An analysis of the depiction of Australia's landscape in its films and literature.Imagined Landscapes teams geocritical analysis with digital visualization techniques to map and interrogate films, novels, and plays in which space and place figure prominently. Drawing upon A Cultural Atlas of Australia, a database-driven interactive digital map that can be used to identify patterns of representation in Australia's cultural landscape, the book presents an int...

Contemporary Australian Playwriting provides a thorough and accessible overview of the diverse and exciting new directions that Australian Playwriting is taking in the twenty-first century.In 2007, the most produced playwright on the Australian mainstage was William Shakespeare. In 2019, the most produced playwright on the Australian mainstage was Nakkiah Lui, a Gamilaroi and Torres Strait Islander woman. This book explores what has happened both on stage and off to genera...

‘Meet Augusta Macquarie: Her Excellency, patron of the arts, formidable matriarch, environmental vandal.’Inside her triple-glazed compound, Augusta shields herself from the catastrophic elements, bathing in the classics and campaigning for the reinstatement of global reliance on fossil fuels. Outside, the world lurches from one environmental cataclysm to the next. Meanwhile, her sister, Olympia, thinks the best way to save endangered species is to eat them. Their niece Bas...

Experience the epic Canadian history of a divided frontier forged into a modern nation through fierce cultural clashes. Perfect for an engaging morning commute, this gripping chronological saga immerses you in the high-stakes evolution of North America. Hear how vast plains, dense forests, and Arctic ice directly shaped the destinies of diverse, competing societies.Whether you are taking a long road trip or seeking a reflective deep-dive into global politics, this immersive timelin...

In Remote Avant-Garde Jennifer Loureide Biddle models new and emergent desert Aboriginal aesthetics as an art of survival. Since 2007, Australian government policy has targeted "remote" Australian Aboriginal communities as at crisis level of delinquency and dysfunction. Biddle asks how emergent art responds to national emergency, from the creation of locally hunted grass sculptures to biliterary acrylic witness paintings to stop-motion animation. Following directly from the unprec...

Australian Aboriginal literature, once relegated to the margins of Australian literary studies, now receives both national and international attention. Not only has the number of published texts by contemporary Australian Aboriginals risen sharply, but scholars and publishers have also recently begun recovering earlier published and unpublished Indigenous works. Writing by Australian Aboriginals is making a decisive impression in fiction, autobiography, biography, poetry, film, drama, and ...

‘Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity’ focuses on the dynamic interaction between suburbs and suburbia as this emerges in a century-long series of Australian novels – in works by Christina Stead, George Johnston, Elizabeth Harrower, Patrick White, Christos Tsiolkas and many other twentieth-century and contemporary writers. It puts the often trenchantly anti-suburban rhetoric found in these novels in dialogue with their evocative rendering of suburban place and time.In...

This unique book proposes a re-reading of the relationship between artists and the contemporary museum. In Australia in particular, the museum has played a significant role in the colonial project and this has generally been considered as the predominant mode of artists' engagement with such institutions and collections. Australian Artists in the Contemporary Museum expands the post-colonial frame of reference used to interpret this work, to demonstrate the broader implications of the rela...

This important new book examines contemporary art while foregrounding the key role feminism has played in enabling current modes of artmaking, spectatorship and theoretical discourse.Contemporary Art and Feminism carefully outlines the links between feminist theory and practice of the past four decades of contemporary art and offers a radical re-reading of the contemporary movement. Rather than focus on filling in the gaps of accepted histories by ‘adding’ the ‘missing’ fe...

This book examines sexuality, gender and race in Australia’s vibrant independent theatre and performance culture. It analyses selected feminist and queer performances that interrogate the cultural construction of sexuality and gender, challenge the normative trends of mainstream Australian society and culture and open up spaces for alternative representations of gender identity and sexual expression. Offering the first full-length study on sexuality and gender in Australian theatre since 2...

This study is a collection of critical and scholarly analyses of the organisation of the Australian Film Industry since 1990. Particular emphasis is put on globalisation, authorship, national narrative and film aesthetics.

A three-volume project tracing key critical positions, people and institutions in Australian film, Australian Film Theory and Criticism interrogates not only the origins of Australian film theory but also its relationships to adjacent disciplines and institutions. The second volume in the series, this book gathers interviews with national and international film theorists and critics to chart the development of different discourses in Australian film studies through the decades. Se...