This volume of essays assembles perspectives on Australian and Canadian fiction and culture from recognised scholars in the fields. Resolutely interdisciplinary in focus, it engages with these two nations through an examination of the discourses of 'passage' that reflect their status as postcolonial cultures. Through a variety of approaches - epistemological, historicist, biofictional, socio-semiological or poetic - grounded in postcolonial and gender theory, the contributions deal in concerns ranging from the sexual politics of New World contact to that of film, from celebrity as a construct to the poetic hybridity of First Nations writing. The collection as a whole raises pertinent questions about Canadian and Australian self-representations: in particular in terms of the gendered aspect of such representations and the place of the indigenous populations within them.
INTRODUCTION:
Australia and Canada: The Tropes of National Culture, the
Culture in Literary Tropes
Charlotte STURGESS
PART I: Contact Zones: History, Rights, and Literary Rites of Passage
Rites of Passage in Transatlantic Journeys
Françoise LE JEUNE
Mrs Roxburgh's Passage from Lady to Lubra: Racial Stereotyping and the Fantasy of Indigeneity in A Fringe of Leaves
Sheila COLLINGWOOD-WHITTICK
The Passage of Fame: Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields and Canadian Literary Celebrity
Lisa HAYDEN
PART II: Transpositions: Indigeneity, Cross-Cultural Identities and the Aesthetics of Passage
Two-Spirits and Tricksters: Cross-cultural Transpositions in Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen
Susan BILLINGHAM
Readers' Rites: Surpassing Style
Ian HENDERSON
The Poetics of Passage in Thomas King's Truth & Bright Water
Taïna TUHKUNEN
'Transliterations': The Poetics of Cultural Transfer in Larissa Lai's When Fox Is a Thousand
Charlotte STURGESS
PART III: Passing Muster: Self-(Re)constructions, Narrating Live(s)
Becoming Julia: Passing as a Male-to-Female Transsexual in Australia
David COAD
'Passage' and 'Becoming' in Rose Boys, by Peter Rose
Christine NICHOLLS
Truth-telling: a Passage to Survival in Doris Brett's Eating the Underworld. A Memoir in Three Voices
Jill GOLDEN
PART IV: Place and Displacement: Passage(s), Cultural Sites, Figuration(s)
Kroetsch's Pedagogy of the Precarious: a Reading of Gone Indian (1973) and The Hornbooks of Rita K (2001)
Claire OMHOVERE
Invisible and Indivisible Boundaries in David Malouf's 12 Edmondstone Street
Deirdre GILFEDDER