re-released in 2002 some 65 years after its first publication. The momentous historical and political changes since the time of writing prompts the author of this article to ask : ‘what will new readers make…
1 May 2004 - Mateship, Individualism and the Production of Character in Australian Fiction
Examines the mode of characterisation prevalent in Australian fiction, a mode which presents character as “the product of social, extrinsic determinants rather than as the expression of an individuated, intrinsic self” (447). Argues that the prominence of this mode of…
1 October 1984 - Reading Institutional Women : A Nexus Approach to Bourdieu, Summer Heights High, and the Fiction of Elizabeth Jolley
The essay uses Bourdieu’s theories to show the ways in which some key female characters in institutions in Lilley’s Summer Heights High and Jolley’s fiction support the workings of institutional patriarchal power. In the final section, the author draws on…
1 October 2009 - Judith Wright and the Temporality of Composition
Discusses the different approaches to Wright’s poetry over the period from her first collection The Moving Image (1946) to her Collected Poems (1994) in the foreword to which Wright discussed changes in literary fashions and readership. Taking several individual poems…
1 October 2007 - Literary Criticism in Australia: A Change of Critical Paradigms?1 June 1991
Contributors
- Katherine Bode
- Karen Barker
- Karen Barker
- David Carter
- Brian Castro
- Leigh Dale
- Anthony J. Hassall
- Michelle Mongan
- Nicole Moore
- Nicole Moore
- Larissa McLean Davies
- Elizabeth McMahon
- Dieter Riemenschneider
- Graeme Turner