Paul Sharrad

University of Wollongong | UOW · English

This chapter has seven sections: 1. Africa; 2. Australia; 3. Canada; 4. The Caribbean; 5. New Zealand; 6. South Asia: India and Sri Lanka; 7. Southeast Asia. Section 1 is by Kerry Manzo, Sanja Nivesjö, Theophilus Okunlola, Chijioke Onah, and Maria Zirra; section 2 is by Adam Gall, Benjamin Miller, and Paul Sharrad; section 3 is by Talia Crockett an...

This chapter has seven sections: 1. Africa; 2. Australia; 3. Canada; 4. The Caribbean; 5. New Zealand and Pacific; 6. South Asia: India and Sri Lanka; 7. Southeast Asia. Section 1 is by Kerry Manzo, Sanja Nivesjö, and Maria Zirra; section 2 is by Adam Gall, Benjamin Miller, and Paul Sharrad; section 3 is by Libe García Zarranz and Dougal McNeill; s...

This chapter has seven sections: 1. Africa; 2. Australia; 3. Canada; 4. The Caribbean; 5. South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent and Sri Lanka; 6. New Zealand and Pacific; 7. Southeast Asia. Section 1 is by Louisa Uchum Egbunike, Kerry Manzo, Sanja Nivesjö, and Maria Zirra; section 2 is by Benjamin Miller and Paul Sharrad; section 3 is by Christine Lo...

This chapter has seven sections: 1. Africa; 2. Australia; 3. Canada; 4. The Caribbean; 5. South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent and Sri Lanka; 6. New Zealand and Pacific; 7. Southeast Asia. Section 1 is by Kanika Batra, Kerry Manzo, and Joya Uraizee; coverage of West Africa will resume in 2022; section 2 is by Benjamin Miller and Paul Sharrad; sectio...

This chapter has seven sections: 1. Africa; 2. Australia; 3. Canada; 4. The Caribbean; 5. New Zealand and Pacific; 6. South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent and Sri Lanka; and 7. Southeast Asia. Section 1 is by Kanika Batra, Louisa Egbunike, Kerry Manzo, and Joya Uraizee; section 2 is by Benjamin Miller and Paul Sharrad; section 3 is by Christine Lorr...

The article picks up references to novelist Thomas Keneally’s interest in painting and tracks his uses of artists and painting in selected fiction. Visual art supplies style and thematic depth to Bring Larks and Heroes, is integral to the complexity underpinning the murder-mystery of A Victim of the Aurora, allows narrative perspective and structur...

Perhaps the fabric that most signifies a Pacific identity is tapa cloth insofar as its use spreads across the entire region and continues to be produced today while dating back to early settlement of the islands. An item of dress that has come to signify Pacific identity is the lei. Male and female identities are often tied to textile/fiber work in...

Decolonising impulses drove the production of Pacific writing. Asserting local experience against Western representations of Oceania entailed countering not only stereotypes from literature and art, but also undoing the print historical archive. Pacific writers have stressed embodied experience and oral transmission over distanced written record, d...

This chapter has seven sections: 1. Africa; 2. Australia; 3. Canada; 4. The Caribbean; 5. South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent and Sri Lanka; 6. New Zealand and Pacific; 7 Southeast Asia. Section 1 is by Kanika Batra, Joya Uraizee, and Mark Williams; section 2 is by Michael Griffiths and Paul Sharrad; section 3 is by Christine Lorre-Johnston and Mar...

This chapter has seven sections: 1. Africa; 2. Australia; 3. Canada; 4. The Caribbean; 5. South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent and Sri Lanka; 6. New Zealand and Pacific; 7. Southeast Asia. Section 1 is by Margaret Daymond, Ashlee Nelson, Lynda Spencer, and Tina Steiner; section 2 is by Paul Sharrad and Michael Griffiths; section 3 is by Christine Lo...

This book explores the history of English-language prose fiction in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific since 1950, focusing not only on the ‘literary’ novel, but also on the processes of production, distribution and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as the work of major novelists, movements,...

This chapter focuses on the history of the South Pacific novel as a post-1950s phenomenon. Many Pacific writings from the early phase of literary production came in the form of ‘auto-ethnographic’ accounts of village life or the transcription of oral stories in which the separation of the writer is indicated often implicitly in the external viewpoi...

This chapter examines G. V. Desani’s only novel, All About H. Hatterr (1948). All About H. Hatterr enjoyed a brief flash of success and then slid into the shadows until 1972. By this time, Desani had revised it and an American edition had appeared, followed by a Penguin edition in the UK. In the interim, English Literature had taken up the study of...

This chapter has seven sections: 1. Africa; 2. Australia; 3. Canada; 4. The Caribbean; 5. South Asia; 6. New Zealand and Pacific; 7. Southeast Asia. Section 1 is by Margaret Daymond, Madhu Krishna, Lynda Gichanda Spencer, and Tina Steiner; section 2 is by Paul Sharrad and Michael Griffiths; section 3 is by Christine Lorre-Johnston and Mark Williams...

