Critical fictions

This thesis draws on feminist theory from the sciences and the humanities to analyse dystopian literature for children and adults. It demonstrates that fiction plays a critical role in understanding how subjectivity and coporeality is implicated in the directions that new science is taking.

Fictional femininity

This thesis examines gender-political representations of middle-aged, middle-class, white women in a sample of new millennial middlebrow novels. The findings demonstrate how popular contemporary fiction traffics a set of feminine norms that are complexly inflected by both feminism and the apolitical ethos of feminism.

Scandalous texts : the anxieties of the literary

This thesis explores contemporary literary scandals in order to identify the cultural and literary anxieties revealed by controversial works. Examining how scandals emerge in relation to challenging representations of children, women, religion and authenticity, the thesis argues that literary controversies reveal concerns about the construction of identity, history and reality.

Matilda's last dance: death, gender, sexuality and Australian adolescent literature

This thesis examines representations of death in a selection of contemporary texts for Australian adolescent audiences. It demonstrates that, although death is a complex subject, a characteristically Australian 'way of death' is identifiable in these fictions and it is invariably associated with issues of sexuality, gender and power.

Reading race, aboriginality in Australian children`s literature

This text looks at the ways in which Australia's indigenous peoples have been, and continue to be, represented in books for children. These varying representations have helped to colour the attitudes, beliefs and assumptions of different generations of Australians.

New world orders in contemporary children's literature : utopian transformations

"New World Orders shows how texts for children and young people have responded to the cultural, economic, and political movements of the last 15 years. With a focus on international children's text produced between 1988 and 2006, the authors discuss how utopian and dystopian tropes are pressed into service to project possible futures to child readers. The book considers what these texts have to say about globalisation, neocolonialism, environmental issues, pressures on families and communities, and the idea of the posthuman."--BOOK JACKET.

At the limits : postcolonial and hyperreal translations of Australian poetry

This dissertation employs the methodologies of postcolonial theory and hyperreal theory (following Baudrillard), in order to investigate articulations of identity, nation and representation in contemporary Australian poetry. Informed by a comparative analysis of contemporary Latin American poetry and cultural theory (in translation), as a means of re-examining the Australian context, this dissertation develops a new transnational model of Australian poetics. The central thesis of this dissertation is that contemporary Australian poetry engages with the postcolonial at its limits. That is, at those sites of postcoloniality that are already mapped by theory, but also at those that occur beyond postcolonial theory. The hyperreal is understood as one such limit, traceable within the poetry but silenced in conventional postcolonial theory. As another limit to the postcolonial, this dissertation reads Latin American poetry and theory, in whose texts postcolonial theory is actively resisted, but where postcolonial and hyperreal poetics nevertheless intersect. The original critical context constructed by this dissertation enables a new set of readings of Australian identity through its poetry. Within this new interpretative context, the readings of contemporary Australian poetry articulate a psycho-social postcoloniality; offer a template for future transactions between national poetry and global politics; and develop a model of the postcolonial hyperreal.

Poetry and silence : "a sequence of disappearances"

[No Abstract]

The work of death in Brontë's and Dickinson's poetry

Death determines distinctly different, almost inverse, responses and outcomes for Emily Dickinson and Emily Brontë. Death is an imaginative poetic solution for Dickinson, demonstrating her belief that art is the only way to transcend death. But death is the ultimate solution for Brontë, for whom freedom of the imagination leads to mystical unity and continuity.