Remembering Babylon

A searing and magnificent picture of Australia at the moment of its foundation, with early settlers staking out their small patch of land and terrified by the harsh and alien continent. Focussing on the hostility between the early British inhabitants and the native Aborigines. Remembering Bablyon tells the tragic and compelling story of a boy who finds himself caught between the two worlds. Shot through with humour, and written with the poetic intensity that characterised Malouf's An Imaginary Life, this is a novel of epic scope yet it is simple, compassionate and universal: a classic.

Taking as its starting-point the ambiguous heritage left by the British Empire to its former colonies, dominions and possessions, And the Birds Began to Sing marks a new departure in the interdisciplinary study of religion and literature. Gathered under the rubric Christianity and Colonialism, essays on Brian Moore. Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood and Marian Engel, Thomas King, Les A. Murray, David Malouf, Mudrooroo and Philip McLaren, R.A.K. Mason, Maurice Gee, Keri Hulme, Epeli Hau'ofa, J.M. Coetzee, Christopher Okigbo, Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola and Ngugi wa Thiong'o explore literary portrayals of the effects of British Christianity upon settler and native cultures in Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific, and the Africas. These essays share a sense of the dominant presence of Christianity as an inherited system of religious thought and practice to be adapted to changing post-colonial conditions or to be resisted as the lingering ideology of colonial times. In the second section of the collection, Empire and World Religions, essays on Paule Marshall and George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Olive Senior and Caribbean poetry, V.S. Naipaul, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Bharati Mukherjee interrogate literature exploring relations between the scions of British imperialism and religious traditions other than Christianity. Expressly concerned with literary embodiments of belief-systems in post-colonial cultures (particularly West African religions in the Caribbean and Hinduism on the Indian subcontinent), these essays also share a sense of Christianity as the pervasive presence of an ideological rhetoric among the economic, social and political dimensions of imperialism. In a polemical Afterword, the editor argues that modes of reading religion and literature in post-colonial cultures are characterised by a theodical preoccupation with a praxis of equity.

In this groundbreaking work, Bill Ashcroft extends the arguments posed in The Empire Writes Back to investigate the transformative effects of postcolonial resistance and the continuing relevance of colonial struggle. He demonstrates the remarkable capacity for change and adaptation emanating from postcolonial cultures both in everyday life and in the intellectual spheres of literature, history and philosophy. The transformations of postcolonial literary study have not been limited to a simple rewriting of the canon but have also affected the ways in which all literature can be read and have led to a more profound understanding of the network of cultural practices that influence creative writing.

After the Celebration explores Australian fiction from 1989 to 2007, after Australia's bicentenary to the end of the Howard government. In this literary history, Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman combine close attention to Australian novels with a vivid depiction of their contexts: cultural, social, political, historical, national and transnational. From crime fiction to the postmodern colonial novel, from Australian grunge to 'rural apocalypse fiction', from the Asian diasporic novel to the action blockbuster, Gelder and Salzman show how Australian novelists such as Frank Moorhouse, Elizabeth Jolley, Peter Carey, Kim Scott, Steven Carroll, Kate Grenville, Tim Winton, Alexis Wright and many others have used their work to chart our position in the world. The literary controversies over history, identity, feminism and gatekeeping are read against the politics of the day. Provocative and compelling, After the Celebration captures the key themes and issues in Australian fiction: where we have been and what we have become.

