v. 1 [Novel]: End of the night girl [Embargoed] -- v. 2 [Exegesis]: Navigating the kingdom of night: writing the holocaust / 'End of the Night Girl': Nothing seems to go right for Molly – she’s stuck in a dead-end waitressing job, she’s sleeping with a man she doesn’t even like, and she’s just been saddled with a swarm of goldfish and a pregnant stepsister. The chance discovery of an old photograph leads her into an act of creation, and brings her into contact with the ghost of a woman who has been dead for more than sixty years. Sixty years earlier, in Poland, Gienia’s family arranges her marriage to a distant cousin. Not long after her marriage to this stranger, the Nazis invade and she has to face life in the ghetto and the horrors of Auschwitz. End of the Night Girl is a complex fictional narrative in which the lives of these two women, ‘real’ and imagined, imagined and re-imagined, are inextricably combined. ‘Navigating the Kingdom of Night’: Critics, historians and Holocaust survivors have argued for decades over whether the Holocaust should be accessible to fiction and, if so, who has the right to write those fictions. ‘Navigating the Kingdom of Night’ addresses such concerns and analyses various literary strategies adopted by authors of Holocaust fiction, including the non-realist narrative techniques used by authors such as Yaffa Eliach, Jonathan Safran Foer and John Boyne and the self-reflexivity of Art Spiegelman. Through the course of the essay I contextualise End of the Night Girl by turning my attention to works that raise critical issues of authorial intent and the reader/writer contract; for example Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird and Helen Darville’s The Hand That Signed the Paper. How did I resolve my own concerns? Which texts helped me and why? Together End of the Night Girl and ‘Navigating the Kingdom of Night’, one creatively and one critically, explore these complex and controversial questions in a contemporary Australian context. / Thesis(PhD)-- School of Humanities, 2007

This thesis demonstrates the close links between Australian literature and German thought and culture in Catherine Martin's An Australian Girl (1890) and Henry Handel Richardson's Maurice Guest (1908), and thereby provides a fuller understanding of the sophisticated literary and intellectual purposes of these two works. In examining the German elements in each novel, and the contexts from which much of that material is drawn, this study seeks to supplement the scholarly explanations provided in the two Academy Editions of these works. While Maurice Guest has received serious scholarly attention, An Australian Girl has been accorded relatively little. Despite generally favourable reviews on publication, both appear to have been undervalued over time. The study begins with a brief historical survey of German migration to Australia and the contribution German migrants made to the intellectual life and culture of the evolving nation. The examination of Catherine Martin's work includes: biographical details, particularly concerning her contact with German culture; an analysis of the form of the novel and a comparison of An Australian Girl with Goethe's Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister with regard to form, theme and characterisation; an analysis of German philosophical elements in the novel; and Martin's presentation of social conditions in Germany in 1888-90, and their role in the novel as a whole. The examination of Henry Handel Richardson's work encompasses: biographical details; the genesis of Maurice Guest; differences between the reception of the novel in England and Germany; the genre to which the novel belongs and parallels with Künstlerromane; an analysis of Richardson's description of the physical, historical and intellectual milieu of Leipzig, and its role in the novel; and finally her integration of German social customs and the German language into the text. Use has been made of five primary sources which have not been used before in any detail with regard to these aspects of either author: additional material from the Mount Gambier Border Watch; The Hatbox Letters, the family history of the Martin and Clarke families; the German translation of Maurice Guest; German reviews of Maurice Guest; and the correspondence between Richardson and her French translator Paul Solanges. The key argument of this thesis is that the German influence on both form and content, in the case of An Australian Girl, and on style and content, in the case of Maurice Guest, is deep and various, and that these German elements have proved to be an impediment to a full understanding and appreciation of these novels for many Anglo-Saxon readers and reviewers. In the two novels Martin and Richardson provide pointers to Australia's earlier interaction with the wider world and display a level of sophistication which makes these works worthy of greater recognition than they currently enjoy.

