National fictions: Literature, film, and the construction of Australian narrative (Australian cultural studies)
Description:
NATIONAL FICTIONS is a study of Australian literature and film. It is also a study of Australian culture, viewing the novels and the films as products of a specific culture as narratives with similar structures, functions, forms and meanings. It covers a wide range of texts, offering both close analysis and an account of their place within the system of meanings the book proposes as those dominant in Australian culture. As a result it makes important steps towards defining the distinctiveness of Australian culture as well as its literature and film. Topics such as the contrasts between the land and the city, the role of the individual and the emergence of selfhood are recurrent themes in Australian film and writing. The author uses these themes to examine narrative, characterisation and the changing approach and methods of Australian writers and film makers. 'The style is lucid, the analysis persuasive and the argument logically sustained... I feet it will prove one of those seminal works to which all future writers in these areas will need to refer', John McLaren. Graeme Turner attended universities in Australia, Canada and the UK and now teaches Australian Studies at the Queensland Institute of Technology. Founding editor of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, he has worked as a musician for a number of years and has published widely in the areas of Australian literature, film and cultural studies.