Author: Thea Astley
Publisher: St. Lucia : University of Queensland Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
Thea Astley won the coveted Miles Franklin Award for the third time with this powerful, bitterly funny novel, her favourite among her own works. Many lives orbit around the radiant genius of Jack Holberg - including wife, lover, child and acolyte - all slowly destroyed by their devotion to the blind musician.
Author: Thea Astley
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 192562661X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 259
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Book Description
This will be a book for the world’s last reader, she decided, chewing pen-end over an open exercise book. In the dying town of Drylands, Janet Deakin sells papers to lonely locals. At night, in her flat above the newsagency, she attempts to write a novel for a world in which no one reads—‘full of people, she envisaged, glaring at a screen that glared glassily back.’ Drylands is the story of the townsfolk’s harsh, violent lives. Trenchant and brilliant, Thea Astley’s final novel is a dark portrait of outback Australia in decline. Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published in 1958 and her third, The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and It’s Raining in Mango (1987). Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner. Her fiction is distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice. One of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century, Astley died in 2004. ‘It is impossible to put this book down. It seethes with energy and passion.’ Herald Sun 'Wonderful.' Australian
Author: Susan Sheridan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781604979329
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186
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Book Description
Thea Astley is one of the outstanding Australian fiction writers of the twentieth century. Four of her novels, including her last, Drylands (1999), won the prestigious Miles Franklin prize, and she was awarded numerous literary and civic honors during her lifetime. Always a writer who avoided solemnity and undercut her characters' claims to heroism of any kind, she reveled in the new-found capacity to mock male pretension and assert female rebellion. Perhaps because of this, her late masterpieces have not yet had the proper recognition that is due to them. This book examines Astley's works and reinforces her standing as a major novelist. The main organizing principle in this study of Astley's fiction is her representation of place and power relations, and the innovative work of historicizing place. Continuing threads from chapter to chapter include the modes of irony, humor, and satire; her varying use of point of view; and her characteristic compression of language and narrative. Descriptive accounts of the novels are offered to raise broader issues of interpretation. Over the period 1986 to 1999 she produced six major works which amply demonstrate her capacity to bring together a critical exploration of patriarchal power relations and a postcolonial perspective on race relations. Also important in her later stories is her satire on the worship of unbridled 'development' which dominated Australian economic and social life in this period, especially in Queensland. The currency of such political and moral issues frames her work, yet her lively engagement with them was never merely topical, but grew out of that acute yet compassionate consciousness of human weakness, formed by her Catholic upbringing, and the darkly comic sensibility draws all these elements into relationship in Astley's art. This book, which is in the Cambria Australian Literature Series (general editor: Susan Lever; see http: //www.cambriapress.com/Austlit-series) will encourage readers familiar with Astley's work to revisit it and reconsider her lifelong achievement, and it will also lead a whole new generation of readers to enter her imaginative world, to be moved and informed by it.
Author: Thea Astley
Publisher: Ringwood, Vic. : Viking
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
Story of four generations of white Australian family empathetic to Aboriginal survivor of massacre on Queensland goldfields and his descendants; chronicles race relations in North Queensland, conflicts and exploitation of Aborigines, children taken from parents.
Author: Thea Astley
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
Author: Karen Lamb
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
ISBN: 0702255017
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 391
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Book Description
This is the first biography of one of Australia's most beloved novelists, Thea Astley (1925–2004). Over a 50-year writing career, Astley published more than a dozen novels and short story collections, including The Acolyte, Drylands, and The Slow Natives, and was the first person to win multiple Miles Franklin Awards. With many of her works published internationally, Astley was a trailblazer for women writers. In her personal life, she was renowned for her dry wit, eccentricity, and compassion. Karen Lamb has drawn on an unparalleled range of interviews and correspondence to create a detailed picture of Thea the woman, as well as Astley the writer. She has sought to understand Astley's private world and how that shaped the distinctive body of work that is Thea Astley's literary legacy.
Author: Thea Astley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781863304542
Category : Australian fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
A novel of Belle whose mother was a drummer in a two-woman band and whose father was a trumpeter whom she met for the first time in a Manhattan jazz bar. She has a husband and a best friend, but her search for a centre for her existence has her becoming obsessed with Gaden Lockyerwho is the object of some of her journalistic research and eventually leads her to Tin River.
Author: Elaine Lindsay
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042015920
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
Women are rarely if ever mentioned in commentaries upon Australian Christianity and spirituality. Only exceptional women are recognized as authorities on religious matters. Why is this so? Does it matter? Don't people from the same religious tradition share similar experiences of the divine, regardless of their gender?Rewriting Godasks whether women have been writing about the divine and whether their insights are different from those contained in malestream accounts of Australian Christianity and spirituality. An analysis of the writings of popular theologians and religious commentators over the last twenty years suggests that the most popular form of spirituality among Australian theologians is Desert Spirituality. An analysis of women's autobiographical writings, however, suggests that the desert is irrelevant to many women's spiritual experiences. This book, through a close investigation of the fictions of Thea Astley, Elizabeth Jolley and Barbara Hanrahan, attempts to posit alternative forms of women's spirituality and to signal ways in which this spirituality is already being expressed.From the evidence gathered here, it becomes obvious that traditional expressions of Australian Christianity and spirituality are gender-specific and that they have functioned to deny women's religious experiences and to silence their claims to equality in the sight and service of the divine. It becomes obvious, too, that women have been developing their own forms of religious expression and that these may be expected to supplant gradually withering images of Desert Spirituality. Whether this new imagery will strengthen Australian Christianity or whether it merely marks a decline in the authority of Christianity remains a moot point.
Author: Thea Astley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781922730442
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
A story of rebellion and loyalty on a small Pacific Island where one man becomes caught in a struggle for independence from colonial rule.Written in 1985, and awarded the ALS Gold Medal the following year, Beachmasters remains relevant in our globalised, post-colonial society, offering pertinent observations about politics, nationalism and race.Thea Astley AO (1925-2004) was a multi-award-winning novelist and short story writer. She won the Miles Franklin Literary Award four times, for The Well Dressed Explorer (1962) and The Acolyte (1972), both also part of the Untapped Collection, as well as The Slow Natives (1965), and Drylands (1999). Her personal awards included the Patrick White Award in 1989 and, in 2002, a New South Wales Premier's Special Award for a lifetime's achievement in literature.
Author: Thea Astley
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
Wafer, who saw his father blown apart by a bomb in the second world war, and who grew up under the shadow of the nuclear bomb, seeks to spend his middle years in a place of solitude where he can prepare for the inevitable... Allbut, scarcely a dot on the map in the vast Queensland outback, seems to be the perfect place. But Wafer's peace-loving ways are not understood by the clean and decent locals and when it comes, the final blast is not the one he expected.
