Sue Kossew

This book analyses the ways in which contemporary women writers in the two 'settler' colonies of Australia and South Africa explore notions of self, identity and place in their fiction.

Contemporary Australian and South African Fiction

Writing Woman, Writing Place

Melinda Harvey

This is the first book to focus entirely on the under-researched but crucial topic of women in the work of J. M. Coetzee, generally regarded as one of the world’s most significant living writers. The fourteen essays in this collection raise the central issue of how Coetzee’s texts address the ‘woman question’. There is a focus on Coetzee’s representation of women, engagement with women writers and the ethics of what has been termed his ‘ventriloquism’ of women’s voices in his fiction and autobiographical writings, right up to his most recent novel, The Schooldays of Jesus. As such, this collection makes important links between the disciplines of literary and gender studies. It includes essays by well-known Coetzee scholars as well as by emerging scholars from around the world, providing fascinating and timely global insights into how his works are read from differing cultural and scholarly perspectives.

Reading Coetzee's Women

Anne Brewster

This book is the first to examine gender and violence in Australian literature. It argues that literary texts by Australian women writers offer unique ways of understanding the social problem of gendered violence, bringing this often private and suppressed issue into the public sphere. It draws on the international field of violence studies to investigate how Australian women writers challenge the victim paradigm and figure women’s agencies. In doing so, it provides a theoretical context for the increasing number of contemporary literary works by Australian women writers that directly address gendered violence, an issue that has taken on urgent social and political currency. By analysing Australian women’s literary representations of gendered violence, this book rethinks victimhood and agency, particularly from a feminist perspective. One of its major innovations is that it examines mainstream Australian women’s writing alongside that of Indigenous and minoritised women. In doing so it provides insights into the interconnectedness of Australia’s diverse settler, Indigenous and diasporic histories in chapters that examine intimate partner violence, violence against Indigenous women and girls, family violence and violence against children, and the war and political violence.

Gender and Violence in Contemporary Australian Women's Writing

Rethinking the Victim

This is the first published collection of critical essays on the work of Kate Grenville, one of AustraliaOCOs most important contemporary writers. Grenville has been acclaimed for her novels, winning numerous national and international prizes including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Commonwealth WritersOCO Prize. Her novels are marked by sharp observations of outsider figures who are often under pressure to conform to societyOCOs norms. More recently, she has written novels set in AustraliaOCOs past, revisiting and re-imagining colonial encounters between settlers and Indigenous Australians.This collection of essays includes a scholarly introduction and three new essays that reflect on GrenvilleOCOs work in relation to her approach to feminism, her role as public intellectual and her books on writing. The other nine essays provide analyses of each of her novels published to date, from the early success of LilianOCOs Story and Dreamhouse to the most recently published novel, The Lieutenant . Her work has been the subject of some debate and this is reflected in a number of the essays published here, most particularly with regard to her most successful novel to date, The Secret River . This intellectual engagement with important contemporary issues is a mark of GrenvilleOCOs fiction, testament to her own analysis of the vital role of writers in uncertain times. She has suggested that OC writers have ways of going into the darkest places, taking readers with them and coming out safely.OCO This volume attests to GrenvilleOCOs own significance as a writer in a time of change and to the value of her novels as indices of that change and in OC lighting dark places.OCO"

Essays on Kate Grenville

Lighting Dark Places

A Post-colonial Reading of J.M. Coetzee and André Brink

Pen and Power

Julian Murphet

Chris Danta

This new collection of essays on Coetzee examines how his novels create and unsettle literary authority. Its unique contribution is to show how Coetzee provokes us into reconsidering certain basic formal and existential questions such as the nature of literary realism, the authority of the author and the constitution of the human self in a posthumanist setting by consciously revealing the literary-theoretical seams of his work. Strong Opinions makes the innovative claim that Coetzee's work is driven not by a sense of scepticism or nihilism but rather by a form of controlled exposure that defines the literary. The essays in the volume variously draw attention to three of Coetzee's most recent and significant experiments in controlled exposure. The first is the exposure of place-Coetzee's decision to set his novels in his newly adopted country of Australia. The second is the exposure of form-Coetzee's direct, almost essayistic address of literary-philosophical topics within his novels. And the third is the exposure of limits-Coetzee's explicit deconstruction of the traditional limits of human life.

Sue Kossew

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