Alex Miller: the ruin of time

Alex Miller: the ruin of time PDF Author: Robert Dixon
Publisher: Sydney University Press
ISBN: 1743324073
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book

Book Description
Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time is the first sole-authored critical survey of the respected Australian novelist's eleven novels. While these books are immediately accessible to the general reading public, they are manifestly works of high literary seriousness - substantial, technically masterful and assured, intricately interconnected, and of great imaginative, intellectual and ethical weight. Among his many prizes and awards, Alex Miller has twice won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, for The Ancestor Game in 1993, and Journey to the Stone Country in 2003; the Commonwealth Writers' prize, also for The Ancestor Game in 1993; and the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize, for Conditions of Faith in 2001 and Lovesong in 2011. He received a Centenary Medal in 2001 and the Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2012. In 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Having published his eleventh novel, Coal Creek, in 2013 - which won the Victorian Premier's Fiction Award in 2014 - Miller is currently writing an autobiographical memoir with the working title 'Horizons'.

Alex Miller: the ruin of time

Alex Miller: the ruin of time PDF Author: Robert Dixon
Publisher: Sydney University Press
ISBN: 1743324073
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book

Book Description
Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time is the first sole-authored critical survey of the respected Australian novelist's eleven novels. While these books are immediately accessible to the general reading public, they are manifestly works of high literary seriousness - substantial, technically masterful and assured, intricately interconnected, and of great imaginative, intellectual and ethical weight. Among his many prizes and awards, Alex Miller has twice won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, for The Ancestor Game in 1993, and Journey to the Stone Country in 2003; the Commonwealth Writers' prize, also for The Ancestor Game in 1993; and the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize, for Conditions of Faith in 2001 and Lovesong in 2011. He received a Centenary Medal in 2001 and the Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2012. In 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Having published his eleventh novel, Coal Creek, in 2013 - which won the Victorian Premier's Fiction Award in 2014 - Miller is currently writing an autobiographical memoir with the working title 'Horizons'.

The Novels of Alex Miller

The Novels of Alex Miller PDF Author: Robert Dixon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000248100
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Get Book

Book Description
One of Australia's most respected novelists, Alex Miller's writing is both popular and critically well-received. He is twice winner of Australia's premier literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award. He has said that writing is his way of 'locating connections' and his work is known for its deeply empathic engagement with relationships and cultures. This collection explores his early and later works, including Miller's best-known novels, The Ancestor Game, Journey to the Stone Country, Lovesong and Autumn Laing. Contributors examine his intricately constructed plots, his interest in the nature of home and migration, the representation in his work of Australian history and culture, and key recurring themes including art and Aboriginal issues. Also included is a memoir, illustrated by photographs from his personal collection, in which Alex Miller reflects on his writing life. With contributions from leading critics including Raimond Gaita, Peter Pierce, Ronald A. Sharp, Brenda Walker, Elizabeth Webby and Geordie Williamson, this collection is the first substantial critical analysis of Alex Miller's work. It is an invaluable resource for anyone teaching and studying contemporary Australian literature.

Time, Tide and History

Time, Tide and History PDF Author: Brigid Rooney
Publisher: Sydney University Press
ISBN: 1743329679
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book

Book Description
Time, Tide and History: Eleanor Dark’s Fiction is the first book-length edited collection of scholarly essays to treat the full span of Eleanor Dark’s fiction, advancing a recent revival of critical and scholarly interest in Dark’s writing. This volume not only establishes a new view of Dark’s fiction as a whole, but also reflects on the ways in which her fiction speaks to our present moment, in the context of a globally fraught, post-pandemic, Anthropocene era. Above all, the revisiting of Dark’s fiction is mandated by a desire to recognise the ways in which it anticipates vital debates in Australian literary and national culture today, about settler colonialism and its legacies, and with regard to the histories, condition and status of Australia’s First Nations people. This volume interweaves varied topical themes, from formal debates about modernism, historical realism and melodrama, to questions about modernity’s time and space, about gender and cultural difference, and about the specifics of built and natural environments. Time, Tide and History intentionally loosens the conventions of literary scholarship by including other kinds of work alongside critical and scholarly readings: a written dialogue between two contemporary historians about Dark’s legacy, and a biographical piece on the life and role of Eleanor Dark’s husband, Eric Payten Dark. Bringing together the interwar fiction’s feminist and modernist dimensions with the historical turn of The Timeless Land trilogy, the essays in Time, Tide and History collectively pursue ethical and political questions while teasing out the distinctive thematic, formal and aesthetic features of Dark’s fiction.

