West-Pavlov, Russell
Imaginary Antipodes

Essays on Contemporary Australian Literature and Culture.

How can contemporary Australian literature and culture be 'imagined' from abroad? What particular refractions may emerge out of an expatriate reflection upon Antipodean literature and culture? This collection of essays summarizes fifteen years' work done from an explicitly European perspective. The unashamedly outside perspective these essays present envisages a largely 'imaginary Antipodes' whose character is regarded from four distinct angles: indigenous literary production, white settler identities, migrant destinies, and the global construction of Australian literature, thereby gesturing towards the transnational perspective that furnishes the framing rationale for the collection itself. The thirteen essays range over a broad selection of literary and filmic texts, from classics such as Patrick White and Crocodile Dundee, via Castro, Davison, Fremd, Gooneratne, Grenville, Hall, Hospital, Lawrence, McGahan, Malouf, Martin, Morgan, Scott, Teo, or Yasbincek, through to wider issues such as indigenous poetry, the post-Mabo 'history wars' of the 1990s, and the global translation of Australian literature. - Contents: 1. 'Why, White Man, Why?': White Australia as the Addressee of Apostrophe in Contemporary Aboriginal Writing. - 2. Uncovering Collective Crimes: Sally Morgan's "My Place" as Australian Indigenous Detective Narrative. - 3. The Time of Biopolitics in the Settler Colony. - 4. 'White Aboriginals': White Australian Literary Responses to the Challenge of Indigenous Histories. - 5. Fencing In the Frontier. - 6. Invasion and Pathology: Australia, Mabo, McGahan and Malouf. - 7. Exile as Origin: Definitions of Australian Identities in Malouf's "12 Edmondstone Street". - 8. The Absence of Hungary: Notes on a Didactic Autobiography by David Martin. - 9. 'Multiple Exposures': Spatial Dilemmas of Postmodern Artistic Identity in the Fiction of Janette Turner Hospital. - 10. Double-Crossing One Nation: Contemporary Asian-Australian Narratives. - 11. 'This is a Man's Country': Masculinity and Australian National Identity in "Crocodile Dundee". - 12. The Traumas of Translation and the Translation of Trauma: Translation and Cultural Plurality in Fremd and Yasbincek. - 13. Translation History as a Provocation for Australian Literary Studies (with Jens Elze). - 238 Seiten mit 6 Abb., gebunden (Anglistische Forschungen; Vol. 416/Universitätsverlag Winter 2011) leichte Lagerspuren/minor shelfwear