More than a mere story : social and political markers in Australian short fiction of the 1980's

This thesis is a literary history which argues that much of the short fiction published in Australia during the 1980s was deeply influenced by the rapid social and political changes during that decade. My argument concentrates on links between the short stones of the period and the socio/political environment into which they were written. The decade was marked by massive changes in technology, the workplace, and in all other areas of social life. In general terms, the ideology of the 'market' predominated over notions of small 'l' liberalism and the last vestiges of state intervention in the economy. The Australian short story benefited from the social 'experiments' of the 1970s in that its concerns became broader - encompassing the onslaught of feminism, the foregrounding of 'multicultural' concerns, and a move away from the bush into the city as a primary site for narratives. The decade was a rich period for the genre. Why was there a tolerance for a new diversity, in literary terms, when the social and political environment was turning to the right? This is a central question of the thesis. I argue that instead of the 'base' determining the 'superstructure' (i.e. culture) the superstructural changes were essential to the deconstruction of the social and political landscape. This thesis contends that a relationship always exists between the 'literary' and 'the social'. I argue, among other things, that many of the short fictions were influenced by 'postmodern' theory to the extent that they became a form of traumatic note-taking, which masked a late romanticism beneath a fear of the sovereign subject. The fear of 'closure' which insinuated itself into many of the texts, besides being a form of academic corrective, was also a flight from emotional candor. I argue that storytelling was, in many cases, the loser.

Abuse of power, oppression and the struggle for human rights in modern indonesian short fiction

 Across the 1990s, Indonesian writers used the short story genre to represent human rights abuses in Indonesia.These rights included freedom of speech, right to life and right to assembly. The short story had great impact, depicting dramatically both perpetrators and victims, and exposing the social, economic and political conditions which bred such abuses.

Fiction in oils

Comprises a collection of seventeen stories based on Australian women's paintings and a critical exegesis that together represent a creative and theoretical response to the ways in which short fiction writing can be informed by visual art.

Celebrating difference

This thesis examines short fiction and some poetry by writers from four different Australian cultural communities, the Indigenous community, and the Jewish, Chinese and Middle-Eastern communities. I have chosen to study the most recent short fiction available from a selection of writing which originates from each culture. In the chapters on Chinese-Australian and Middle-Eastern Australian fiction I have examined some poetry if it contributes to the subject matter under discussion. In this study I show how the short story form is used as a platform for these writers to express views on their own cultures and on their identity within Australian society. Through a close examination of texts this study reveals the strategies by which many of these narratives provide an imaginative literary challenge to Anglo-Celtic cultural dominance, a challenge which contributes to the political nature of this writing and the shifting nature of the short story genre. This study shows that by celebrating difference these narratives can act as a site of resistance and show a capacity to reflect and instigate cultural change. This thesis examines the process by which these narratives create a dialogue between cultures and address the problems inherent in diverse cultural communities living together.

Snap

‘Snap’ deploys the queer cliché of becoming-sailor as a trope for recognition in the amorous encounter and literalises the ‘copycat’ as its catalyst. As Girard argues (1973), the human is foremost mimetic: this story makes its claim for originality and authenticity of connection through the playful recycling of cliché.‘Snap’ eschews the relative affectlessness of some metafiction by staging an amorous approach under the shadow of mortality. It exploits the liminal moment of modernist short fiction to summon the ‘manifold’ of experience. Here, love opens a space of intertextual esonance (Costello 2007), including motifs of Genet (masquerade), Duras (haunting) and Maurice Blanchot (the infinite approach), by writing the threshold of encounter as the intensive silence of wond