A Brief Affair

A Brief Affair PDF Author: Alex Miller
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1761185527
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book

Book Description
A moving novel about storytelling, about truths, and love, from twice Miles Franklin Award winner Alex Miller. 'More than one ghost haunts this tender novel about love in its many guises, condoned and illicit. In his deceptively simple, lucid prose, Alex Miller examines the emotional contradictions inherent in apparent opposites as his central character learns to draw strength and inspiration from unlikely places. Hauntingly beautiful, A Brief Affair will resonate long after its pages are closed.' Sylvia Martin, author of Ink in Her Veins: The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer From the bustling streets of China, to the ominous Cell 16 in an old asylum building, to the familiar sounds and sight of galahs flying over a Victorian farm, A Brief Affair is a tender love story. On the face of it, Dr Frances Egan is a woman who has it all - a loving family and a fine career - until a brief, perfect affair reveals to her an imaginative dimension to her life that is wholly her own. Fran finds the courage and the inspiration to risk everything and change her direction at the age of forty-two. This newfound understanding of herself is fortified by the discovery of a long-forgotten diary from the asylum and the story it reveals. Written with humour, sensitivity and the wisdom for which Miller's work is famous, this exquisitely compassionate novel explores the interior life and the dangerous navigation of love in all its forms. '...richly satisfying and luminous' Emeritus Professor, Tom Griffiths

The 'Imagined Sound' of Australian Literature and Music

The 'Imagined Sound' of Australian Literature and Music PDF Author: Joseph Cummins
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1785270923
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Get Book

Book Description
‘Imagined Sound’ is a unique cartography of the artistic, historical and political forces that have informed the post-World War II representation of Australian landscapes. It is the first book to formulate the unique methodology of ‘imagined sound’, a new way to read and listen to literature and music that moves beyond the dominance of the visual, the colonial mode of knowing, controlling and imagining Australian space. Emphasising sound and listening, this approach draws out and re-examines the key narratives that shape and are shaped by Australian landscapes and histories, stories of first contact, frontier violence, the explorer journey, the convict experience, non-Indigenous belonging, Pacific identity and contemporary Indigenous Dreaming. ‘Imagined Sound’ offers a compelling analysis of how these narratives are reharmonised in key works of literature and music.

Max

Max PDF Author: Alex Miller
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1761060376
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book

Book Description
An astonishing, moving tribute to Alex's friend, Max Blatt, that is at once a meditation on memory itself, on friendship and a reminder to the reader that history belongs to humanity. SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY AWARD 'Max is haunted by devastating insights. Blatt told Miller that the hardest part of torture was the realisation that the torturer was also your brother. It is the same generosity that makes Max such a compelling argument against narrowness and division. Blatt's life has deep and wide ramifications. Miller's intelligent love has created a tale for the ages.' The Age 'This book so beautifully evokes the power of places in shaping our consciousness and perception As readers of Alex Miller, we feel ourselves to be in the presence of a great heart and a penetrating sensibility, and in the thrall of one of our nation's most beloved writers.' Tom Griffiths, Emeritus Professor of History, ANU 'Max tells of Alex Miller's search -- in turns fearful and elated -- for the elusive past of Max Blatt, a man he loves, who loved him and who taught him that he must write with love. Miller discovers that he is also searching for a defining part of himself, formed by his relation to Max Blatt, but whose significance will remain obscure until he finds Max, complete, in his history. With Max, Miller the novelist has written a wonderful work of non-fiction, as fine as the best of his novels. Always a truth-seeker, he has rendered himself vulnerable, unprotected by the liberties permitted to fiction. Max is perhaps his most moving book, a poignant expression of piety, true to his mentor's injunction to write with love.' Raimond Gaita, award-winning author of Romulus, My Father I began to see that whatever I might write about Max, discover about him, piece together with those old shards of memory, it would be his influence on the friendships of the living that would frame his story in the present. According to your 1939 Gestapo file, you adopted the cover names Landau and Maxim. The name your mother and father gave you was Moses. We knew you as Max. You had worked in secret. From an early age you concealed yourself - like the grey box beetle in the final country of your exile, maturing on its journey out of sight beneath the bark of the tree. You risked death every day. And when at last the struggle became hopeless, you escaped the hell and found a haven in China first, and then Australia, where you became one of those refugees who, in their final place of exile, chose not death but silence and obscurity. Alex Miller followed the faint trail of Max Blatt's early life for five years. Max's story unfolded, slowly at first, from the Melbourne Holocaust Centre's records then to Berlin's Federal Archives. From Berlin, Miller travelled to Max's old home town of Wroclaw in Poland. And finally in Israel with Max's niece, Liat Shoham, and her brother Yossi Blatt, at Liat's home in the moshav Shadmot Dvora in the Lower Galilee, the circle of friendship was closed and the mystery of Max's legendary silence was unmasked. Max is an astonishing and moving tribute to friendship, a meditation on memory itself, and a reminder to the reader that history belongs to humanity.

