Mud map: Australian women’s experimental writing (2024)

Jamming the Machinery: contemporary Australian women's writing

Lana ana 1aentity PROCEEDINGS OF THE NINETEENTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE 1997 .ft8

Australian Poetry 2009–2010

Westerly, 2010

Reviews that commented on the predominance of young female talent among poets left some of the authors in question feeling not so much flattered as wondering — in conversation and in blogs — why they were being singled out as female: they preferred, some of them said, to be judged — and categorised if they must be categorised — based on some quality of their writing, not on the particular pairing of their chromosomes. It’s not that it isn’t interesting to think about the poet’s sex (and for that matter his or her gender and sexuality), they argued, but only if such interrogations yield interesting results pertinent to their work. Many of the same poets deemed that this clumping, as they saw it, did not. As might be expected, however, some bloggers (some of whom were poets, some critics) accused them of being overly sensitive: the ‘young female poets’ were being complimented, not being thrown into a now non-existent gender ghetto.

Words in Place: Mapping Australian Literature

E-rea, 2017

Articles du même auteur The Theme of Displacement in Contemporary Art [Texte intégral] Paru dans E-rea, 9.2 | 2012 Droits d'auteur E-rea est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution-Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale-Pas de Modification 4.0 International.

Contemporary Australian Women's Writing: An Overview

1984

Elizabeth Jolley has dubbed the 1980s a 'moment of glory' for the woman writer in Australia, a phase in the national literary history when women writers and readers entered the mainstream. Thea Astley takes a more general view when she typifies the 80s as a 'decade of the minorities'. The traditional oppositions and centres which have organised Australian literary production have been displaced to allow space not only for the experience of women but also a marked sense of regional, ethnic and class-based difference. This journal article is available in Kunapipi: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol16/iss1/103

Gendering Australian Literature (Pre print Version for proofing) Chapter 24

The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature, ed Jessica Gildersleeve, 2020

An awareness that Australian literature is actually gendered emerged with the critiques generated by the women's liberation movement from the late 1960s onward. Of course, there had been a strong, if sometimes neglected, tradition of women writers since the late 1800s (most notably Louisa Lawson) who addressed gender as an issue for writers and publication, to which I shall return. As a recognisable critical movement, however, it is second-wave feminist theory and criticism that established a body of work and social analysis regarding gender and literature in Australia. This chapter will focus on the development of those arguments and their implications. The initial direction of gender criticism was to note the structural marginalisation of women-and Indigenous and migrant characters as well as sexuality-from the dominant expressions of what is Australian in literature. The naturalised features of the Australian character type were typified by a sardonic white male who preferred to imagine his place in the bush rather than the city. In 1958 Russel Ward identified this as the Australian legend, anchored in the 1890s writing culture of the Bulletin's famous Red Pages under the editorship of JF Archibald and then AG Stephens. Legacies of Australian identity like these meant that the work of literary scholars and historians often overlapped, later joined by art historians and cultural studies

Found poetry as literary cartography: Mapping Australia with prose poems

Abstract:

Women’s Experimental Writing : Negative Aesthetics and Feminist Critique

Women’s Experimental Writing : Negative Aesthetics and Feminist Critique

'Between Anthologies: Feminism and Genealogies of Australian Women's Poetry', Australian Feminist Studies 12, 1997, 265-273.

Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature: General Introduction

The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, 2009

Looking from my window seat as the plane crosses Australia, I can't help reading stories into the country that unfolds below. From the leafy street grid of suburbs hugging the blue coast to the channels that run like arteries through interior red earth, from the brown geometry of farm roads and fenced paddocks, spotted with salinity, to fl ash new settlements staked in the verdant tropics, the patterns revealed in the landscape and in the marks of human habitation modulate like some great epic. Like many an Australian traveller before me, I refl ect on the intimate relationship between this extreme, subtle land and the human experiences it has shaped and been shaped by. My contemplation starts with the long custodianship of the land by Aboriginal Australians, and continues on to later visitors from across the seas, including those who became settlers-none more decisively than the small band of mainly British Europeans who landed at Sydney Cove in 1788. Their arrival made what would be called Australia a predominantly Englishspeaking country and bequeathed English literature and its related modes and rhetoric as the primary framework for giving expression to what would happen, be felt or imagined here for succeeding years. Human experience and creativity would be shared among those who lived in this new and often diffi cult society largely through speech and writing in English, and would likewise be recorded, reported abroad and passed on to posterity. Australian writing, then, is inseparable from the environment and circumstances of its origins. As Judith Wright wrote in Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965), 'Australia has from the beginning … been the outer equivalent of an inner reality … of exile … and of newness and freedom … a condition of life [that] loomed large in the consciousness of her white invaders'. Just as the landscape unfolds its meaning in patterns formed through time across marvellous and changing terrain, so Australian literature, as a mosaic of individual utterances, reveals a larger picture: a variegated, lively and quite distinctive version of the