This chapter has seven sections: 1. Africa; 2. Australia; 3. Canada; 4. The Caribbean; 5. South Asia; 6. New Zealand & Pacific; 7 Southeast Asia. Section 1 is by Margaret Daymond, Grace Musila, Tina Steiner and Madhu Krishnan; section 2 is by Michael Griffiths and Paul Sharrad; section 3 is by Paul Sharrad; section 4 is by Giselle Rampaul and Gera...

Although Thomas Keneally is firmly located as a national figure, his international literary career and his novels’ inspection of colonial exile, Aboriginal alienation, and movements of people throughout history reflect aspects of diasporic experience, while pushing the term itself into wider meaning of the transnational.

So at fifty years, what can we say? An easy conclusion would be that Keneally is best understood (as he himself has suggested from time to time) as a good craftsman of readable stories that raise serious issues, a writer better suited to the literary mass-market found in north America than to the more anxious and divided cultural space of literary...

This chapter has seven sections: 1. Africa; 2. Australia; 3. Canada; 4. The Caribbean; 5. South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent and Sri Lanka; 6. New Zealand; 7. Southeast Asia. Section 1 is by Margaret Daymond and Tony Simoes Da Silva; section 2 is by Marguerite Nolan; section 3 is by Sally Carpentier, Paul Sharrad, and Ian Whitehouse; section 4 is...

Papua New Guinea (PNG) writing has faded into the background of Pacific literature after initially sparking off the late-colonial/early postcolonial 'boom' of the 1970s. This essay examines some of the dynamics behind this, based on the tension in the loosely networked regional literary formation between cosmopolitan, disaporic, and anglophone expr...

Thomas Keneally is almost always introduced as ‘Australia’s best-known novelist’—or ‘best loved’, or ‘most productive’. Auberon Waugh, with characteristic Waugh provocation, called him ‘the best Australian writer alive’.1 In 52 years of literary publishing, he has written stories, plays, novels, travel books, biographies and histories, has acted in...

Commonwealth literary studies functioned for some time as comparative work across discrete national literary cultures. Using the curious instance of an Indian novelist finding publication with an Australian publisher, this article shows how similar and different colonial dynamics of literary production both kept national contexts meaningful and und...

An assessment of twenty-first-century Indian-English fiction, 'Writing India Anew' features fifteen essays by some of the most prominent scholars in the field and explores a range of themes, including the remapping of mythology and history, the reassessment of globalized India, and technical experimentation in the epic, science fiction, and the gra...

Contemporary Indian English-language fiction marks both a continuous focus on the Indian family as central to society, and also a break from the traditional socialisations of family life. Shifting away from the former calls for reform of marital conventions to accommodate individual needs and many recent novels show families to be dysfunctional sit...

This article is framed by a wider interest in how literary careers are made: what mechanisms other than the personal/biographical and the text-centred evaluations of scholars influence a writer’s choices in persisting in building a succession of works that are both varied and yet form a consistently recognizable “brand.” Translation is one element...

This chapter has six sections: 1. Africa; 2. Australia; 3. Canada; 4. The Caribbean; 5. The Indian Subcontinent and Sri Lanka; 6. New Zealand. Section 1 is by Femi Abodunrin, Margaret Daymond, and Margaret Lenta; section 2 is by Leigh Dale and Chris Tiffin; section 3 is by Sally Carpentier and Ian Whitehouse; section 4 is by Elizabeth Hicks and Pau...

This book originates as a collection of essays on fiction from an "Indian Writing in English" context (this is understood as including writing from the Indian diaspora that engages with the subcontinent). Produced over two decades now-sometimes as conference papers, occasionally as developments from lectures, and not infrequently as extensions of b...

How difficult it is to assess a pioneering literary work. It is ahead of its time when it appears, marks an awakening occasioned by things already past, and yet is so much of its time that later readers can have trouble appreciating its significance as a contribution that cleared the way for the works and cultural conditions with which audiences to...

This paper takes its title from the historical novel by Ranga Rao, The River is Three-quarters Full, itself apparently borrowed from a Telugu proverb about the beneficent powers of riverine nature and the ultimate benevolence of the cosmos. The phrase is invoked repeatedly by villagers despite a major drought and connects to East India Company idea...

In its broadest context, this paper inspects historical connections between Australia and India under colonialism. It works with the general idea that the heavily textual /literary emphasis of postcolonial studies to date is usefully informed by paying attention to material culture and historical movements. Australian literature is read against/thr...

This paper takes up the concept of memory that is a capacity basic to human selfhood, and seeks to describe a common attitude to narration in writers in English from countries that have liberated themselves from a colonial past. The author maintains that memory is a central element in post-colonial narrative, and shows how it is associated with two...

