Anne Whitehead

Memory

The literary potential of trauma is examined in this book, bringing trauma theory and literary texts together for the first time. Trauma Fiction focuses on the ways in which contemporary novelists explore the theme of trauma and incorporate its structures into their writing. It provides innovative readings of texts by Pat Barker, Jackie Kay, Anne Michaels, Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, W. G. Sebald and Binjamin Wilkomirski. It also considers the ways in which trauma has affected fictional form, exploring how novelists have responded to the challenge of writing traumatic narratives, and identifying the key stylistic features associated with the genre. In addition, the book introduces the reader to key critics in the field of trauma theory such as Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Geoffrey Hartman. The linking of trauma theory and literary texts not only sheds light on works of contemporary fiction, it also points to the inherent connections between trauma theory and the literary which have often been overlooked. The distinction between literary theme and style in the book opens up major questions regarding the nature of trauma itself. Trauma, like the novels discussed, is shown to take an uncertain but productive place between content and form.Key Features*Idenitifes and explores a new and evolving genre in contemporary fiction*Thinks through the relation between trauma and literature*Produces innovative readings of key works of contemporary fiction *Provides an introduction to key ideas in trauma theory

Trauma Fiction

Writing against the prevailing narrativization of suicide in terms of why it happened, Whitehead turns instead to the questions of when, how, and where, calling attention to suicide's materiality as well as its materialization. By turns provocative and deeply affecting, this book brings suicide into conversation with the critical medical humanities, extending beyond individual pathology and the medical institution to think about subjective and social perspectives, and to open up the various sites, scenes and interactions with which suicide is associated. Suicide is related forward from the point of death, rather than taking a retrospective view. Combining critical and textual analysis with personal reflection based on her own experience of her sister's suicide, Whitehead examines the days, months, and years following a death by suicide. This pivoting of attention to what happens in the wake of suicide brings to light the often-surprising ways in which suicide is woven into the everyday places that we inhabit, and in which it is related to all of us, albeit with varying degrees of proximity and kinship.

A Personal and Critical Perspective

Relating Suicide

Over the last twenty years there has been a dramatic upsurge in the application of meta-analysis to medical research. This has mainly been due to greater emphasis on evidence-based medicine and the need for reliable summaries of the vast and expanding volume of clinical research. At the same time there have been great strides in the development and refinement of the associated statistical methodology. This book describes the planning, conduct and reporting of a meta-analysis as applied to a series of randomized controlled clinical trials. The various approaches are presented within a general unified framework. Meta-analysis techniques are described in detail, from their theoretical development through to practical implementation. Each topic discussed is supported by detailed worked examples. A comparison of fixed and random effects approaches is included, as well as a discussion of Bayesian methods and cumulative meta-analysis. Fully documented programs using standard statistical procedures in SAS are available on the Web. Ideally suited for practising statisticians and statistically-minded medical professionals, the book will also be of use to graduate students of medical statistics. The book is a self-contained and comprehensive account of the subject and an essential purchase for anyone involved in clinical trials.

Meta-Analysis of Controlled Clinical Trials

The concept of ‘memory’ has given rise to some of the most exciting new directions in contemporary theory. In this much-needed guide to a burgeoning field of a study, Anne Whitehead: presents a history of the concept of ‘memory’ and its uses, encompassing both memory as activity and the nature of memory examines debates around the term in their historical and cultural contexts introduces the reader to key thinkers in the field, from ancient Greece to the present day traces the links between theorisations and literary representations of memory. Offering a clear and succinct guide to one of the most important terms in contemporary theory, this volume is essential reading for anyone entering the field of Memory Studies, or seeking to understand current developments in Cultural and Literary Studies.

Jonathan James Long

Focusing on the key areas of travel, intertextuality, nature and memory, this collection of essays by leading international scholars offers interdisciplinary perspectives on Sebald's work, providing a thorough assessment of his achievements.

