Elizabeth McMahon | The University of New South Wales (original) (raw)
Awards by Elizabeth McMahon
Australia is the planet’s sole island continent. This book argues that the uniqueness of this con... more Australia is the planet’s sole island continent. This book argues that the uniqueness of this contradictory geography has shaped Australian history and culture. Further, it claims that a study of the island continent throws new light on the relationship between islands and continents in the map of modernity including: colonisers' preference for islands, the rise of continents in the nineteenth century; the increased perception of islands as isolated and disconnected from modernity; the need to rethink this geography in the globalised present; alternative understandings of space from Islanders themsleves.
Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination, Anthem Press, London and New York, 2016.
Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination, Anthem Press, London and New York, 2016.
For the best work of literary criticism on an Australian subject published within the previous t... more For the best work of literary criticism on an Australian subject published within the previous two calendar years.
Edited Books by Elizabeth McMahon
This collection works from the premise that a key Australian literary and aesthetic modernity beg... more This collection works from the premise that a key Australian literary and aesthetic modernity begins at the mid-twentieth century with the arrival of refugees from the Displaced Persons camps of post-war Europe, and continues through the many subsequent waves of arrivals.
Papers by Elizabeth McMahon
Australian humanities review, Jun 1, 2010
Island studies journal, 2011
Certain limitations arise from the persistent consideration of two common relations of islands in... more Certain limitations arise from the persistent consideration of two common relations of islands in the humanities and social sciences: land and sea, and island and continent/mainland. What remains largely absent or silent are ways of being, knowing and doing-ontologies, epistemologies and methods-that illuminate island spaces as interrelated , mutually constituted and co-constructed: as island and island. Therefore, this paper seeks to map out and justify a research agenda proposing a robust and comprehensive exploration of this third and comparatively neglected nexus of relations. In advancing these aims, the paper's goal is to (re)inscribe the theoretical, metaphorical, real and empirical power and potential of the archipelago: of seas studded with islands; island chains; relations that may embrace equivalence, mutual relation and difference in signification.
Political Geography, Aug 1, 2011
It was Achille Mbembe (2003) who avowed that geography was never intended to be equal. Sustained ... more It was Achille Mbembe (2003) who avowed that geography was never intended to be equal. Sustained engagement with Suvendrini Perera's richly evocative, intellectually provocative, and critically important intervention in the borderlands between cultural studies and geography underlines his observation. Australia and the Insular Imagination will resonate deeply with readers of Political Geography, since both are concerned with the complex interrelationships between power and space. Most obviously, Perera's work is about "sea, land, nation, and the spaces between"; it is about "their conjunction in a specific formation, the island"; and, in particular, it is about the ways in which the island configures and shapes "territorial nationalism in Australia, the island-continent" (p. 1). Note the definite article here: this is Australia as monolith: insular, singular, inviolable. Yet, data from Geoscience Australia (2010) suggest this island-continent is, in fact, some 8222 islands, islets and rocky outcropsdan archipelago. Of such geographical formations, Baldacchino, Farbotko, Harwood, McMahon, and Stratford (2011, p. 6) note that they are "not essential properties of space but instead are fluid cultural processes, 'abstract relations of movement and rest', dependent on changing conditions of articulation or connection". In many ways, Perera's book is a challenge to the 'monologicality' of the island and an invitation to consider this other, processual political geographydan archipelagic world. Here, for Perera, may be a "starting point for alternative historical understandings that 'should alleviate those fears that serve to deepen our isolation, and worse, our racist instincts'" (p. 100, following Dunn). A key justification for focussing on the island is that it has a central strategic role in "the spatiopolitical organization of
Journal of the association for the study of Australian literature : JASAL, 2012
First published in 2006 by University of Western Australia Press Crawley, Western Australia 6009 ... more First published in 2006 by University of Western Australia Press Crawley, Western Australia 6009 www.uwapress.uwa.edu.au Publication of this book was made possible with funding assistance from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales. This book is ...
Routledge eBooks, Jun 13, 2018
This reading of transvestic performance in Australian fiction is in dialogue with Robert Dixon’s ... more This reading of transvestic performance in Australian fiction is in dialogue with Robert Dixon’s 1995 monograph Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in AngloAustralian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914. It is informed by the frameworks Dixon developed in his analysis of the relationship between literature and culture, specifically the ways in which he relates the occult effects of the literary imaginary and the political unconscious to historical contexts and their implication in the formation of Australia’s particular colonialism. More specifically still, the argument regarding colonial transvestism engages directly with Dixon’s deployment of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s formulation of the ‘grotesque’ and its application to the Australian colonial context. The essay revisits Dixon’s reading of the Australian grotesque as a critical optic for reading Australian colonial narratives of female to male cross-dressing to argue that the transvestite figures in colonial ...
