Grotesques, prattlers, hysterical women … historically, spinsters have had a raw deal in fiction. But astonishingly, the situation for older single ladies in contemporary novels has scarcely improved.
- Professor in Politics and Journalism, University of Notre Dame Australia
The Australian writer Georgia Blain, who died last week, wrote extraordinary portraits of family relationships, in luminous prose, with devastating insight. And when she became ill, she wrote about her cancer.
In an age of uncertainty, in which truth is apparently an illusion and all claims to authority are suspect, it is tempting to believe that a first person narrator telling their own story – in a style that…
Writers, over the last decade, have been waxing lyrical about the rise of the present tense in English fiction. But this morning I read something entirely new – for me, at least. I read a manuscript written…
Clementine Ford is no stranger to speaking out. This makes her a near-perfect poster person for the Stella’s schools program and their latest project Girls Write Up – a day-long wordfest and workshop for…
Fourteen of Jane Austen’s female characters – witty or ridiculous, selfish or avaricious – are presented in the astonishing show, Austen’s Women. But her graver, more nuanced creations and stern but comic moralism fail to materialise.
This week’s Sydney Writers’ Festival not only celebrates the art of writing, but the art of reading. Of course, it is difficult not to worry that this might be because the art of reading – that is, deep…
Charlotte Wood has won the fourth annual Stella Prize for The Natural Way of Things, a dark and dangerous book shot through with a kind of feminist rage that – after decades of anti-feminist backlash…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the first sentence of a novel sets the tone. Our new column, On Writing, explores the wonderful world of opening lines: from Tolstoy to Elmore Leonard.
Like it or not, the literary canon is part of the cultural capital of the West. Universities that choose not to teach it – or refuse to critically engage with it – are actually disempowering students.
England’s green and pleasant land will be beset by a plague of the living dead, corpses will dig their way out of graves … Jane Austen horror is now a distinctive subgenre of Austen adaptations.
At the time of publication, the longevity of Jane Austen’s fifth novel Emma was far from guaranteed. And yet, 200 years later, it now seems immortal. This is the story of its remarkable life.
Women are supposed to be happy about motherhood – if they’re not their parenting is open to question. We have seen a ‘Parenting Hate’ backlash against this, but what’s needed most is better social support.
If a society should be judged by the way it treats its children, and those who are struggling on the margins, then Laguna’s work once again proves that the novel is a crucial means for drawing attention to the burning problems of our times.
Can history and fiction really be kept separate? A special edition of journal TEXT examines historical fictions and fictional histories. Here, the editors map out the contested territory.
Victor Hugo famously claimed the invention of the printing press destroyed the edifice of the gothic cathedral. Others fear the internet age will eventually destroy the novel. But guess what? It won’t.
Modernism – and western culture generally since the late 18th century – taught us that books were written in solitary creative frenzies. But ghostwriters are increasingly challenging that assumption.
Once pivotal to the English canon, Jane Austen has been adapted and readapted for Hollywood and Bollywood – and that kind of popularity comes at a cost.
We’re starting 2015 with an experiment in collaborative creative writing. What happens when you ask ten academics to write a story together? Taking our cue from the Exquisite Cadaver game played by Surrealist…
It’s official: men are better writers than women. The news came as something of a shock to a hardened feminist such as myself, but a quick survey of prescribed and suggested texts set for senior English…
It can take decades for critics to catch up with the great reads of the century. Even a cursory glance at the history of literary awards will confirm that cosy, comfortable, safe, or merely popular books…
Yesterday’s decision to confer the Nobel Prize for Literature on revered French novelist Patrick Modiano has sent even the most widely-read English speaking critics scurrying to find copies of his books…
In a hunting society, children learn by playing with bows and arrows. In an information society, they learn to play with information. Despite this excellent advice from media scholar Henry Jenkins, it…
The idea of a generation gap is an old one, but the discrepancies between young people’s lived experience and other people’s perceptions present a very contemporary challenge. Today The Conversation begins…
Just when you thought that pile of death-dealing demons heaped up in the bargain bin at your local Kmart couldn’t get any higher … 2014 is turning out to be yet another year of monsters at the movies…
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