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"Gildersleeve, Jessica"
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The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature
In recent years, Australian literature has experienced a revival of interest both domestically and internationally. The increasing prominence of work by writers like Christos Tsiolkas, heightened through television and film adaptation, as well as the award of major international prizes to writers like Richard Flanagan, and the development of new, high-profile prizes like the Stella Prize have all reinvigorated interest in Australian literature both at home and abroad. This Companion emerges as a part of that reinvigoration, considering anew the history and development of Australian literature and its key themes, as well as tracing the transition of the field through those critical debates. It considers works of Australian literature on their own terms, as well as positioning them in their critical and historical context and their ethical and interactive position in the public and private spheres. With an emphasis on literature’s responsibilities, this book claims Australian literary studies as a field uniquely positioned to expose the ways in which literature engages with, produces, and is produced by its context, provoking a critical re-evaluation of the concept of the relationship between national literatures, cultures, and histories, and the social function of literary texts.
eBook
The Strategies of Picture Books as a Mode of Health Communication for Young Children with Coeliac Disease
Background/Objectives: Coeliac disease, a chronic and lifelong health condition, is one of the most common autoimmune diseases. However, it is also one of the most under-recognised conditions, and emotionally and cognitively appropriate materials are especially lacking for young children and their families who are coping with this disease. Effective health communication is essential for educating and supporting children living with coeliac disease as well as their families and communities. Picture books can serve as useful and accessible educational and health promotion tools, promoting adaptive coping strategies for dealing with a potentially traumatic condition. Methods: This study aimed to fill a critical gap in the literature by examining a range of picture books (n = 9) aimed at children three to eight years of age diagnosed with coeliac disease. Reflective thematic and structural narrative analyses were applied to explore strategies and themes used in these books and how they align with the current literature on developing coping through children’s narratives. Results: Four themes were developed and measured against an existing model of coping narratives to find a more specific model that recognises the specific concerns of coeliac disease. The four themes found were Information Provision; Promotion of CD Management; Anxiety and Hypervigilance Reduction, with two subthemes of Validating Feelings and Reducing Concerns; and Community and Connection. Conclusions: The findings have likely implications for the following applications: incorporation into clinician training (as a therapeutic and health promotion intervention), support within schools, authors of similar books for children coping with chronic illness, and coping approaches for individuals/families to promote health literacy/support regarding living with coeliac disease.
Journal Article
From stage to page to screen: The traumatic returns of Leah Purcell's 'the drover's wife'
The process of adaptation is a complex project of reconfiguration: one that is not only governed by ethical issues and aesthetic tensions but by the social, cultural, and political issues that arise in the calibration of old stories for new times, new audiences, and new medias. Since the past itself can either be contested or conserved, rewritten or restated, the act of retelling always calls into question the relationship between story and history. This article investigates the ethics and politics of Leah Purcell's multiple contemporary adaptations of Henry Lawson's frontier narrative, 'The Drover's Wife' (1892). Purcell's contemporary reimaginings traverse stage (2016), page (2019), and screen (2021), and repurpose colonial tropes and stereotypes to rework Lawson's 'Outback hell'. By remediating Lawson's iconic tale, and infusing the story with her own personal history, Purcell moves beyond simply reimagining the story to foregrounding the corrective dimension of retelling, such that Australia's traumatic history must be claimed by us in the present. Purcell's multiple adaptations, then, not only shift the story to different mediums, but illuminate and interrogate the past in order to destabilise Australia's foundational narrative.
Journal Article
For the sake of the children: Class, anxiety and childhood in Barbara Noble's 'Doreen'
Although she was a highly prolific publisher and editor, working for 20th Century Fox and Doubleday from the 1930s until the 1970s, Barbara Noble's own novels are not well known. Yet, in its timely recognition of the emotional effects of the war and evacuation on the child, Noble's 1946 novel, 'Doreen', is comparable to the socio-political observations of a writer like Rose Macaulay, or the domestic fineness of Elizabeth Taylor. 'Doreen' considers the impact of the evacuation of a child on her mother and on the woman with whom she stays for a brief period. While this novel does position maternity as perhaps the greatest responsibility of wartime, and grapples with the ethical problems of caring for a child during this period, its primary attention is reserved for the largely voiceless child, whose subjectivity is removed by the adults and by a government concerned more with their own ideals of what is best for her, and with their fears about class cross-contamination, than in ever asking her own opinion on the matter. Moreover, in the sense that the novel's adults mimic the instruction of Vera Lynn's wartime song, \"Goodnight Children Everywhere\" (1940), commanding the child to repress her emotions, they permit from her only one possible response: anxious withdrawal. In this way, 'Doreen' repositions the battleground as a class- and emotion-bound struggle taking place over the paradoxically devalued body of the child.