The present volume contains general essays on: the relevance of `Commonwealth¿ literature; the treatment of Dalits in literature and culture; the teaching of African literature in the UK; `sharing places¿ and Drum magazine in South Africa; black British book covers as primers for cultural contact; Christianity, imperialism, and conversion; Orang Pendek and Papuans in colonial Indonesia; Carnival and drama in the anglophone Caribbean; issues of choice between the Maltese language and Its Others; and patterns of interaction between married couples in Malta. As well as these, there are essays providing close readings of works by the following authors: Chinua Achebe, André Aciman, Diran Adebayo, Monica Ali, Edward Atiyah, Margaret Atwood, Murray Bail, Peter Carey, Amit Chaudhuri, Austin Clarke, Sara Jeannette Duncan, Amitav Ghosh, Nadine Gordimer, Antjie Krog, Hanif Kureishi, Naguib Mahfouz, David Malouf, V.S. Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, Tayeb Salih, Zadie Smith, Ahdaf Soueif, Yvonne Vera. Contributors: Jogamaya Bayer, Katrin Berndt, Sabrina Brancato, Monica Bungaro, Judith Lütge Coulli, Robert Cribb, Natasha Distiller, Evelyne Hanquart¿Turner, Marie Herbillon, Tuomas Huttunen, Gen¿ichiro Itakura, Jacqueline Jondot, Karen King¿Aribisala, Ursula Kluwick, Dorothy Lane, Ben Lebdai, Lourdes López¿Ropero, Amin Malak, Daniel Massa, Concepción Mengibar¿Rico, Susanne Reichl, Brigitte Scheer¿Schaezler, Lydia Sciriha, Jamie S. Scott, Andrea Strolz, Peter O. Stummer, Cynthia vanden Driesen, Clare Thake Vassallo. Stella Borg Barthet is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Malta. She is the author of papers and book chapters, mostly on Maltese, Australian, and African fiction. Her current research interests include North African and African-American writing.

Issues of identity are central to many historical and current debates in Australia. This superb collection of essays represents a significant rethinking of received ideas on identity, and reveals how issues of identity lie at the heart of Australian political thought, and form the foundation of Australian society and culture. It provides a comprehensive introduction to the political discourse surrounding Australian identity through key themes including identity theory, the manipulation of identity for political ends, gender and sexuality, immigration and national identity, citizenship and Aboriginality, and literature and film. The book rejects many of the assumptions underlying contemporary political debates, including the promulgation of a singular national identity in historical fact or as a political goal. This is a thought-provoking study of identity, its links with nationalism, and its potentially divisive effects.

This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language. Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o) and their key works Examines the genres and sub-genres of fiction in English across the twentieth century (including crime fiction, Sci-Fi, chick lit, the noir novel, and the avant-garde novel) as well as the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field, such as censorship, globalization, modernist fiction, fiction and the film industry, and the fiction of migration, diaspora, and exile

Beyond the obvious and enduring socio-economic ravages it unleashed on indigenous cultures, white settler colonization in Australasia also inflicted profound damage on the collective psyche of both of the communities that inhabited the contested space of the colonial world. The acute sense of alienation that colonization initially provoked in the colonized and colonizing populations of Australia and New Zealand has, recent studies indicate, developed into an endemic, existential pathology. Evidence of the psychological fallout from the trauma of geographical deracination, cultural disorientation and ontological destabilization can be found not only in the state of anomie and self-destructive patterns of behaviour that now characterize the lives of indigenous Australian and Maori peoples, but also in the perpetually faltering identity-discourse and cultural rootlessness of the present descendants of the countries' Anglo-Celtic settlers. It is with the literary expression of this persistent condition of alienation that the essays gathered in the present volume are concerned. Covering a heterogeneous selection of contemporary Australasian literature, what these critical studies convincingly demonstrate is that, more than two hundred years after the process of colonisation was set in motion, the experience that Germaine Greer has dubbed 'the pain of unbelonging' continues unabated, constituting a dominant thematic concern in the writing produced today by Australian and New Zealand authors.

"Cultural Studies"is an international journal committed to exploring the relationships between cultural practices and everyday life, economic relations, the material world, the State, and historical forces and contexts.

In Cultural Memory and Literature, Diane Molloy suggests a new way of reading novels that respond to Australia’s violent past beyond trauma studies and postcolonial theory to re-imagine a different, syncretic past from multiple perspectives.

After the veritable hype concerning postmodernism in the 1980s and early 1990s, when questions about when it began, what it means and which texts it comprises were apt to trigger heated discussions, the excitement has notably cooled down at the turn of the century. Voices are now beginning to be heard which seem to suggest a new episteme in the making which points beyond postmodernism, while it remains at the same time very uncertain whether what appears as newness is not rather a return to traditional concepts, theoretical premises, and authorial practices. Contributors to this volume propose to explore new openings and recent developments in anglophone literatures and cultural theories which engage with issues seen to be central in the construction of a postmodern paradigm, but deal with them in ways that promise new openings or a new Zeitgeist.