Debates around postcolonial theory often arise from misunderstandings owing to translation from one disciplinary context to another. This article acknowledges real material limits to text centred theory and critiques the uninspected use of hybridity as a concept/textual practice of subversion. The term has a range of meanings and does different wor...

This article traces the stories in and around one of four Srinagar "map shawls" (c. 1870), bringing postcolonial discourse analysis to bear on reading its changing and contending meanings. Its technical brilliance sits amongst changes in shawl production as a result of East-West trade, particularly during the nineteenth century. The shawl's meaning...

K. S. Maniam, Between Lives. Petaling Jaya: Maya Press, 2003. 389 pp. Hbk. ISBN 983–2737–03–6.

The Contemporary Pacific 15.2 (2003) 506-507 Born in American Samoa, raised on military bases and in colleges in the United States, and now teaching literature at the University of Hawai'i, Caroline Sinavaiana has a name long familiar to readers of Pacific literature, though mainly through individual poems encountered in journals here and there. It...

The Contemporary Pacific 15.2 (2003) 378-420 Wendt is clearly a leading figure in literary creativity and cultural criticism in the Pacific region. He is only beginning, however, to get the kind of international attention that equivalent figures from other regions have received. Apart from an honorary doctorate from the University of Bourgogne, rec...

Poet and fiction writer Albert Wendt has taken on the task of correcting colonialist representations of the Pacific from an insider perspective. This involves him in questions of historical record and modes of recording history. The role of memory becomes central to the artist transposing oral traditions into written forms. Trained as an historian,...

The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (2001) 717-728 At some point in my 1960s high school years in Papua New Guinea (PNG) there was a visit from a United Nations delegation. I can recall two things from the time: dimly, the mutterings of hostile planters and concerned missionaries about being pushed into things the natives weren't yet ready for, and,...

Introduction Poems by: Subagio Sastrowardoyo, Toeti Heraty, Taufiq Ismail, Ayatrohaedi, Sapardi Djoko Damono, Isma Sawitri, Gocnawan Mohamad, Sunaryono Basuki KS, Kuntowijoyo, Linus Suryadi AG, Emha Ainun Nadjib, Adhy Ryadi.

Callaloo 18.1 (1995) 94-108 --Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra One constant in all the theorizing of post-colonial literature is the centrality to both literary creation and its criticism of involvement in historical process. This engagement with history becomes at once a pre-condition and a problem for the Caribbean writer, whose past appears to have...

Norman Simms, Silence and Invisibility, Washington: Three Continents Press, 1986, pp. 227, paper US$20, ISBN 0 89410 362 6 (cloth binding also available).

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A reading of Rushdie's 'Shalimar the Clown' and Carey's 'The Unusual Life of Tristram Smith' as fictional uses of the circus, dramatising the writer's role and allegorising political dynamics of terrorism and postcolonial liberation.

Reviews Bill Ashcroft's 'Postcolonial Transformations' arguing for a postcolonial consideration of spaces of negotiation beyond the textual in an era of globalisation. Taking the figure of textiles, this argument is illustrated using Amitav Ghosh's 'The Circle of Reason', Raja Rao's 'Kanthapura', and Rohinton Mistry's 'A Fine Balance'. Mention is a...

White Australia has had a long, though thinly spread, imaginative involvement in the Pacific region, drawing on the European interests, following Cook's voyages, that formed the Pacific links during the age of sail-the Californian Gold Rush, sealing, whaling, and sandalwood gathering, and notably the 'Blackbirding industry'. Louis Becke's stories,...

Albert Wendt is the most prolific and influential contemporary writer of the Pacific Islands - of his native Samoa in particular, but including greater Oceania and New Zealand as well. He has four books of verse, three collections of short stories, five novels (tow of them made into feature films) and three major anthologies of Pacific Literature t...

Postcolonial critique, as I see it, operates with two projects and in two modes. It seeks to expose the systems of conceptualization and representation that justify and help maintain imperialist power during and after the age of colonialism; it also attempts to analyse, and provide a theoretical basis for textual and critical practices promoting cu...

This paper considers a history of imaginative links between Australia and India, offering readings of Suneeta Perez da Costa's 'Homework' and Christopher Cyrill's 'The Tributaries of the Ganges'.

The link between an embroidered Kashmir shawl in the National Gallery of Australia and Salman Rushdie's novel Shame may seem a little tenuous, but it can be sustained through the history that Rushdie 'translates' into his allegorical satire of modern Pakistan. Iskandar Harappa and Raza Hyder, two of the central male figures, are warped versions of...

Since the 1970s a whole new breed of artists have appeared, telling the stories of Oceania from the inside. Albert Wendt is the leading writer and exponent of Pacific Literature. His work is consistently different in style, politically challenging, and ranges across essays, plays, poems, stories and novels, two of which have been filmed. This book...