v. 1 [Novel]: End of the night girl [Embargoed] -- v. 2 [Exegesis]: Navigating the kingdom of night: writing the holocaust / 'End of the Night Girl': Nothing seems to go right for Molly – she’s stuck in a dead-end waitressing job, she’s sleeping with a man she doesn’t even like, and she’s just been saddled with a swarm of goldfish and a pregnant stepsister. The chance discovery of an old photograph leads her into an act of creation, and brings her into contact with the ghost of a woman who has been dead for more than sixty years. Sixty years earlier, in Poland, Gienia’s family arranges her marriage to a distant cousin. Not long after her marriage to this stranger, the Nazis invade and she has to face life in the ghetto and the horrors of Auschwitz. End of the Night Girl is a complex fictional narrative in which the lives of these two women, ‘real’ and imagined, imagined and re-imagined, are inextricably combined. ‘Navigating the Kingdom of Night’: Critics, historians and Holocaust survivors have argued for decades over whether the Holocaust should be accessible to fiction and, if so, who has the right to write those fictions. ‘Navigating the Kingdom of Night’ addresses such concerns and analyses various literary strategies adopted by authors of Holocaust fiction, including the non-realist narrative techniques used by authors such as Yaffa Eliach, Jonathan Safran Foer and John Boyne and the self-reflexivity of Art Spiegelman. Through the course of the essay I contextualise End of the Night Girl by turning my attention to works that raise critical issues of authorial intent and the reader/writer contract; for example Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird and Helen Darville’s The Hand That Signed the Paper. How did I resolve my own concerns? Which texts helped me and why? Together End of the Night Girl and ‘Navigating the Kingdom of Night’, one creatively and one critically, explore these complex and controversial questions in a contemporary Australian context. / Thesis(PhD)-- School of Humanities, 2007

TITLE: The Fictional Man: Ned Kelly in Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang in Comparison with Older Portrayals AUTHOR: Adam Prentis DEPARTMENT: Department of English Language and Literature SUPERVISOR: PhDr. Petr Chalupský, Ph.D. ABSTRACT: The thesis concerns itself with the analysis of various personality aspects of the protagonist of Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) - Ned Kelly. Albeit a historical figure, Ned Kelly is approached as a fictional character with focus placed on his symbolic status of Australian nationality, myth and manhood, and on the literary means that point to this. The separate aspects are placed in an evolutionary context through comparisons with older portrayals of the same character - in Max Brown's Australian Son (1948) and J. J. Kenneally's The Complete Inner History of the Kelly Gang and their Pursuers (1929), all of which use a heroising approach to the man. The work shows that Ned Kelly may be perceived in many complex ways, with further possibilities for analysis suggested. Comparing the three books, it is found that although considerable unifying tendencies and moments exist, some aspects have a significant difference in focus or emphasis. A shift is noted from a confrontational idealising defence of what is perceived as a historical person to a...

Esta tese apresenta e analisa excertos da minha tradução não publicada de The Solid Mandala, de Patrick White, em português brasileiro, considerando seus aspectos sóciohistóricos e culturais em três níveis: como tradutor, como revisor da tradução e como crítico literário. A teoria dos polissistemas de Itamar Even-Zohar é adotada para justificar a importância de (re)introduzir Patrick White como representante da Literatura Australiana em nosso sistema literário brasileiro por meio da tradução. Como suporte às capacidades necessárias para realizar a tarefa, o modelo de competências de Amparo Hurtado Albir é apresentado. Quanto aos aspectos culturais, a teoria dos itens específico-culturais de Javier Franco Aixelá é empregada. As traduções publicadas em francês, italiano e espanhol são contrastadas com a minha a fim de identificar inconsistências e/ou soluções, bem como chamar a atenção para desafios que não foram contemplados. A versão em português brasileiro é proposta por meio de excertos selecionados, com os três níveis estando em funcionamento durante o processo de revisão da tradução. Ao buscar fazer a obra de Patrick White ser redescoberta não somente no Brasil, mas também na América Latina e em outros países de língua portuguesa, por meio da tradução, esta tese oferece uma contribuição inédita aos Estudos de Tradução. / This dissertation presents and analyzes excerpts from my unpublished translation of Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala into Brazilian Portuguese considering its socio-historical and cultural aspects at three levels of reading: as a translator, as a revisor/proofreader of the translation and as a literary critic. Itamar Even-Zohar’s Polysystems Theory is adopted to justify the importance of (re)introducing Patrick White as a representative of Australian Literature into our Brazilian system via translation. Supporting the abilities necessary to perform the task, Amparo Hurtado Albir’s model of competences is presented. In regards to cultural aspects, Javier Franco Aixelá’s culture-specific items theory is used. The translations into French, German, Italian and Spanish are contrasted to mine, so as to identify inconsistencies and/or solutions and call attention to challenges which were not addressed. The version in Brazilian Portuguese is conveyed in this dissertation via selected excerpts, with the three levels being at work during the proofreading process of the translation. By attempting to make Patrick White’s oeuvre be rediscovered not only in Brazil, but also in South America and in other Portuguese-speaking countries, through translation, this dissertation presents an innovative contribution to Translation Studies.

