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This volume explores the subterfuges, strategies, and choices that Australian women writers have navigated in order to challenge patriarchal stereotypes and assert themselves as writers of substance. Contextualized within the pioneering efforts of white, Aboriginal, and immigrant Australian women in initiating an alternative literary tradition, the text captures a wide range of multiracial Australian women authors' insightful reflections on crucial issues such as war and silent mourning, emergence of a Australian national heroine, racial purity and Aboriginal motherhood, communism and activism, feminist rivalry, sexual transgressions, autobiography and art of letter writing, city space and female subjectivity, lesbianism, gender implications of spatial categories, placement and displacement, dwelling and travel, location and dislocation and female body politics. Claiming Space for Australian Women's Writing tracks Australian women authors' varied journeys across cultural, political and racial borders in the canter of contemporary political discourse.
List of contents
1 Writing the Silence: Grieving Mothers and the Literature of War.- 2 Among the Reeds: A Lost Novel of Women's Emancipation.- 3 Poetic Rivalry and Silent Love: Lawson's Muse and Mary the Bard.- 4 Gothic Moods and Colonial Night Guests: Beatrice Grimshaw's writings on Fiji.- 5 From Miles Franklin to Germaine Greer: Writing as Activism.- 6 Kate Grenville's Transgressive Narratives.- 7 Disparate Visions: The Contesting Homefront Worlds of Gwen Harwood, Faith Richmond and Judith Wright (1939-45).- 8 Made in Suburbia: Intra-Suburban Narratives in Contemporary Australian Women's Fiction.- 9 'Properties of a Lady's Pen': The literary craft of Georgiana Molloy.- 10 Inner Space to Outer Space: Lesbian Writing in Australia.- 11 Possibilities from the Peripheries into the Urban Labyrinth: Helen Garner's Monkey Grip.- 12 'The sex thing is strange': The Queerness of Barbara Hanrahan's Fiction.- 13 Australian Aboriginal Women's Protest Poetry.- 14 Locating Indigenous Sovereign Spaces: Race and Womanhood in Romaine Morton's Poetry.- 15. Writing the Aboriginal Women's Auto/biographical Experience: Jackie Huggins and Jeanine Leane.- 16 On Becoming an Australian: The Journey of Patricia Pengilley.- 17 Australianness in M. L. Skinner's Exilic Novels.- 18 Transnation and Feminine Fluidity: New Horizon in the Fiction of Chandani Lokugé.
About the author
Dr. Devaleena Das is Lecturer at University of Wisconsin Madison, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. Her published books include Critical Study of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Critical Essays on Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Unveiling Desire: Fallen Women in Literature, Culture, and Films of the East.
Dr. Sanjukta Dasgupta is Professor and Former Head, Department of English and Former Dean, Faculty of Arts, Calcutta University. She is a poet, critic and translator and recipient of many awards and fellowships. Her published books include The Novels of Huxley and Hemingway: A Study in Two Planes of Reality, and Media, Gender and Popular Culture in India: Tracking Change and Continuity.
Summary
This volume explores the subterfuges, strategies, and choices that Australian women writers have navigated in order to challenge patriarchal stereotypes and assert themselves as writers of substance. Contextualized within the pioneering efforts of white, Aboriginal, and immigrant Australian women in initiating an alternative literary tradition, the text captures a wide range of multiracial Australian women authors’ insightful reflections on crucial issues such as war and silent mourning, emergence of a Australian national heroine, racial purity and Aboriginal motherhood, communism and activism, feminist rivalry, sexual transgressions, autobiography and art of letter writing, city space and female subjectivity, lesbianism, gender implications of spatial categories, placement and displacement, dwelling and travel, location and dislocation and female body politics. Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing tracks Australian women authors’ varied journeys across cultural, political and racial borders in the canter of contemporary political discourse.
