Download or read book The Girl Green as Elderflower written by Randolph Stow and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2015-08-26 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He thought of his dream, of how he had looked up out of his hole, his pit, his wolf-pit, and seen the foreign leaves, which had formed themselves into a face... Laid low by a tropical disease and an accompanying malaise, Crispin Clare returns to his ancestral home in East Anglia. Local folklore seeps into his fever dreams and into his writing, and the lines between reality and myth soon start to blur. In this finely woven tale of illness and recovery, family and fable, Randolph Stow creates a unique imaginative landscape, populated by figures from old English myths and legends, and from Clare’s present. Julian Randolph ‘Mick’ Stow was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1935. He attended local schools before boarding at Guildford Grammar in Perth, where the renowned author Kenneth Mackenzie had been a student. While at university he sent his poems to a British publisher. The resulting collection, Act One, won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal in 1957—as did the prolific young writer’s third novel, To the Islands, the following year. To the Islands also won the 1958 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Stow reworked the novel for a second edition almost twenty-five years later, but never allowed its two predecessors to be republished. He worked briefly as an anthropologist’s assistant in New Guinea—an experience that subsequently informed Visitants, one of three masterful late novels—then fell seriously ill and returned to Australia. In the 1960s he lectured at universities in Australia and England, and lived in America on a Harkness fellowship. He published his second collection of verse, Outrider; the novel Tourmaline, on which critical opinion was divided; and his most popular fiction, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and Midnite. For years afterwards Stow produced mainly poetry, libretti and reviews. In 1969 he settled permanently in England: first in Suffolk, then in Essex, where he moved in 1981. He received the 1979 Patrick White Award. Randolph Stow died in 2010, aged seventy-four. A private man, a prodigiously gifted yet intermittently silent author, he has been hailed as ‘the least visible figure of that great twentieth-century triumvirate of Australian novelists whose other members are Patrick White and Christina Stead’. Praise for The Girl Green as Elderflower ‘As eccentric as it is magnificently achieved.’ Geordie Williamson ‘His novels and poetry embody a uniquely rich and strange account of the land and people of Australia that we can ill afford to lose.’ Australian Book Review

Download or read book The Girl Green as Elderflower written by Randolph Stow and published by . This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel by a winner of the Patrick White Award, first published in Britain in 1980. Past and present are blurred, and the hero finds himself caught up in two worlds: that of President Kennedy's inaugural year and 12th-century Suffolk.

Download or read book Mick written by Suzanne Falkiner and published by Apollo Books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 916 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Randolph Stow was one of the great Australian writers of his generation. His novel To the Islands - written in his early twenties after living on a remote Aboriginal mission - won the Miles Franklin Award for 1958. In later life, after publishing seven remarkable novels and several collections of poetry, Stow's literary output slowed. This biography examines the productive period as well as his long periods of publishing silence. In Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow, Suzanne Falkiner unravels the reasons behind Randolph Stow's quiet retreat from Australia and the wider literary world. Meticulously researched, insightful and at times deeply moving, Falkiner's biography pieces together an intriguing story from Stow's personal letters, diaries, and interviews with the people who knew him best. And many of her tales - from Stow's beginnings in idyllic rural Australia, to his critical turning point in Papua New Guinea, and his final years in Essex, England - provide us with keys to unlock the meaning of Stow's rich and introspective works. *** "The overriding virtue of this book is Falkiner's steady trust in the intelligence of her readers. She spells very little out, presenting us instead with this carefully curated wealth of textual evidence." -- Kerryn Goldsworthy, Australian Book Review *** Finally we have some sense of the wounds that shaped and animated Stow's poetry and fiction." -- Geordie Williamson, The Australian *** "Suzanne Falkiner's prodigious biography of Randolph Stow is a book long awaited by many; not just the literati of his native Australia but those countless readers who feasted on his novels and wondered what kind of person could write with such imaginative power. Not only do we come to appreciate what led this renowned Australian writer to create his celebrated fictional works, but we are also given rare glimpses into the inner world of this most private individual, whose personal demons included a dependence on alcohol, two suicide attempts, and struggles with homosexuality. Falkiner cut her teeth on six previous biographies, which stood her in good stead to tackle this challenge. Against significant odds, she has done a masterful job in painting a portrait of one of Australia's most revered writers, somewhat akin to what compatriot David Marr did for Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick White. It will no doubt send readers scurrying back to Stow's novels, which, as Marr once said, is the best news a biographer can hear." --World Literature Today, January-February 2017 [Subject: Biography, Literary Criticism]

Download or read book International Medievalisms written by Leverhulme Early Career Fellow Mary Boyle and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identifies and investigates international medievalism through three distinct strands: "Internationally Nationalist", "Someone Else's Past?", and "Activist Medievalism". Medievalism - the reception of the Middle Ages - often invokes a set of tropes generally considered 'medieval', rather than consciously engaging with medieval cultures and societies. International medievalism offers an additional interpretative layer by juxtaposing two or more national cultures, at least one of which is medieval. 'National' can be aspirational: it might refer to the area within agreed borders, or to the people who live there, but it might also describe the people who understand, or imagine, themselves to constitute a nation. And once 'medieval' becomes simply a collection of ideas, it can be re-formed as desired, cast as more geographically than historically specific, or function as a gateway to an even more nebulous past. This collection identifies and investigates international medievalism through three distinct strands, 'Internationally Nationalist', 'Someone Else's Past?', and 'Activist Medievalism', exploring medievalist media from the textual to the architectural. Subjects range from The Green Children of Woolpit to Refugee Tales, and from Viking metal to Joan of Arc. As the contributors to each section make clear, for centuries the medieval has provided material for countless competing causes and cannot be contained within historical, political, or national borders. The essays show how the medieval is repeatedly co-opted and recreated, formed as much as formative: inviting us to ask why, and in service of what.

