Fact and Fiction: Readings in Australian Literature

Contents: Acknowledgements. Preface: Comprehension without closure: Australian studies for the Twenty-first century?/Nicholas Birns. 1. Introduction: an Indian Ocean outlook: Australian studies in Australia and India/Richard Nile. 2. Additive exile in David Martin: The necessary other that makes for place and home/J.V. D’Cruj and William Steele. 3. Fictional reality strikes back: C.J. Koch’s novels from fiction to friction/Jean-Francois Vernary. 4. Colonisation, convicts, and national convictions: C.J. Koch’s Out of Ireland and Kate Grenville’s The secret river/Dunya Lindsey. 5. The core of reality: "Mandala" as a leitmotif in Patrick white’s fiction/Krishna Barua. 6. "A world the shape of an eye": Gerald Murnane’s The Plains and benedicts de Spinoz/Patrick West. 7. Apparitions of desire: Homo-Eros in Elizabeth Jolley’s fiction/Anneta Rajendran. 8. When the fact becomes fiction: Ned Kelly, his letters and those films/Stephen Gaunson. 9. Extinction, resistance and rebirth: The representation of aboriginality in the timeless land, the Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Benang/Isabelle Benigno. 10. Experimenting with aboriginality in theatre: Jack Davis’s The dreamers/Alessandra Senzani. 11. Exploration of indigenous fate in Terra incognita: Philip McLaren’s Scream Black Murder/Salhia Ben-Messahel. 12. Linguistic damage: Fear of other languages in David Malouf’s works/Beverly Curran. 13. "A breath out of the heart of the country": The landscape of David Malouf/Jonathan Highfield. 14. "We must laugh at one another, or die": Yasmine Gooneratne’s A change of skies and South Asian Migrant identities/Chandani Lokuge. 15. Displacement and trans-placement: Jo E Ohar’s Obiranje Limon/Igor Maver. 16. Appropriating national myths: Brian Castro’s birds of passage/Marilyne Brun. 17. Lost and (then) found: the quest for home in Benang, Tirra Lirra by the river and requiem for a rainbow/Reema Sarwal. 18. Message from the inside? Multiculturalism in contemporary children’s literature/Sharyn Pearce. 19. Reading Kerry greenwood: the fisher queen of Australian crime writing/Toni Johnson Woods. 20. "In their different ways, classics": Arthur W. Upfield’s detective fiction/Carol Hetherington. 21. Writing the land: Western Australia as textual space in Tim Winton’s Dirt Music/Malathy Anandavalli. 22. The poet as a public critic: A study of Christopher Brennan/Phillip A. Ellis. 23. Once more with feeling: the strange history of Manning Clark/Mark Mckenna. 24. Becoming postcolonial: getting lost for a while with Stephen Muecke’s No road and remaking Australia/Lisa Slater. 25. The politics of Diasporic desire: a study of Vijay Mishra’s key works/Gunjeet Aurora. 26. Afterword reminiscence: Monsoon semester, JNU, New Delhi, 1989/Richard Hosking. Contributors. Index.