A Critical Companion

W.G. Sebald

In the 1890s in a bizarre social experiment, a band of over 500 Australians - mostly men and just three single women - sailed to South America to create a communal Utopia, a New Australia, in the jungles of Paraguay. One of them was a red-headed schoolteacher Mary Cameron, a poet and feminist, who left the writer Henry Lawson behind, despairing on the wharf. Politics in the Australian colony were soon tumultuous. Mary, rejected by one man she loved, married another, had a son, and she and her near-illiterate shearer husband Will Gilmore left Paraguay for the vast Patagonian sheep estancias of southern Argentina to earn their passages home. Anne Whitehead chronicles the full history of the Australian experiment in Paraguay, including an account of the descendants of those who remained, in her award-winning Paradise Mislaid: In Search of the Australian Tribe of Paraguay (1998). In this second work she focuses on Mary's four years at the colony and, in particular, on her two fraught and previously little-known years in Patagonia. Mary's independent spirit soon offended the strict rules of the estancia ruling class and she was forced to leave her husband for the tough frontier town of Río Gallegos. Speaking little Spanish, she supported her child for almost six months. Dame Mary later became an Australian national icon, campaigned for many causes including Aboriginal rights and she is on the $10 note today. In a remarkable blend of biography and travel writing, Anne Whitehead follows in Mary's footsteps in South America, searching out places where she lived and traces of her stay, during a period of severe economic depression and political repression in Argentina, just as there was in Mary's experience. She brings to life a testing time in one of the harshest places on earth. 'Patagonia is a rich source of curious incidents and eccentric people, and Whitehead makes the most of these, describing the Welsh towns of Trelew and Puerto Madryn... a robbery pulled off by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Charles Darwin's forays from the Beagle; W.H. Hudson's delight in the birds of the region, and the search for the giant sloth carried out by Mr Hesketh Prichard of the Daily Express. She mentions Bruce Chatwin, who turned up unannounced at the great estancia of Killik Aike, where the Gilmores had lived for some months, only to be sent away "with a flea in his ear" by its current owners. Mary Gilmore left Killik Aike abruptly too... [Her] letters reflect a courageous, resourceful and strong-willed woman... "Yea! I have lived" was how she began one poem, and reading Anne Whitehead's spry account of her life, it is hard not to agree.' - Times Literary Supplement 'I quickly fell under the spell of Whitehead's intelligent writing... a biography that compassionately embraces the artistic, emotional and political aspect of Mary Gilmore's life' - Age 'This splendid and fascinating book is brilliantly balanced as part memoir, part well-researched recreation of the young Mary Gilmore as inamorata of Henry Lawson, as radical wife, Paraguayan and Patagonian settler, and as abidingly Australian soul.' - Thomas Keneally 'Bluestocking in Patagonia is a very beautiful book. In the first place, Whitehead writes with considerable flair, and with a fine eye for detail. The text is intelligently crafted, switching between Australia and South America, past and present, self and other... Yet Bluestocking in Patagonia is important for other reasons. This book is as much about Whitehead's effort to retrace Gilmore's steps as about Gilmore herself and is, in this respect, a fine blend of history and travel writing: a combination we also find in Whitehead's earlier book on the Paraguayan colonists.' - Frank Bongiorno, Australian Literary Studies 'There should be more books like this.' Geographical, journal of the Royal Geographical Society 'The writing is consistently compelling and frequently beautifully descriptive' - Weekend Australian

Mary Gilmore's Quest for Love and Utopia at the World's End

Bluestocking in Patagonia

After Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, he was sent into exile on Saint Helena. He became an 'eagle in a cage', reduced from the most powerful figure in Europe to a prisoner on a rock in the South Atlantic. But the fallen emperor was charmed by the pretty teenage daughter of a local merchant, Betsy Balcombe. Anne Whitehead brings to life Napoleon's last years on Saint Helena, revealing the central role of the Balcombe family. She also lays to rest two centuries of speculation about Betsy's relationship with Napoleon. After Napoleon's death, Betsy travelled to Australia in 1823 with her father, who was appointed the first Colonial Treasurer of New South Wales. When the family lost their fortune, she returned to London and published a memoir that made her a celebrity. With her extraordinary connections to royalty and high society, Betsy Balcombe led a life worthy of a Regency romance, but she was always fighting for her independence. This new account reveals Napoleon at his most vulnerable, human and reflective, and a woman caught in some of the most dramatic events of her time. 'Anne Whitehead deftly weaves a lively, poignant tale of Napoleon's last years on St Helena and the precocious teenager whose impudent charm briefly enlivened his exile. Her indefatigable pursuit of a tantalising archival trail takes her readers from St Helena to England, Scotland, France and New South Wales, uncovering a life curiously shadowed by its early brush with fame.' - Professor Penny Russell, University of Sydney

The true story of Napoleon, a pretty girl, a Regency rake and an Australian colonial misadventure

Betsy and the Emperor

In this landmark Companion, expert contributors from around the world map out the field of the critical medical humanities. This is the first volume to introduce comprehensively the ways in which interdisciplinary thinking across the humanities and social sciences might contribute to, critique and develop medical understanding of the human individually and collectively. The thirty-six newly commissioned chapters range widely within and across disciplinary fields, always alert to the intersections between medicine, as broadly defined, and critical thinking. Each chapter offers suggestions for further reading on the issues raised, and each section concludes with an Afterword, written by a leading critic, outlining future possibilities for cutting-edge work in this area. Topics covered in this volume include: the affective body, biomedicine, blindness, breath, disability, early modern medical practice, fatness, the genome, language, madness, narrative, race, systems biology, performance, the postcolonial, public health, touch, twins, voice and wonder. Together the chapters generate a body of new knowledge and make a decisive intervention into how health, medicine and clinical care might address questions of individual, subjective and embodied experience.

Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities

In the 1890s after a period of social unrest, a brave band of Australians sailed from Sydney to found a communal Utopia in South America. Under the charismatic journalist William Lane, over 500 settlers, including poet Mary Gilmore, created a New Australia in the Paraguayan jungle. Their hopes soon collapsed. Many returned home. Others stayed, becoming part of the culture of their adopted country. They learned about Paraguay's Jesuit missions of the 17th and 18th centuries, perhaps the world's most successful communal settlements which were disbanded in violence, the country's catastrophic wars, its revolutions, its repressive dictators, and about another communal experiment led by Elisabeth Nietzsche and Bernhard Forster to create an Aryan master race. Anne Whitehead made three journeys to Paraguay over 12 years and, in a vivid blend of biography and travel writing, uncovers stories of the original colonists and their descendants. Some fought for the British Empire in World War I, others defended Paraguay against Bolivia in the 1932-35 Chaco War; they witnessed the arrival of Nazi war criminals, the manhunt of forest Indians and endured the 35-year dictatorship of President Alfredo Stroessner. Paradise Mislaid won the 1998 NSW Premier's Award for Australian History. Judges' citation: 'An erudite, beautifully researched work of history which knits together the stories of Paraguay and Australian emigration as a quest for Utopia... Whitehead utilises material which was not available to earlier historians. She also takes to heart the well-known adage that a tolerable pair of boots is essential for an historian, and retraces the steps of the original "New Australians" and their descendants. The result is a beautifully-crafted historical and contemporary travelogue.' 'One of the most bizarre stories in Australian history - splendidly told by one of our master story-tellers.' - Frank Moorhouse 'A superb blend of travel writing and history, during which Whitehead casts her discerning eye on the present, with pertinent excursions to the past. This personal odyssey has resulted in a wonderful, rambunctuous, passionate, picaresque narrative that combines meticulous research with compelling personal stories and acute observation. One is swept irresistibly along.' - Tim Bowden, Sydney Morning Herald 'Whitehead has produced a travel book within a carefully researched and densely documented historical frame extending across 600 pages. She is a skillful raconteur and the reader is carried along, largely unmindful that she has used the "Australian Tribe" as a peg on which to suspend her personal reminiscences of Paraguay. Her style strongly resembles the work of Paul Theroux and V.S. Naipaul.' - Transforming Anthropology 'The descendants of the tribe are a fascinating cross-section... Inevitably to follow the families is to create a portrait of Paraguayan life in the past century - a distinct mixture of good times, bad times, of dictators and war. To understand those years, the history of the country has to be traversed. Whitehead does all this with skill and understanding. She has probably the best written account of the Jesuit communes, where the Jesuits defended their converts from the slave traders, communes which lasted two hundred years, almost as long as European settlement in Australia.' - Richard Hall, Australian Book Review 'An exhaustive yet entertaining piece of historical detective work which is at once authoritative, scholarly and delightfully chatty... due to Whitehead's own indefatigable physical adventures, it's also a travel adventure to rival Bruce Chatwin's wanderings.' - The Leader 'Whitehead's book, winner of the NSW Premier's Award, has the intensity of the novel combined with the attentiveness to detail of a good travelogue, and gives a deserved prominence not only to the Paraguayan experiment but also to Australian-Latin American relations in general.' - Antipodes

In Search of the Australian Tribe of Paraguay

Paradise Mislaid

Likened to Proust, to Günter Grass and Virginia Woolf, W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) is one of the most important writers of our time, combining a wide readership with universal critical acclaim. Now available in paperback, this first collection to appear in English provides a thorough assessment of his achievement through newly commissioned essays by leading international scholars, offering interdisciplinary perspectives on Sebald’s work.Features* The first full-length critical book on Sebald to appear in English.* All new essays by leading international scholars.* Covers a range of topics that interested Sebald - such as landscape, nature, travel, haunting and memory.* Presents interdisciplinary perspectives on Sebald's work.

Anne Whitehead

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