Unter dem Begriff der Konversionen erkundet dieser kulturwissenschaftliche Band Formen einer Umkehrung, die einsetzt, wenn die Erfahrung des Beobachtetwerdens als zentraler Bestandteil von Fremderfahrungen anerkannt wird. In den versammelten Texten wird ausgeführt, wie diese aus der ethnologischen Feldforschung gewonnene Erinnerung als Vorbild für andere disziplinäre Perspektiven dienen kann. Die Ethnologie liefert dabei den viel zu lange vernachlässigten Hinweis auf die Wichtigkeit des Blicks des anderen in der Fremderfahrung; die philosophische Perspektive auf interkulturelle Dialoge liefert den Hinweis auf die Wichtigkeit des Sprechens des anderen. Aus diesen Hinweisen ergeben sich Ansprüche an ethnographische und literarische Texte und an andere wissenschaftliche Disziplinen sowie an eine angemessene Lektürepraxis. Die Texte des vorliegenden Bandes versuchen, diese Ansprüche exemplarisch einzulösen. Sie zeigen in einer neuartigen interdisziplinären Zusammenstellung sowohl einzelne Fälle der Umkehrung von Blickrichtungen als auch das Prinzip der Kritik und Erweiterung einer eurozentristischen Philosophie durch die Einführung einer ethnologischen und interkulturellen Perspektive.

Exploring literatures from a range of countries this book provides a comprehensive introduction to some of the central features of language in a wide variety of postcolonial texts.

As England withdrew from its empire after World War II, how did writers living outside the United Kingdom respond to the history of colonialism and the aesthetics of modernism within a global context? In fourteen original essays, edited by Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses, a distinguished group of scholars considers these questions in relation to novelists, playwrights, and poets living in English-speaking countries around the world. Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism not only examines how modernism and postcolonialism evolved over several generations, but also situates the writers analyzed in terms of canonical realignments inspired by the New Modernist Studies and an array of emerging methodologies and approaches. While this volume highlights social and political questions connected with the end of empire, it also considers the aesthetics of postcolonialism, detailing how writers drew upon, responded to and, sometimes reacted against, the formal innovations of modernism. Many of the essays consider the influence modernist artists and movements exercised on postcolonial writers, from W. B. Yeats, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf to Impressionism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and Abstractionism. Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism is organized around six geographic locales and includes essays on Africa (Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee), Asia (Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy), the Caribbean (Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul), Ireland (Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney), Australia/New Zealand (David Malouf, Keri Hulme) and Canada (Michael Ondaatje). Examining how Anglophone writers engaged with the literary, intellectual, and cultural heritage of modernism, this volume offers a vital and distinctive intervention in ongoing discussions of modern and contemporary literature.

Australia and New Zealand, united geographically by their location in the South Pacific and linguistically by their English-speaking inhabitants, share the strong bond of hope for cultural diversity and social equality--one often challenged by history, starting with the appropriation of land from their Indigenous peoples. This volume explores significant themes and topics in Australian and New Zealand literature. In their introduction, the editors address both the commonalities and differences between the two nations' literatures by considering literary and historical contexts and by making nuanced connections between the global and the local. Contributors share their experiences teaching literature on the iconic landscape and ecological fragility; stories and perspectives of convicts, migrants, and refugees; and Maori and Aboriginal texts, which add much to the transnational turn. This volume presents a wide array of writers--such as Patrick White, Janet Frame, Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Witi Ihimaera, Christina Stead, Allen Curnow, David Malouf, Les Murray, Nam Le, Miles Franklin, Kim Scott, and Sally Morgan--and offers pedagogical tools for teachers to consider issues that include colonial and racial violence, performance traditions, and the role of language and translation. Concluding with a list of resources, this volume serves to support new and experienced instructors alike.

Don Randall’s comprehensive study situates Malouf within the field of contemporary international and postcolonial writing, but without losing sight of the author’s affiliation with Australian contexts. The book presents an original reading of Malouf, finding the unity of his work in the continuity of his ethical concerns: for Malouf, human lives find their value in transformations, specifically in instances of self-overcoming that encounters with difference or otherness provoke. However, the book is fully aware of, and informed by, the quite ample body of criticism on Malouf, and thus provides readers with a broad-based understanding of how Malouf’s works have been received and assessed. It is an effective companion volume for studies in postcolonial or Australian literature, for any study project in which Malouf figures prominently.