The problem with which this thesis is concerned is the relationship between literature and politics. By means of a biographical and historical study two significant writers of the 1930s/40s I examine the ways in which the pressures of Depression, the threat of fascism and the onset of war influenced Australian writing. In particular, I ask whether the political issues of the period affected what these authors wrote and how they wrote it. My conclusion is that pressure of political concern caused significant personal, philosophical and political changes in Barnard and Davison, and that it affected both the genre in which they wrote and the content of their fiction. They turned from fiction to cultural commentary, historical writing, political pamphleteering and activism. They utilised short fiction as a means of discussing their worries about the state of the world and in order to promote values they felt threatened. When they returned to longer fiction their work bore, to differing degrees, in its ideas, arguments and imagery, the influence of their political engagement. More generally, I conclude that liberal humanism was the major animating philosophy of writers in the 1930s and that their concern with political issues grew from their conviction that western liberal democracy was the most fruitful soil for the production of art, a climate of freedom which they felt threatened by both fascism and war. This anxiety is the most important factor in both their politicisation and the work they did under the latter???s influence.

Abstract This thesis offers the first detailed critical account of the Greek-Australian writer, Alex Doucas (1900-1962) who came to Australia in 1927 as a migrant from Asia Minor. It attempts to place his work in the perspectives of Greek and Australian literatures and to evaluate his position both as a migrant and as a writer. The Asia Minor Catastrophe and the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923, as well as the Great Depression he faced in Australia along with many other Australians had a profound effect on his social outlook. Considered one of the pioneers of Greek-Australian Literature, Doucas played an important role in the development of Greek community life in Australia during the pre- and post-World War II periods. His work consists of two published novels (one posthumously) and a significant body of published and unpublished, stories, poems, translations and essays. Out of print for some decades, it remains largely unknown to the general public or even to academic circles in Greece and in Australia. It was, however, a landmark of Greek-Australian Literature and continues to have more than historical interest in its treatment of migration, exile and displacement, and in its use of intercultural perspectives to forge a positive vision for humanity. Although forced into ill-paid manual labour for much of his life after his arrival in Australia, Alex Doucas tried to develop links and relationships with Australian intellectual circles and to become involved in Australian life in the broadest way. At the same time, he never lost contact with social, political and literary developments in Greece. Alex Doucas maintained close relations with both the Greek and Australian literary traditions. As a writer he belongs to the Greek generation of the 1930s and its literary traditions. In his work, he dealt with events which took place in Anatolia before the Asia Minor Catastrophe as well as with the impact the catastrophe had on Greek society. He is one of the first writers of his generation who turned his attention to the “other side of the coin” and investigated the impact of the Catastrophe on the Turkish people. This perspective was adopted mainly due to the openness that he found in Australia, an openness that led to Multiculturalism. Alex Doucas was a multiculturalist before his time. His work is a fine example of the Australian version of Multiculturalism. Through his brother Stratis Doucas (also a writer) and others, he kept himself informed on all sorts of changes and developments in his native country, Greece, especially as it was shaped after the Asia Minor Catastrophe. At the same time, he tried to understand the Australian way of life, its culture and its literary traditions. His bi-cultural position gave him a powerful perspective. He attempted to understand the Australian way of life through his Greekness and to find answers for problematic events that happened in Greece through his Australian experience. Across the entire span of Doucas’s work, it is clear that his political philosophy and his belief in the goals of socialism played a crucial role in his consciousness of himself as a writer whose role was to provide the artistic equivalent of the philosophical basis of Marxism, best expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) by Marx, in his famous dictum, "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it". In other words, it was never enough for Doucas simply to describe in social realist terms the conditions of life and the aspirations of human beings. His aim was to show how these conditions might be changed for the better, not only for the individual, but for the community as a whole. Equally, he wished to show how people’s aspirations, particularly those of an immigrant community familiar with exile, suffering and loss, might be more fully realised.