Download or read book From New National to World Literature written by Bruce King and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-05 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New National to World English Literature offers a personal perspective on the evolution of a major cultural movement that began with decolonization, continued with the assertion of African, West Indian, Commonwealth, and other literatures, and has evolved through postcolonial to world or international English literature. Bruce King, one of the pioneers in the study of the new national literatures and still an active literary critic, discusses the personalities, writers, issues, and contexts of what he considers the most important change in culture since modernism. In this selection of forty-five essays and reviews, King discusses issues such as the emergence and aesthetics of African literature, the question of the existence of a “Nigerian literature”, the place of the new universities in decolonizing culture, the contrasting models of American and Irish literatures, and the changing nature of exile and diasporas. He emphasizes themes such as traditionalism versus modernism, the dangers of cultural assertion, and the relationships between nationalism and internationalism. Special attention is given to Nigerian, West Indian, Australian, Indian, and Pakistani literature.

Download or read book The Burning Library written by Geordie Williamson and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-24 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alarmed by the increasingly marginal status of Australian literature in the academy, Williamson has set out to reintroduce us to those key writers whose works we may have forgotten or missed altogether. His focus is on fiction that gives pleasure, and he is ardent in defence of books that for whatever reason sit uneasily in the present moment.

Download or read book Spatial Relations Volume One written by John Kinsella and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2013 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These volumes present John Kinsella’s uncollected critical writings and personal reflections from the early 1990s to the present. Included are extended pieces of memoir written in the Western Australian wheatbelt and the Cambridge fens, as well as acute essays and commentaries on the nature and genesis of personal and public poetics. Pivotal are a sense of place and how we write out of it; pastoral’s relevance to contemporary poetry; how we evaluate and critique (post)colonial creativity and intrusion into Indigenous spaces; and engaged analysis of activism and responsibility in poetry and literary discourse. The author is well-known for saying he is preeminently an “anarchist, vegan, pacifist” – not stock epithets, but the raison d’être behind his work. The collection moves from overviews of contemporary Australian poetry to studies of such writers as Randolph Stow, Ouyang Yu, Charmaine Papertalk–Green, Lionel Fogarty, Les Murray, Peter Porter, Dorothy Hewett, Judith Wright, Alamgir Hashmi, Patrick Lane, Robert Sullivan, C.K. Stead, and J.H. Prynne, and on to numerous book reviews of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, originally published in newspapers and journals from around the world. There are also searching reflections on visual artists (Sidney Nolan, Karl Wiebke, Shaun Atkinson) and wide-ranging opinion pieces and editorials. In counterpoint are conversations with other writers (Rosanna Warren, Rod Mengham, Alvin Pang, and Tracy Ryan) and explorations of schooling, being struck by lightning, ‘international regionalism’, hybridity, and experimental poetry. This two-volume argosy has been brought together by scholar and editor Gordon Collier, who has allowed the original versions to speak with their unique informal–formal ductus. Kinsella’s interest is in the ethics of space and how we use it. His considerations of the wheatbelt through Wagner and Dante (and rewritings of these), and, in Thoreauvian vein, his ‘place’ at Jam Tree Gully on the edge of Western Australia’s Avon Valley form a web of affirmation and anxiety: it is space he feels both part of and outside, em¬braced in its every magnitude but felt to be stolen land, whose restitution needs articulating in literature and in real time. Beneath it all is a celebration of the natural world – every plant, animal, rock, sentinel peak, and grain of sand – and a commitment to an ecological poetics.

Download or read book Moving Among Strangers written by Gabrielle Carey and published by Univ. of Queensland Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two literary lives defined by storytelling and secrets As her mother Joan lies dying, Gabrielle Carey writes a letter to Joan’s childhood friend, the reclusive novelist Randolph Stow. This letter sets in motion a literary pilgrimage that reveals long-buried family secrets. Like her mother, Stow had grown up in Western Australia. After early literary success and a Miles Franklin Award win in 1958 for his novel To the Islands, he left for England and a life of self-imposed exile. Living most of her life on the east coast, Gabrielle was also estranged from her family’s west Australian roots, but never questioned why. A devoted fan of Stow’s writing, she becomes fascinated by his connection with her extended family, but before she can meet him he dies. With only a few pieces of correspondence to guide her, Gabrielle embarks on a journey from the red-dirt landscape of Western Australia to the English seaside town of Harwich in a quest to understand her family’s past and Stow’s place in it. Moving Among Strangers is a celebration of one of Australia’s most enigmatic and visionary writers.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Post Colonial Literatures in English written by Eugene Benson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-11-30 with total page 2597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Post-Colonial Literatures in English, together with English Literature and American Literature, form one of the three major groupings of literature in English, and, as such, are widely studied around the world. Their significance derives from the richness and variety of experience which they reflect. In three volumes, this Encyclopedia documents the history and development of this body of work and includes original research relating to the literatures of some 50 countries and territories. In more than 1,600 entries written by more than 600 internationally recognized scholars, it explores the effect of the colonial and post-colonial experience on literatures in English worldwide.

