Please find below information about the books that will be presented during the conference.
Title of the Book: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel
Editor: David Carter
Publishers: Cambridge University Press
Year of Publication: 2023
About the Book: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel is an authoritative volume on the Australian novel by more than forty experts in the field of Australian literary studies, drawn from within Australia and abroad. Essays cover a wide range of types of novel writing and publishing from the earliest colonial period through to the present day. The international dimensions of publishing Australian fiction are also considered as are the changing contours of criticism of the novel in Australia. Chapters examine colonial fiction, women’s writing, Indigenous novels, popular genre fiction, historical fiction, political novels, and challenging novels on identity and belonging from recent decades, not least the major rise of Indigenous novel writing. Essays focus on specific periods of major change in Australian history or range broadly across themes and issues that have influenced fiction across many years and in many parts of the country.
Title of the Book: Dancing in Red: Shoes Barbara Baynton and the Australian Myth
Author: Tihana Klepač
Publishers: FFPress
Place of Publication: Zagreb, Croatia
Year of Publication: 2020
About the Book: The title of the book is Dancing in Red Shoes: Barbara Baynton and the Australian Myth. It invokes Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle and Anne Sexton’s “The Red Shoes”, as well as the general metaphor of the dance, and especially dance in red shoes, as being transgressive of the dominant patriarchal social narrative and modes of behaviour. And the prime way to dance is to write. My primary interest was to describe the national Australian metanarrative as a myth and to show how Barbara Baynton discloses the fissures in it, creating a parallel narrative of female existence in the bush. In Australia marginalised for “dancing in red shoes” Baynton published most of her writing in Britain.
Title of the Book: Humour Traditions in Australia and Canada
Editors: B. Hariharan and Suja Kurup P. L.
Publishers: Emerald
Place of Publication: Chennai, India
Year of Publication: 2020
About the Book: Humour speaks the language of exaggeration and it is at the same time serious business. It is also serious business to discuss the ways in which cultures have claimed such traditions and explore how humorous narratives address our lived and living exaggerations. The present volume of essays titled Humour Traditions in Australia and Canada (2020) focuses on some of the facets in the humour traditions in Australia and Canada. Certainly, the expression and experience of humour in Australia and Canada have a profound social and political dimension. This is why it is important to explore this genre in our times. A collection of essays on the humour traditions in Australia and Canada will perhaps bring more than a smile and make us ask how and why we laugh the way we do.
Title of the Book: Mabo’s Cultural Legacy: History, Literature, Film and Cultural Practice in Contemporary Australia
Editors: Geoff Rodoreda and Eva Bischoff
Publishers: Anthem Press
Place of Publication:
Year of Publication: 2021
About the Book: This book examines the broader impacts on Australian culture and cultural practice of the Australian High Court’s landmark Mabo decision of 1992. It considers how history, linguistics and anthropology as well as film, fiction, poetry and memoir writing have been challenged or transformed by Mabo.
Title of the Book: Trauma, Australia and Gail Jones’s Fiction (1996-2007)
Author: Pilar Royo-Grasa
Publishers: Peter Lang
Year of Publication: 2022
About the Book: Australia’s official Reconciliation project confronted Australians with the continuous violent dispossession suffered by the country’s Indigenous peoples and the pressing need to offer a public apology to them. While trauma became a tool whereby to create paths of empathy and reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, it was also a manipulative strategy to deny the country’s shameful history. This book examines Gail Jones’s literary contribution to such debates. It examines Gail Jones’s questioning of Australia’s victimology narratives, and offers an insightful discussion of the transmedia, transnational and multidirectional approach to trauma in the reconciliation-related novels she published during John Howard’s vexed Liberal Government (1996-2007).
Title of the Book: Major Fitz-Gerald and the Matter of War: An Anzac Archive
Author: John Scheckter
Publishers: Australian Scholarly Publishing
Year of Publication: 2021
About the Book: In 1915, Major Richard Francis Fitz-Gerald was the last Australian to leave an exposed position at Gallipoli. He was awarded the DSO for that and served on the Western Front through to the end of the Great War. Everywhere he went, often while in danger, he collected materials that marked his experience – photographs, orders, his battalion’s timetable for evacuation, and a souvenir map of Gallipoli that he annotated by hand. He wrote careful comments on everything he kept, transforming public documents into personal sites of memory and retrieval. He also kept a diary for the first year of his experience, covering Gallipoli, Egypt, and France. Major Fitz-Gerald and the Matter of War personalises the difficult position of a front-line officer by closely examining the things he carried, collected, and preserved for the rest of his life.