Writing Woman, Writing Place: Contemporary Australian and South African Fiction

ISBN-13: 9780415286497 / Angielski / Twarda / 2003 / 214 str.

Sue Kossew

Opis

Contemporary women writers in these two societies are still writing about similar issues as did earlier generations of women, such as exclusions from discourses of nation, a problematic relationship to place and belonging, relations with indigenous people and the way in which women's subjectivity has been constructed through national stereotypes and representations. This book describes and analyses some contemporary responses to 'writing woman, writing place' through close readings of particular texts that explore these issues.
Three main strands run through the readings offered in Writing Woman, Writing Place - the theme of violence and the violence of representational practice itself, the revisioning of history, and the writers' consciousness of their own paradoxical subject-position within the nation as both privileged and excluded. Texts by established writers from both Australia and South Africa are examined in this context, including international prize-winning novelists Kate Grenville and Thea Astley from Australia and Nadine Gordimer from South Africa, as well as those by newly-emerging and younger writers.
This book will be of essential interest to students and academics within the fields of Postcolonial Literature and Women's Writing.

Spis treści

General Introduction: Place, Space and Gender Part One: Contemporary Australian Fiction Introduction: Post-Bicentennial Perspectives 1. The Violence of Representation: Rewriting 'The Drover's Wife' 2. 'Gone Bush': Refiguring Women and the Bush 3. Another Country: the 'Terrible Darkness' of Country Towns 4. Learning to Belong: Nation and Reconciliation Part Two: Contemporary South African Fiction Introduction: New Subjectivities 5. 'A White Woman's Words': The Politics of Representation and Commitment 6. Rewriting the Farm Novel 7. Revisioning History 8. A State of Violence: The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation 9. Beyond the National: Exile and Belonging in Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup and Eva Sallis's The City of Sealions

O autorze

Sue Kossew was born in South Africa and spent her childhood in Zambia. She lived and taught in England and has been in Australia since 1987. She is a senior lecturer in the School of English at the University of New South Wales. Her previous publications have been in the field of South African and Australian literature, notably on J.M. Coetzee, André Brink and Nadine Gordimer.