Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796-1945

by Michael Farrell

Overview

A bold work of synthetic scholarship, Writing Australian Unsettlement argues that the history of Australian literature contains the rough beginnings of a new literacy. Michael Farrell reads songs, letters and visual poems by Indigenous farmers and skmen, the unpunctuated journals of early settler women, drover tree-messages and carved clubs, and a meta-commentary on settlement from Moore River (the place escaped from in The Rabbit-Proof Fence) in order to rethink old forms. The book borrows the figure of the assemblage to suggest the active and revisable nature of Australian writing, arguing against the "settling" effects of its prior editors, anthologists, and historians. Avoiding the advancement of a new canon, Farrell offers instead an unsettled space in which to rethink Australian writing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137485717
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	09/22/2015
Series:	Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
Edition description:	1st ed. 2015
Pages:	223
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

Michael Farrell is the editor of Slope Magazine.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. The Hunted Writer
2. An Australian Poetics of the Plough
3. Unnecessary Inventions
4. Open Secrets
5. Boredom
6. Unsettling the Field
7. Writing To Order
8. Homelessness
Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

"Writing Australian Unsettlement is a daring and remarkable study of intertextuality and appropriation as poetic tools. Disassembling and reassembling a variety of generic models, he demonstrates with the greatest aplomb how such contemporary techniques as collage, recycling, visualization, and translation are currently reanimating the field of Australian poetry. Only a scholar who is himself a discerning poet could have brought it off so elegantly." - Marjorie Perloff, Emeriti Professor of English, Stanford University, USA

"A brilliantly original piece of critical and scholarly work, Writing Australian Unsettlement is intellectually adventurous, investigating and challenging foundational assumptions of the literary and postcolonial fields. Drawing from an eclectic range of source material and theorists, Michael Farrell makes a major contribution to the rethinking of the postcolonial paradigm as it is currently happening around the globe." - Philip Mead, Professor of Australian Literature, University of Western Australia

From the Publisher