Download or read book Midnite written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Strange Country written by Anthony J. Hassall and published by St. Lucia ; New York : University of Queensland Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book To the Islands written by Randolph Stow and published by Univ. of Queensland Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This masterpiece of Australian fiction was written by Randolph Stow when he was just twenty-two. It won for him the coveted Miles Franklin Award and the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature society. A work of mesmerising power, against a background of black-white fear and violence, To the Islandsjourneys towards the strange country of one man's soul. Set in the desolate outback landscape of Australia's north-west, the novel tracks the last days of a worn-out Anglican missionary. Fleeing his mission after an agonising confrontation, he immerses himself in the wilderness, searching for the isalnds of death and mystery. 'To the Islandshas acquired the status of an Australian classic. Half a century after it was written, its challenges remain central to the continuing quests of European Australians for psychic integration, and for reconciliation with indigenous Australians and with the land itself.' Anthony J. Hassall 'A novel of great originality and depth ... his writing swells with a dark power that makes it seem, in the true sense, inspired.' Encounter

Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Fiction 3 Volume Set written by Brian W. Shaffer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 1581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language. Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o) and their key works Examines the genres and sub-genres of fiction in English across the twentieth century (including crime fiction, Sci-Fi, chick lit, the noir novel, and the avant-garde novel) as well as the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field, such as censorship, globalization, modernist fiction, fiction and the film industry, and the fiction of migration, diaspora, and exile

Download or read book Visitants written by Randolph Stow and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2015-08-26 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I want to die. I do not want to be mad...It is like my body is a house, and some visitor has come, and attacked the person who lived there. After an Australian patrol officer commits suicide on a remote New Guinea island in 1959, five witnesses are called to a government inquiry. Each has a disturbing story to tell: strand by strand, the mystery of the officer’s past is unravelled. But what of other visitants, like the unidentified flying object and the cargo cult it has inspired on the island? Informed by Randolph Stow’s experiences, Visitants is an original, astonishing investigation of colonialism.

Download or read book Australian Writers 1915 1950 written by Selina Samuels and published by Dictionary of Literary Biograp. This book was released on 2002 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The starting date for this volume is central to Australia's self-definition; it is the year of the most famous battle in Australian military history - Gallipoli, during World War I. It marked the first time that Australians fought as a nation rather than part of the British military, and the Gallipoli campaign has come to signify a legendary image of the Australian character - one who is brave in the face of danger, stoic in adversity, and loyal to ones comrades.

Download or read book Travellin Mama Mothers Mothering and Travel written by Charlotte Beyer and published by Demeter Press. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Don’t women with children travel?” Marybeth Bond and Pamela Michael enquire, in their book A Mother’s World: Journeys of the Heart (1998), when discovering the absence of portrayals of travelling mothers. Addressing this absence, our book Travellin’ Mama: Mothers, Mothering and Travel explores the multiple dimensions of motherhood and travel. Through a variety of compelling creative pieces and critical essays with a global outlook and wide-ranging historical, cultural, and national perspectives, Travellin’ Mama: Mothers, Mothering and Travel examines the vital contributions made to travel writing and representations of travel by mothers. Autoethnographical approaches inform many of the pieces in this book, illustrating the significance of the personal and writing the self in re-imagining our cultural narratives and representations of travel, and the mothers who undertake it. This book is about mothers who travel, for mothers who travel with their children, and all those readers who have travelled in any capacity, with or without family.

Download or read book Selected Stories written by Amy Witting and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amy Witting was a master of the short story, the genre in which she felt ‘most at home’. Her subjects—childhood and school, marriage and loneliness, the cruelty of men and women—are rendered in a crisp, understated style, at once compassionate and unsentimental. This new selection of twenty pieces from across five decades includes the acclaimed novella-length ‘The Survivors’ and the final appearance of Isobel Callaghan from I for Isobel. Amy Witting was born in Annandale, an inner suburb of Sydney, in 1918. She attended Sydney University, then taught French and English in state schools. Beginning late in life she published six novels, including The Visit, I for Isobel, Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop and Maria’s War; two collections of short stories; two books of verse, Travel Diary and Beauty Is the Straw; and her Collected Poems. She had numerous poems and short stories published in magazines such as Quadrant and the New Yorker. Witting was awarded the 1993 Patrick White Prize. Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop won the Age Book of the Year Award. Amy Witting died in 2001. ‘Brilliant distillations...tinged with latent tenderness.’ New York Times