Characterisation
Articles
- Patrick White’s The Vivisector: The Artist in Relation to His Art
The vivisector of the title is first and foremost the painter whose life story it relates, Hurtle Duffield. But it is also the creative artist…
1 October 1971 - The Redemptive Theme in His Natural Life
Hergenhan reveals that after Clarke shortened the serial version of For The Term of His Natural Life for book publication a theme of redemption was…
1 June 1965 - A Link with Late Nineteenth-Century Decadence in ‘Maurice Guest’
Palmer critiques Nietzschean readings of Maurice Guest, arguing that the character of Kraft is better served by viewing him 'as a Decadent figure and…
1 October 1972 - The Young Cosima
Green examines The Young Cosima by Henry Handel Richardson, arguing that Richardson's psychological portraits, in particular of the relationships between Wagna, Liszt, Bülow and Cosima…
1 May 1970 - ‘The Great Australian Emptiness’ Revisited: Murray Bail’s Holden’s Performance
If, as Dean MacCannell argues, tourism is the quest for a 'reality' and an 'authenticity' that are thought to be always 'elsewhere' (160), then it…
1 May 1991 - Society and Nature in Such is Life
Kiernan questions whether Such is Life reflects the “spirit of the nineties” and whether the ideas that Tom Collins expresses in his digressions are simply…
1 December 1963 - Louis Stone’s ‘Jonah’ : A Cinematic Novel
Green identifies Stone’s narrative gift in his ability to construct character through action, connecting this effect to the narrative devices of motion pictures. The limitations…
1 June 1965 - Reading Men Like Signboards: The Egalitarian Semiotic of Such is Life
Indyk attempts to show how “the recognition of complexity and diversity is at the same time an assertion of the principles of social equality”. Because…
1 May 1986 - Bringing Franklin Up to Date: The Film of My Brilliant Career
Clancy examines Gillian Armstrong's 1979 adaptation of My Brilliant Career, focusing on the film's approach to narrative structure and its position in contemporary Australian…
1 May 1980 - ‘Greatness’ and Australian Literature in the 1930s and 1940s: Novels by Dark and Barnard Eldershaw
This paper analyses a single aspect of Australian literary culture in a particular historical period, namely its interest in 'greatness' - great books and great…
1 May 1995 - An Irish Conflict in Bring Larks and Heroes
Discusses the novel’s historical sources and implications (Irish and Australian) and the complexities of the relationship between the two main characters, Phelim Halloran and Robert…
1 October 1976 - An Interview with Archie Weller
Weller discusses the relationship between Aboriginal literature and (white) academia, and his approach to writing Aboriginality, particularly in terms of characterisation, form and style.
1 October 1993 - A Tale of Two Countries: Jack Maggs and Peter Carey’s Fiction
Peter Carey has generally preferred to fictionalise Australia at a remove, to reimagine it, shape-shifted out of its present appearance by science fiction transformations, or…
1 October 1997 - ‘The Only Russian in Sydney’: Modernism and Realism in The Watch Tower
In the post-war period, the dichotomy between Realism and Modernism seemed to summarise all the important rivalries in Australian fiction — nationalist enthusiasm and political…
1 May 1992 - Three-Dimensionality and My Brother Jack
It is no surprise that George Johnston's prize-winning novel, My Brother Jack (1964), has often been seen as a reflection upon the self or a…
1 May 1997 - A Reconsideration of Christina Stead at Work: Fact into Fiction
Everyone knows that novelists, like painters, draw from life. What we need to understand is more about the ways particular novelists transform real people into…
1 May 1997 - An Interview with Christopher Koch
Christopher Koch discusses his career and approach to writing.
1 May 1997 - ‘Deep Ancestral Voices’: Inner and Outer Narrative in Christopher J. Koch’s Highways to a War
Argues that in Koch's novel, 'two strands are continually in process: the inner and outer life, the world of values and the quotidian, the mythic…
1 May 1997 - Dying of Landscape: E.L. Grant Watson and the Australian Desert
The six, relatively neglected Australian novels of Elliot Lovegood Grant Watson, written between 1914 and 1935, present an intriguing and complex reworking of their author's…
1 May 1999 - Origin, Identity and the Body in David Malouf’s Fiction
Argues that a conception of Malouf's fiction as historical is simplistic. Malouf undertakes 'fictional revisitings of moments in Australian history—moments in which, in retrospect, significant…
1 May 1999
Contributors
- Australia Council
- John Beston
- Patrick Buckridge
- Lee Brotherson
- Ann Blake
- Jack Clancy
- Robert Dixon
- Dorothy Green
- Dorothy Green
- Laurie Hergenhan
- Anthony J. Hassall
- Roslynn D. Haynes
- Ivor Indyk
- Brian Kiernan
- Christopher Koch
- Janine Little
- F. C. Molloy
- Nicholas Mansfield
- Adrian Mitchell
- Adrian Mitchell
- Anthony J. Palmer
- Andrew Taylor
- Archie Weller