Gender is acknowledged as a highly-vexed category in Australian history and culture. Its doctrine... more Gender is acknowledged as a highly-vexed category in Australian history and culture. Its doctrine of mateship excludes women yet white Australian women were amongst the first in the world to be granted franchise. Mateship is a fiercely homophobic relation, yet Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is one of Australia’s most celebrated international events. Australian literature rehearses similar contradictions and we find deep ambivalence around the categories of sex, gender and sexuality at the heart of the national literature and in writing that challenges accepted conventions of identity. Specifically, at the time of nation-formation in the late 1800s, and coinciding with the rise of nationalist discourses more generally, Australian literature commonly presents processes of identity-formation without stable definition or closure. Rather than shoring up national types, the literature betrays a fascination with perverse and volatile identities. This chapter addresses the question of ...
Inner and Outer Worlds, 2022
In her representation of 'internal difference' - in both senses of transformatio... more In her representation of 'internal difference' - in both senses of transformation and of individuation - Elizabeth Harrower deploys a very particular version of the Modernist epiphany or moment of being. In this paper I will attempt to characterise at least some of the key properties of Harrower’s epiphanies and how they relate to narrative mode and form. For in Harrower, in many ways the most unromantic of writers, this moment occurs between people, overlaying the secular epiphany with forms of literary romance including fairy tale, myth and fantasy. These moments include a shared gaze of recognition and misrecognition, and charged with Eros. The gaze of insight mirrors the reflexivity of Donne’s ‘The Good Morrow": ‘My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears’, replete with the confusion of subject and object, self and other and the dilemma of extrication.
Australia is the planet’s sole island continent. This book argues that the uniqueness of this con... more Australia is the planet’s sole island continent. This book argues that the uniqueness of this contradictory geography has shaped Australian history and culture. Further, it claims that a study of the island continent throws new light on the relationship between islands and continents in the map of modernity including: colonisers' preference for islands, the rise of continents in the nineteenth century; the increased perception of islands as isolated and disconnected from modernity; the need to rethink this geography in the globalised present; alternative understandings of space from Islanders themsleves.
Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination, Anthem Press, London and New York, 2016.
Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination, Anthem Press, London and New York, 2016.
For the best work of literary criticism on an Australian subject published within the previous t... more For the best work of literary criticism on an Australian subject published within the previous two calendar years.
This collection works from the premise that a key Australian literary and aesthetic modernity beg... more This collection works from the premise that a key Australian literary and aesthetic modernity begins at the mid-twentieth century with the arrival of refugees from the Displaced Persons camps of post-war Europe, and continues through the many subsequent waves of arrivals.
Australian humanities review, Jun 1, 2010
Island studies journal, 2011
Certain limitations arise from the persistent consideration of two common relations of islands in... more Certain limitations arise from the persistent consideration of two common relations of islands in the humanities and social sciences: land and sea, and island and continent/mainland. What remains largely absent or silent are ways of being, knowing and doing-ontologies, epistemologies and methods-that illuminate island spaces as interrelated , mutually constituted and co-constructed: as island and island. Therefore, this paper seeks to map out and justify a research agenda proposing a robust and comprehensive exploration of this third and comparatively neglected nexus of relations. In advancing these aims, the paper's goal is to (re)inscribe the theoretical, metaphorical, real and empirical power and potential of the archipelago: of seas studded with islands; island chains; relations that may embrace equivalence, mutual relation and difference in signification.