British Art for Australia, 1860-1953

British Art for Australia, 1860-1953 PDF Author: Matthew C. Potter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429752679
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Get Book

Book Description
Traditional postcolonial scholarship on art and imperialism emphasises tensions between colonising cores and subjugated peripheries. The ties between London and British white settler colonies have been comparatively neglected. Artworks not only reveal the controlling intentions of imperialist artists in their creation but also the uses to which they were put by others in their afterlives. In many cases they were used to fuel contests over cultural identity which expose a mixture of rifts and consensuses within the British ranks which were frequently assumed to be homogeneous. British Art for Australia, 1860–1953: The Acquisition of Artworks from the United Kingdom by Australian National Galleries represents the first systematic and comparative study of collecting British art in Australia between 1860 and 1953 using the archives of the Australian national galleries and other key Australian and UK institutions. Multiple audiences in the disciplines of art history, cultural history, and museology are addressed by analysing how Australians used British art to carve a distinct identity, which artworks were desirable, economically attainable, and why, and how the acquisition of British art fits into a broader cultural context of the British world. It considers the often competing roles of the British Old Masters (e.g. Romney and Constable), Victorian (e.g. Madox Brown and Millais), and modern artists (e.g. Nash and Spencer) alongside political and economic factors, including the developing global art market, imperial commerce, Australian Federation, the First World War, and the coming of age of the Commonwealth.

The Simplest Words

The Simplest Words PDF Author: Alex Miller
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1925268543
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book

Book Description
From one of Australia's greatest novelists comes this fine collection, a storyteller's journey. These short stories and essays, written over the last forty years, comprise an insightful and intelligent meditation on the life of the novelist and the culture of contemporary Australia. Personal and intimate as many of these pieces are, this collection forms a kind of assured autobiography, of the sort that only Alex Miller could write. Alex Miller's stories are told with a rare level of wisdom and profundity, engaging the intellect and the emotions simultaneously. Stories are, after all, in his blood.

Middlebrow Modernism

Middlebrow Modernism PDF Author: Melinda J. Cooper
Publisher: Sydney University Press
ISBN: 1743328575
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book

Book Description
Eleanor Dark (1901–85) is one of Australia’s most innovative 20th-century writers. Her extensive oeuvre includes ten novels published from the early 1930s to the late 1950s, and represents a significant engagement with global modernity from a unique position within settler culture. Yet Dark’s contribution to 20th-century literature has been undervalued in the fields of both Australian literary studies and world literature. Although two biographies have been written about her life, there has been no book-length critical study of her writing published since 1976. Middlebrow Modernism counters this neglect by providing the first full-length critical survey of Eleanor Dark’s writing to be published in over four decades. Focusing on the fiction that Dark produced during the interwar years and reading this in the context of her larger body of work, this book positions Dark’s writing as important to the study of Australian literature and global modernism. Melinda Cooper argues that Dark’s fiction exhibits a distinctive aesthetic of middlebrow modernism, which blends attributes of literary modernism with popular fiction. It seeks to mediate and reconcile apparent binaries: modernism and mass culture; liberal humanism and experimental aesthetics; settler society and international modernity. The term middlebrow modernism also captures the way Dark negotiated cosmopolitan commitments with more place-based attachments to nation and local community within the mid-20th century. Middlebrow Modernism posits that Dark’s fiction and the broader phenomenon of Australian modernism offer essential case studies for larger debates operating within global modernist and world literature studies, providing perspectives these fields might otherwise miss.

Reckoning with the Past

Reckoning with the Past PDF Author: Ashley Barnwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351613359
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Get Book

Book Description
This is the first book to examine how Australian fiction writers draw on family histories to reckon with the nation’s colonial past. Located at the intersection of literature, history, and sociology, it explores the relationships between family storytelling, memory, and postcolonial identity. With attention to the political potential of family histories, Reckoning with the Past argues that authors’ often autobiographical works enable us to uncover, confront, and revise national mythologies. An important contribution to the emerging global conversation about multidirectional memory and the need to attend to the effects of colonisation, this book will appeal to an interdisciplinary field of scholarly readers.