How Global is Australian Literature in the 21st century? A story of gender, genre and the international literary field
Seminar
How global is Australian literature in the twenty-first century? This large question generates many others, the two most obvious being: What is meant by global? What is meant by Australian literature? These are important but technical, easily answered. The real question is: What might the answer to…
The First Person at Work: The Fiction of Helen Garner’s Autobiographical Self
Seminar
Over the course of her long career, Helen Garner has regularly been accused of writing too autobiographically for a novelist; of drawing too readily on her diaries; of lacking a narrative arc in her fiction. This paper turns this accusation on its head to suggest that the first person of Garner’s…
The Australasian Book Society: Making a Literary Working Class During the Cultural Cold War
Seminar
For access to the Zoom ID and Password for this seminar, please send an email enquiry to : monique.rooney@anu.edu.au “To encourage mass participation in and responsibility for the publication of progressive Australian literature” was one of the masthead aims of the Australasian Book…
'Believe in Me' Talk and Q&A with Lucy Neave and Kathryn Hind
Seminar
Lucy Neave will give a short talk about the forces that shaped the writing of her novel, Believe in Me (UQP, 2021), followed by a Q&A with Kathryn Hind. Lucy Neave is the author of the novels Believe in Me (2021) and Who We Were (2013), a Griffith Review…
Francis Steegmuller’s Pyjamas: reticence, intimacy and becoming a biographer
Seminar
For access to the Zoom ID and Password for this seminar, please send an email enquiry to : monique.rooney@anu.edu.au This paper looks back on the process of writing Shirley Hazzard’s authorised biography. It considers a biographer’s interest in and access to the (open) secrets of a…
Helen Garner, Joseph Steinberg
Seminar
Please contact Monique.Rooney@anu.edu.au to obtain zoom link and password. On the 14th of December 1972, a schoolteacher named Helen Garner found herself fired. Summoned to the Victorian Education Department and admonished by the Deputy Director of Secondary education, she was sacked on the spot…
Jessica Anderson’s vision of the 1970s, Elizabeth McMahon
Seminar
Please contact Monique.Rooney@anu.edu.au to obtain zoom link and password. Jessica Anderson published four novels between 1970 and 1980: The Last Man’s Head (1970), The Commandant (1975), Tirra Lirra by the River (1977) and The Impersonators (1980), the latter two of these winning multiple awards…