scholarly journals Genre, History, and the Stolen Generations: Three Australian Stories

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-273
Author(s):  
Melanie Duckworth

This article explores the role that genre plays in fictional depictions of the Stolen Generations (Australian Indigenous children removed from their homes) in three twenty-first-century Australian middle-grade novels: Who Am I?: The Diary of Mary Talence, Sydney 1937 by Anita Heiss (2001) ; The Poppy Stories: Four Books in One by Gabrielle Wang (2016) ; and Sister Heart by Sally Morgan (2016) . It argues that the genres of fictional diary, adventure story and verse novel invite different reading practices and approaches to history, and shape the ways in which the texts depict, for children, the suffering and resilience of the Stolen Generations.

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-29
Author(s):  
Bradley J. Fest

This review essay approaches Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature across Continents (2016) from a set of questions about what it means to read in the age of hyperarchival accumulation. Written against the background of events in the United States and elsewhere during the fall of 2017, the essay tracks and assesses Ghosh and Miller's differing methods for approaching literary study in the twenty-first century: undiscriminating catholicity and rhetorical reading, respectively. Through emblematic readings of David Foster Wallace's novel The Pale King ( 2011 ), the videogame Katamari Damacy ( 2004 ), and Amy Hungerford's Making Literature Now ( 2016 ), this essay argues that Thinking Literature across Continents self-reflexively models and performs the interested, situated reading practices necessary for continuing the never-ending project of encountering, sharing, accounting for, learning from, and contending with others and their divergent readings, practices that, though many may have lost sight of them today, are fundamental to the project of democracy itself.


Reclining quietly with a book; an ear glued to the Hi-Fi; sifting a library stack; the TV flickering; a website gone live… Few poets have inspired such remarkable scenes and modes of interpretation as Dylan Thomas. Our means of access and response to his work have never been more eclectic, and this collection sheds new light on what it means to ‘read’ such a various art. In thinking beyond the parameters of life writing and lingering interpretative communities, Reading Dylan Thomas attends in detail to the problems and pleasures of deciphering Thomas in the twenty-first century, teasing out his debts and effects, tracing his influence on later artists, and suggesting ways to understand his own idiosyncratic reading practices. From short stories to memoirs, poems to broadcasts, letters to war films, manuscripts to paintings, the material considered in this volume lays the ground for a new consideration of Thomas’s formal versatility, and his distinctive relation to the many kinds of media that constitute literary modernism.


2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Perri Six ◽  
Nick Goodwin ◽  
Edward Peck ◽  
Tim Freeman

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