This thesis explores the issues of representation and identity through an examination of the writings of Thomas King and Mudrooroo. The particular focus of the dissertation is on the similar yet distinctive ways these authors explore past and present possibilities for representing Indigenous peoples in fiction. This discussion has a largely Canadian-Australian cross-cultural comparison because of the national milieux in which each author writes. The research question, then, addresses the authors' common approaches to Indigenous, colonial and postcolonial themes and the similar textual attitudes to the act of representation of identity in writing. In order to explore these ideas the chapters in the thesis do not each focus on a particular author or even on a specific text. Each chapter examines the writings of both authors comparatively, and reads the novels of both Thomas King and Mudrooroo thematically. The themes unifying each chapter occur in four major movements. Firstly, the Preface and Chapter One are primarily concerned with the methodology of the thesis. This methodology can be summarised as a combination of general postcolonial assumptions about the impact of colonial texts on representations of Indigenous peoples; ideas of reading practice coming from North American and Australian Indigenous writing communities and cultural studies theories on race. A movement in argument then occurs in Chapters Two and Three, which focus upon how the authors interact with colonising narratives from the past. Chapter Four shifts from this focus on past images and explores how the authors commonly re-imagine the present. In Chapters Five and Six the dissertation progresses from charting the authors' common responses to colonising narratives -- past and present -- and engages in the writings in terms of the authors' explications of Indigenous themes and their celebrations of Indigenous presence. These chapters analyse the ways in which King and Mudrooroo similarly re-envisage narrative process, time and space. Overall, the thesis is not interested in authorisations of Thomas King and Mudrooroo as 'Indigenous writers'. Rather, it argues that these authors on either side of the world use very similar techniques to reject previous representations of Indigenous people, and, importantly, attempt to change the meaning of and approach to representation. In so doing this thesis finds that the novels of both authors respond to colonising semiotic fields, as well as reducing the importance of such fields by incorporating them within a larger framework of repeated and multiple evocations of Indigenous identity. The writings of both Thomas King and Mudrooroo share a selfconscious textuality. The same tales and emblems are repeated within each author's entire oeuvre in order to reinforce their thematic trope of re-presentation as a constantly evolving process. Finally, the thesis concludes that a significant common effect of this similar approach to re-presentation is an emphasis on the community over the individual, and a community that can be best described as pan-Indigenous rather than specific.