Political Geography, Aug 1, 2011
It was Achille Mbembe (2003) who avowed that geography was never intended to be equal. Sustained ... more It was Achille Mbembe (2003) who avowed that geography was never intended to be equal. Sustained engagement with Suvendrini Perera's richly evocative, intellectually provocative, and critically important intervention in the borderlands between cultural studies and geography underlines his observation. Australia and the Insular Imagination will resonate deeply with readers of Political Geography, since both are concerned with the complex interrelationships between power and space. Most obviously, Perera's work is about "sea, land, nation, and the spaces between"; it is about "their conjunction in a specific formation, the island"; and, in particular, it is about the ways in which the island configures and shapes "territorial nationalism in Australia, the island-continent" (p. 1). Note the definite article here: this is Australia as monolith: insular, singular, inviolable. Yet, data from Geoscience Australia (2010) suggest this island-continent is, in fact, some 8222 islands, islets and rocky outcropsdan archipelago. Of such geographical formations, Baldacchino, Farbotko, Harwood, McMahon, and Stratford (2011, p. 6) note that they are "not essential properties of space but instead are fluid cultural processes, 'abstract relations of movement and rest', dependent on changing conditions of articulation or connection". In many ways, Perera's book is a challenge to the 'monologicality' of the island and an invitation to consider this other, processual political geographydan archipelagic world. Here, for Perera, may be a "starting point for alternative historical understandings that 'should alleviate those fears that serve to deepen our isolation, and worse, our racist instincts'" (p. 100, following Dunn). A key justification for focussing on the island is that it has a central strategic role in "the spatiopolitical organization of
Journal of the association for the study of Australian literature : JASAL, 2012
First published in 2006 by University of Western Australia Press Crawley, Western Australia 6009 ... more First published in 2006 by University of Western Australia Press Crawley, Western Australia 6009 www.uwapress.uwa.edu.au Publication of this book was made possible with funding assistance from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales. This book is ...
Routledge eBooks, Jun 13, 2018
This reading of transvestic performance in Australian fiction is in dialogue with Robert Dixon’s ... more This reading of transvestic performance in Australian fiction is in dialogue with Robert Dixon’s 1995 monograph Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in AngloAustralian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914. It is informed by the frameworks Dixon developed in his analysis of the relationship between literature and culture, specifically the ways in which he relates the occult effects of the literary imaginary and the political unconscious to historical contexts and their implication in the formation of Australia’s particular colonialism. More specifically still, the argument regarding colonial transvestism engages directly with Dixon’s deployment of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s formulation of the ‘grotesque’ and its application to the Australian colonial context. The essay revisits Dixon’s reading of the Australian grotesque as a critical optic for reading Australian colonial narratives of female to male cross-dressing to argue that the transvestite figures in colonial ...
Gender is acknowledged as a highly-vexed category in Australian history and culture. Its doctrine... more Gender is acknowledged as a highly-vexed category in Australian history and culture. Its doctrine of mateship excludes women yet white Australian women were amongst the first in the world to be granted franchise. Mateship is a fiercely homophobic relation, yet Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is one of Australia’s most celebrated international events. Australian literature rehearses similar contradictions and we find deep ambivalence around the categories of sex, gender and sexuality at the heart of the national literature and in writing that challenges accepted conventions of identity. Specifically, at the time of nation-formation in the late 1800s, and coinciding with the rise of nationalist discourses more generally, Australian literature commonly presents processes of identity-formation without stable definition or closure. Rather than shoring up national types, the literature betrays a fascination with perverse and volatile identities. This chapter addresses the question of ...
Inner and Outer Worlds, 2022
In her representation of 'internal difference' - in both senses of transformatio... more In her representation of 'internal difference' - in both senses of transformation and of individuation - Elizabeth Harrower deploys a very particular version of the Modernist epiphany or moment of being. In this paper I will attempt to characterise at least some of the key properties of Harrower’s epiphanies and how they relate to narrative mode and form. For in Harrower, in many ways the most unromantic of writers, this moment occurs between people, overlaying the secular epiphany with forms of literary romance including fairy tale, myth and fantasy. These moments include a shared gaze of recognition and misrecognition, and charged with Eros. The gaze of insight mirrors the reflexivity of Donne’s ‘The Good Morrow": ‘My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears’, replete with the confusion of subject and object, self and other and the dilemma of extrication.
Islands in History and Representation, 2020
Remembering Patrick White, 2010
Lighting Dark Places, 2010
Cultural Studies Review, 2019
Remembering Patrick White, 2010
This review assess Pinet's project of placing the disciplines of literature and cartography side ... more This review assess Pinet's project of placing the disciplines of literature and cartography side by side, in order to 'suggest that the overlaps are not mere coincidences, but historically specific strategies that can be traced back to structural concerns'.
