Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Queensland, 2005. / Includes bibliography.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sydney, 2008. / Title from title screen (viewed 29 Apr. 2008). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Dept. of English, Faculty of Arts. Degree awarded 2008; thesis submitted 2007. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print form.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Queensland, 2005. / Includes bibliography.

No description available.

No description available.

Abstract not available

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-168). CD-ROMs comprise: Appendix A. Family values: fictocritical sentences -- appendix C. Reforming the boy: fictocritical sentences Primarily enacts a fictocritical mapping of local cultural events essentially concerned with crime and trauma in Adelaide. The fictocritical treatment of these events simulates their unresolved or traumatised condition. A secondary concern is the relationship between electronic writing (hypertext) and fictocriticism.

Narratives of place have always been crucial to the construction of Australian identity. The obsession with identity in Australia betrays longstanding uncertainty. It is not difficult to interpret in this uncertainty a replaying of the deeper insecurities surrounding the settler community's legal and more broadly cultural claims to the land. Such insecurities are typically understood negatively. In contrast, this thesis accepts the uncertainty of identity as an activating principle, appropriate to any interpretation of the narratives and themes that inform what it means to be Australian. Fundamental to this uncertainty is a provisionality in the post-colonial experience of place that is papered over by misleadingly coherent spatial narratives that stem from the imperial inheritance of Australian mythology. Place is a model for the tension between the coherence of mythic narratives and the actual rhizomic formlessness of daily life. Place is the ???ground??? of that life, but an ambivalent ground. An Ambivalent Ground approaches postcolonial Australia as a densely woven text. In this text, stories that describe the founding of a nation are enveloped by other stories, not so well known, that work to transform those more familiar narratives. ???Re-placing Australian literature??? describes the process of this transformation. It signifies an interpretative practice which seeks to recuperate the open-ended experience of place that remains disguised by the coherent narratives of nationhood. The process of ???re-placing??? Australian literature shifts the understanding of nation towards a landscape that speaks not so much about identity as about the constitutive performances of everyday life. It also converges with the unhomely dimension that is the colonist's ambiguous sense of belonging. We can understand this process with an analogy used in this thesis, that of music ??? the colonising language, and noise ??? the ostensibly inchoate, unformed background disruptive to cultural order yet revealing the spatial realities of place. Traditionally, cultural narratives in Australia have disguised the much more complex way in which place noisily disrupts and diffracts those narratives, and in the process generates the ambivalence of Australian identity. Rather than a text or a narrative, place is a plenitude, a densely intertwined performance space, a performance that constantly renders experience ??? and its cultural function ??? transgressive. The purpose of this thesis is not to displace stereotypical narratives of nationhood with yet another narrative. Rather, it offers the more risky proposition that provisionality and uncertainty are constitutive features of Australian social being. The narrative in the thesis represents an aggregation of such an ambivalent ground, addressing the persistent tension between place and the larger drama of colonialist history and discourse.

Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis explores the sense of place formed during childhood, as remembered by adult Australians who reconstruct their youth through various forms of life writing. While Australian writers do utilize traditional tropes of Western autobiography, such as the mythology of Eden and the Wordsworthian image of the child communing with Nature, these themes are frequently transformed to meet a uniquely Australian context. Isolation and distance from Europe, and the apparent indifference of our landscape towards white settlement, have received much critical attention in Australian studies generally and, indeed, broadly influence the formation of children’s sense of place across the continent. However, writers are also concerned with the role of place on a more local level. Through a comparison of writing from Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria, this thesis explores regional landscape preoccupations that create an awareness of local identity, variously contributing to or frustrating the child’s sense of belonging. Western Australian writing is dominated by images of isolation, the fragility of white settlement in a dry land lacking fresh water, and a pervasive beach culture. A strong sense of the littoral pervades writing from this region. Queensland’s frontier mythology is of a different flavour: warm and tropical, nature here is exuberant, constantly threatening to overwhelm culture, already perceived as transient due to the flimsy aspect of the “Queenslander” house. Writing from Victoria, to some extent, tends to more closely follow English models, juxtaposing country and city environments, although there is a distinctly local flavour to many representations of urban Melbourne and its flat, grid-like organization. As Australian society becomes more concentrated on the coastal fringe, the beach is an increasingly significant environment. Though more prominent in writing from some regions than others, coastal imagery broadly reflects the modern Australian’s sense of inhabiting a liminal zone with negotiable boundaries.

Doctor of Philosphy(PhD) / This thesis explores the sense of place formed during childhood, as remembered by adult Australians who reconstruct their youth through various forms of life writing. While Australian writers do utilize traditional tropes of Western autobiography, such as the mythology of Eden and the Wordsworthian image of the child communing with Nature, these themes are frequently transformed to meet a uniquely Australian context. Isolation and distance from Europe, and the apparent indifference of our landscape towards white settlement, have received much critical attention in Australian studies generally and, indeed, broadly influence the formation of children’s sense of place across the continent. However, writers are also concerned with the role of place on a more local level. Through a comparison of writing from Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria, this thesis explores regional landscape preoccupations that create an awareness of local identity, variously contributing to or frustrating the child’s sense of belonging. Western Australian writing is dominated by images of isolation, the fragility of white settlement in a dry land lacking fresh water, and a pervasive beach culture. A strong sense of the littoral pervades writing from this region. Queensland’s frontier mythology is of a different flavour: warm and tropical, nature here is exuberant, constantly threatening to overwhelm culture, already perceived as transient due to the flimsy aspect of the “Queenslander” house. Writing from Victoria, to some extent, tends to more closely follow English models, juxtaposing country and city environments, although there is a distinctly local flavour to many representations of urban Melbourne and its flat, grid-like organization. As Australian society becomes more concentrated on the coastal fringe, the beach is an increasingly significant environment. Though more prominent in writing from some regions than others, coastal imagery broadly reflects the modern Australian’s sense of inhabiting a liminal zone with negotiable boundaries.