This thesis examines the crime fiction of Mary Helena Fortune (c.18331910). My analysis concentrates on Fortune’s series, “The Detective’s Album”, more than four hundred self-contained crime stories published over forty years that are framed as the “casebook” of a colonial detective, Mark Sinclair. Although this series remains nominally the reminiscences of Sinclair, the stories within the casebook increasingly employ private and amateur detectives, and Sinclair himself transforms from a member of the colonial police force into a private inquiry agent. I characterise this move as constituting a shift from Fortune’s detecting heroes acting essentially as “public avengers” to becoming instead predominantly “private defenders”. Accompanying the evolution of the detective are other structural changes in Fortune’s crime fiction, so that by the 1880s an increasingly private model of detective was more often resolving a domestic mystery in a suburban setting than investigating a violent crime on the mean streets. The central aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the ways in which these transformations relate to the differentiated social and historical conditions within colonial Australia. Through the close analysis of Fortune’s crime texts and examination of the cultural and historical context in which they were produced, the thesis offers perspectives on broad cultural patterns. This thesis draws predominantly on a lineage of critics who have analysed crime fiction using Marxist, Foucauldian and Postcolonialist strategies. I utilise in particular the central paradigm of D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1988): – his assertion that in the nineteenth-century novel the “move to discard the role of the detective is at the same time a move to disperse the function of detection”. The appearance of private and amateur detectives in Fortune’s crime fiction indicates respectively the professionalisation and privatisation of the mechanism of detection, evolutions that reflect a broad embourgeoisment within her crime corpus. Such a social transformation of nineteenth-century crime fiction occurred across the industrialised world. In British crime fiction, for instance, the ordinary workaday policeman of the 1850s had given way by the 1890s to such independent and professional detectives as Sherlock Holmes. But while the embourgeoisment of crime fiction was an international phenomenon, I argue that in Australian crime fiction the emergence of private and surrogate detectives also performed a second, crucial function: to distance the agent of detection, and demotic crime fiction itself, from the enforcement of imperial order in the colonial landscape. The movement from simple criminal apprehensions to financial and reputation protection also increasingly distances Fortune’s crime fiction from the kind of direct social control necessary to enforce imperial order. v This thesis contains four analytical chapters, each of which is devoted to exploring mechanisms by which Fortune’s crime fiction dispersed the function of detection and concealed the conservative disciplinary order that underpins the fiction. The first three chapters examine familiar forms of fictional detectives: the official police detective; the private and the amateur detective; and the female detective, both official and unofficial. The final analytical chapter examines the way in which the criminal also worked as part of the dispersed function of detection. One of the key ways in which Fortune’s crime fiction works to reinforce disciplinary order is, paradoxically, to make the detectives often fail to solve the crime, so that order is restored only by the collective efforts of several individuals or through the mechanism of fate or an avenging land, or even as a consequence of the criminals’ own actions. Thus Fortune’s crime fiction is not a celebration of virtuoso individualism, as is found in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, but instead of an ethically logical and just world in which order is the product of collective efforts on the part of a largely cohesive community, and in which the apprehension of criminals and restoration of order are presented as inevitable outcomes. Stephen Knight has described Fortune as “internationally the most significant woman writing about crime in the mid-nineteenth century” (Continent of Mystery 4), and yet her impressive corpus of crime fiction has never received extended scholarly attention. This thesis addresses this omission, but more importantly, the conclusions I offer about Mary Fortune’s crime fiction contribute to an understanding of a much larger question about how Australians began to imagine and adopt a national identity in the nineteenth century. It is certainly clear from Fortune’s crime corpus that well before the nationalist-democratic cultural insurrection of the 1890s, Australian fiction already offered versions of the key paradigms that still inflect the national imagination into the twenty-first century.

The problem with which this thesis is concerned is the relationship between literature and politics. By means of a biographical and historical study two significant writers of the 1930s/40s I examine the ways in which the pressures of Depression, the threat of fascism and the onset of war influenced Australian writing. In particular, I ask whether the political issues of the period affected what these authors wrote and how they wrote it. My conclusion is that pressure of political concern caused significant personal, philosophical and political changes in Barnard and Davison, and that it affected both the genre in which they wrote and the content of their fiction. They turned from fiction to cultural commentary, historical writing, political pamphleteering and activism. They utilised short fiction as a means of discussing their worries about the state of the world and in order to promote values they felt threatened. When they returned to longer fiction their work bore, to differing degrees, in its ideas, arguments and imagery, the influence of their political engagement. More generally, I conclude that liberal humanism was the major animating philosophy of writers in the 1930s and that their concern with political issues grew from their conviction that western liberal democracy was the most fruitful soil for the production of art, a climate of freedom which they felt threatened by both fascism and war. This anxiety is the most important factor in both their politicisation and the work they did under the latter???s influence.