Political Geography, Jan 1, 2011
New Australian Modernities: Antigone Kefala and Australian Migrant Aesthetics, 2019
From her first two novellas, The First Journey (1975), to the most recent collection, Summer Visi... more From her first two novellas, The First Journey (1975), to the most recent collection, Summer Visit (2002), the prose fictions of Antigone Kefala are laden with scenes of interiors. Mostly, Kefala’s interiors are domestic residences and include dwellings that house intergenerational and extended families, the abodes of friends, the communal accommodation provided for refugees, the private room. In each domain, public and private, the interior spaces of Kefala’s fiction are negotiations of possible inhabitations in the world, of home.
The Routledge International Handbook of Island Studies, Jun 2018
Since the time of the Columbian discoveries, island literature has become inseparable from histor... more Since the time of the Columbian discoveries, island literature has become inseparable from historical, political and geographical globalisation, though as Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith note, at the time of their writing, “islands had tended to slip the net of postcolonial theorising” (2003, p. 5). Modelling ways of reading island literature in the context of modern world-making, the following discussion will examine three of the dominant binaries by which islands have been understood and bifurcated: reality and fantasy, utopia and dystopia, isolation and connection.
Our intention is twofold. First, this chapter will demonstrate the inevitable contagion between these three sets of binaries, which readily collapse if we dislocate the imperial eye. Second, it will set out some of the key issues for Literary Studies in the context of Island Studies where ‘the island’ is uniquely poised between real and imaginary domains.
The range of literature we discuss is also limited by our own literary heritages: French and English. We have attempted to extend that range through translated texts but these are far outweighed by our own areas of expertise. What we have attempted is a cross-cultural dialogue to open a wider conversation about and between the world’s literary islands.
Elizabeth Harrower: Critical Essays, 2017
Introduction to Elizabeth Harrower: Critical Essays
Elizabeth Harrower: Critical Essays, 2017
In her representation of 'internal difference' - in both senses of transformation and of individ... more In her representation of 'internal difference' - in both senses of transformation and of individuation - Elizabeth Harrower deploys a very particular version of the Modernist epiphany or moment of being. In this paper I will attempt to characterise at least some of the key properties of Harrower’s epiphanies and how they relate to narrative mode and form. For in Harrower, in many ways the most unromantic of writers, this moment occurs between people, overlaying the secular epiphany with forms of literary romance including fairy tale, myth and fantasy. These moments include a shared gaze of recognition and misrecognition, and charged with Eros. The gaze of insight mirrors the reflexivity of Donne’s ‘The Good Morrow": ‘My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears’, replete with the confusion of subject and object, self and other and the dilemma of extrication.
Gender is acknowledged as a highly-vexed category in Australian history and culture. Its doctrine... more Gender is acknowledged as a highly-vexed category in Australian history and culture. Its doctrine of mateship excludes women yet white Australian women were amongst the first in the world to be granted franchise. Mateship is a fiercely homophobic relation, yet Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is one of Australia’s most celebrated international events. Australian literature rehearses similar contradictions and we find deep ambivalence around the categories of sex, gender and sexuality at the heart of the national literature and in writing that challenges accepted conventions of identity. Specifically, at the time of nation-formation in the late 1800s, and coinciding with the rise of nationalist discourses more generally, Australian literature commonly presents processes of identity-formation without stable definition or closure. Rather than shoring up national types, the literature betrays a fascination with perverse and volatile identities. This chapter addresses the question of teaching queer fiction in a literary and cultural tradition built on the ethos of mateship in and against perverse genealogies of national and gendered identities. It discusses teaching early colonial fiction from a queer perspective and then establishes connections between this early work and Patrick White’s staging of his own coming out in The Twyborn Affair (1979) as a moment that confronts the national imaginary with its own ambivalence.
This Introduction considers re-considers Australian women writing after the cataclysm of World Wa... more This Introduction considers re-considers Australian women writing after the cataclysm of World War II, from within post-war culture; women demonstrating the agency of writing fiction before the formal politicisation of feminism. The Introduction presents a rationale for the selection of scholarly essays on numerous of these writers.
This issue of Southerly focuses on this issue of modern mobilities and how they dismantle and re-... more This issue of Southerly focuses on this issue of modern mobilities and how they dismantle and re-create notions of identity, home, family, nation and literature.
This Introduction considers the status of romance in Australian fiction and presents a series of... more This Introduction considers the status of romance in Australian fiction and presents a series of works that addresses and complicates this idea.
This issue present writing by musicians and writers who cross mediums and collaborate and experim... more This issue present writing by musicians and writers who cross mediums and collaborate and experiment in the space between words and music
This issue of Southerly marks the centenary of World War 1 with essay, fiction and poetry engaged... more This issue of Southerly marks the centenary of World War 1 with essay, fiction and poetry engaged with war.
