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.
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Awards by Elizabeth McMahon
Edited Books by Elizabeth McMahon
Papers by Elizabeth McMahon
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.