Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Anthony Lynch reviews 'Antipodes, Vol. 22, No. 2' edited by Nicholas Birns

by
July-August 2009, no. 313

Antipodes, Vol. 22, No. 2 edited by Nicholas Birns

American Association of Australian Literary Studies, US$20 pb, 108 pp

Anthony Lynch reviews 'Antipodes, Vol. 22, No. 2' edited by Nicholas Birns

by
July-August 2009, no. 313

The latest Antipodes opens with Katherine Bode’s provocative discussion of Roger McDonald’s The Ballad of Desmond Kale. Dissecting McDonald’s ‘fantasy of an all-white, all-male Australian society’, Bode’s essay also criticises Inga Clendinnen for exempting McDonald’s novel from her much-aired arguments against historical fiction. Bernadette Brennan draws on Maurice Blanchot to explore ‘the ungraspable experience of death’ evoked in works by Alex Miller and Noel Rowe, and Lyn McCredden has philosopher René Girard in mind when revisiting the familiar territory of the Lindy Chamberlain case and the ‘rituals of perpetual scapegoating’. Helen Gildfind ‘meets’ Janet Frame through Frame’s autobiographies, and reflects on the ‘reader’s power to decide the autobiographical status of a text’. The result is interestingly self-reflexive, but some readers might prefer more Frame and less Gildfind.

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.