The Naked Writer 2 focuses on the poet and the author: their processes, habits and ambitions, and... more The Naked Writer 2 focuses on the poet and the author: their processes, habits and ambitions, and the intersections of their lives and work
Elemental is concerned with our experience of the elements in an era of climate change. The four ... more Elemental is concerned with our experience of the elements in an era of climate change. The four elements of classical thought (earth, fire, water, air) align with what we now call four states of matter and hence to what is termed the ‘material turn’ in contemporary debates in the humanities. This material turn seeks new ways of understanding the physical world and is motivated by the urgency of shared vulnerability on the planet. In Australia this experience of extreme weather, including floods and fires, embroils the entire ecosystem including literary ecologies. This issue considers a range of Australian writers who address the modern experience of the elements in their volatility and magnificence, raising questions, recording and responding to matter as the matter at hand.
Elemental is concerned with our experience of the elements in an era of climate change. The four ... more Elemental is concerned with our experience of the elements in an era of climate change. The four elements of classical thought (earth, fire, water, air) align with what we now call four states of matter and hence to what is termed the ‘material turn’ in contemporary debates in the humanities. This material turn seeks new ways of understanding the physical world and is motivated by the urgency of shared vulnerability on the planet. In Australia this experience of extreme weather, including floods and fires, embroils the entire ecosystem including literary ecologies. This issue considers a range of Australian writers who address the modern experience of the elements in their volatility and magnificence, raising questions, recording and responding to matter as the matter at hand.
Forward Thinking considers how to think about the future in a time that doubts it will occur. It ... more Forward Thinking considers how to think about the future in a time that doubts it will occur. It addresses the question of how culture retains its capacity to imagine possible futures in the face of multiple forces that threaten its existence: climate change, global war, the extinction of species. In local terms, Forward Thinking looks at how Australian literature imagines the world beyond present constraints and crises or as its impending corollary. The essays range from Bill Ashcroft’s discussion of the utopian possibilities within literature itself to Australian science fiction, recent literary works that envisage post-catastrophic worlds and the role of catastrophic commemoration. There is also Lucy Sussex’s account of writing and teaching speculative fiction and a consideration of the utopian speculations of late Marxism as a way of opening up older works from the Australian archive to new readings – to give them a future, so to speak.
This Introduction presented a history of the journal Southerly on its 70th birthday.
The theme of ‘Archive Madness’ aims to promote and enable consideration of the limits of discipli... more The theme of ‘Archive Madness’ aims to promote and enable consideration of the limits of disciplinary borders and the revival of the archive in literary analysis and the implications of these for the study of Australian Literature. The title echoes and redirects Derrida’s famous study Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression and numerous essays here engage directly with Derrida’s text. Archive fever, for Derrida, is ‘a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement’ (Archive Fever 91). The archive is simultaneously a site of revelation and concealment, both of which are accorded the authority of the actual trace.
Islands and Archipelagos In addition to being the planet’s sole island continent, Australia is ... more Islands and Archipelagos In addition to being the planet’s sole island continent, Australia is comprised of many islands, 8,222 according to Geoscience Australia, as well as many others in its external territories. Islands have been at the forefront of heated public policy regarding asylum seekers and detention, and in relation to the rising oceans. So, too, the man at the centre of the fight for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land rights, Eddie Mabo, came from Mer (Murray Island) in the Eastern Torres Strait. Historically, Australia has used islands as ideal prisons, lazarets, and strategic bases, and exploited their romantic associations as perfect idylls. Artists, such as Ian Fairweather, have sought seclusion on islands; despots have sought complete autonomy on islands; and Western scholars have viewed them as perfect laboratories. This issue of Southerly is framed by a contemplation of island futures by Elaine Stratford, taken from her opening address at the inaugural Australian Small Island Forum held in May 2012. The remaining literary essays focus on the interplay between island fantasies and realities in Australian writing where the island is a powerful site in real and imaginary terms, including Randolph Stow (To the Islands), Alexis Wright (Carpentaria), Andrew McGahan (Wonders of a Godless World). It also contains a reappraisal of Bronislaw Malinowski, a founding father of modern anthropology, stressing the importance of Malinowski’s time in New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands. In additions to these thoughtful works of analysis the issue includes a wealth of fiction, poetry, and reviews centred on islands, archipelagos, the experience of their materiality and their imaginative power.