Journal Article
Thea Astley's modernism of the 'Deep North', or on (un)kindness
Although she is often perceived as a writer of the local, the rural or the regional, Thea Astley herself notes writing by American modernists as her primary literary influence, and emphasises the ethical value of transnational reading and writing. Similarly, she draws parallels between writing of the American ‘Deep South’ and her own writing of the ‘Deep North’, with a particular focus on the struggles of the racial or cultural outsider. In this article, I pursue Astley’s peculiar blend of these literary genres — modernism, the Gothic and the transnational — as a means of understanding her conceptualisation of kindness and community. Although Astley rejects the necessity of literary community, her writing emphasises instead the value of interpersonal engagement and social responsibility. With a focus on her first novel, Girl with a Monkey (1958), this article considers Astley’s representation of the distinction between community and kindness, particularly for young Catholic women in Queensland in the early twentieth century. In its simultaneous critique of the expectations placed on women and its upholding of the values of kindness and charity, Astley considers our responsibilities in our relations with the Other and with community.
Journal Article
Elizabeth Bowen and the writing of trauma : the ethics of survival
Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma analyses the treatment of memory and the past in Bowen's writing through the lens of trauma theory. It draws on the theories of Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, and Cathy Caruth.
eBook
“This book belongs to”: Trauma, (Bio)Degradation, and the Law in Visual and Narrative Diaries
[...]the impurity of genre figures an ethical response to the representation of trauma precisely because it points to the ways that lived experience and its disruption of cohesive identity trouble the possibilities of what we might call a standard narrativization. [...]the very structure of these visual and written narratives-the gutter of comics, the \"seepage\" of photographs, and the immersive spaces of installations, or what Michael calls their \"gappiness\" (\"Graphic Autofiction\" 108)-not only permits but demands the reader or viewer to enter into the mutual and active construction of the narrative. Given Derrida's concepts of the \"biodegradable\" and of the \"law of genre\"-that is, the associations between the paper, the diary, and waste-as well as Thomas Giddens's recognition that \"the complexities inherent in the comics' form itself can provide avenues for conceptualising and engaging with issues in legal theory, notably around the relationships between words and images, and the limits of textual representation\" (2), this essay explores how photo and narrative diaries both degrade and are responsible to \"truth,\" precisely as a means of bearing feminist witness to the criminal and the ugly. Paradoxically, indeed, confessional art may reveal more than the spectator (voyeur even) wants to know, moving beyond an experience that feels safe or comfortable for the spectator. [...]the subjectivity inherent in confessional art can also result in the manipulation or fabrication of \"memories.\" [...]as in both Goldin's Ballad and Gloeckner's Diary, the confessional
Journal Article
Editorial: Queensland modernisms
To posit Queensland's modernism may seem like an oxymoron. Queensland is often the butt of the southern states’ jokes. North of its more cultured and intellectual sibling-states (or so popular perception would have it), Queensland is ‘backward’, naïve, behind the times, provincial. According to this mythology, Brisbane is a glorified country town, Queenslanders refuse daylight saving for the sake of their very sensitive cows and curtains, and there is very little ‘culture’ to mention.
Journal Article
Traumatic cosmopolitanism: Eleanor dark and the world at war
This essay argues that women writers working during and prior to the Second World War produced works which might be identified as examples of \"traumatic cosmopolitanism\"-that is, a cosmopolitanism forged through the shared experience of trauma. In narrativising their shared, global traumatic experience, and in particular, the experience of being a writer during this time, wartime women writers effectively construct a community of (thinking about and writing about) suffering which moves beyond the national discourses of jingoism and ignorance that can perpetuate trauma and violence. With a focus on Eleanor Dark's wartime novel The Little Company (1945), this essay suggests that Australian women writers of the Second World War are at the vanguard of such ethical projects for the ways they challenge the lapse into nationalist dichotomous discourses of war, and considers the dual sense of psychological threat and the ethical responsibility of the writer which is figured in such works.
Journal Article