Contents: Preface. 1. Shellshocks and aftershocks: scars of the Holocaust problematizing identity in Elizabeth Jolley's Milk and Honey/V. Lakshmanan. 2. The other space : Jack Davis' No sugar/Tapati Gupta. 3. Irony as protest: a reading of "They Give Jacky Rights"/Debi Prasad Bhattacharya. 4. "The beginning of a novel is a belief that the world really needs this book": Thomas Keneally's Oeuvre with special reference to The Tyrant's Novel"/Somdatta Mandal. 5. "It is our dreaming": A Russian ethnographer meets the Australian Aborigine/Himadri Lahiri. 6. "Giving voice to the voiceless": The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith/Amrit Sen. 7. Australianness and beyond: transcultural spaces in the poetry of Syd Harrex/Keya Majumdar. 8. Narratives of resistant marginality: Patrick White and Firdaus Kanga/Niladri R. Chatterjees. 9. Beyond the pleasures of otherness: Mudrooroo Narogin's politics of aboriginality/Debasish Lahiri. 10. Whiteness under dark skins/darkness under white skins? Kim Scott's tryst with aboriginal identity in Benang/Indrani Datta (Chaudhuri). 11. Capture of the body or of the mind?: reconnecting Fraser's narrative with A Fringe of Leaves/Antara Mukherjee. 12. David Malouf's exploration of the problem of identity: a reading of remembering Babylon/Sriparna Dutta. 13. Foucault, Mudrooroo and the Panoptican: A study of Mudrooroo's Wild Cat screaming/Sagar Dan. 14. "The high lean country full of old stories": Judith Wright and the birth of a nation/Partha Pratim Dasgupta. 15. The poems of Henry Lawson: A Smorgasbord Soaked in smiles and tears/Binod Mishra. 16. 'Aboriginal Reality' in Jack Davis's Barungin (Smell the wind)/Ramanuj Konar. 17. Aesthetcizing aboriginality in Jack Davis' No Sugar/S. Robert Gnanamony. 18. Challenging the British inheritance: the poetry of A.D. Hope and Judith Wright/Indranil Acharya. 19. Post-colonial 'waters': contextualizing river poems of Peter Porter and John Kinsella/Angshuman Kar. 20. Problematics of 'Home' and place in Martin Flanagan's In Sunshine or in Shadow/Suranjana Bhadra. Index.
"Intellectual Australian interest is not a new phenomenon. Homi K. Bhabha declares in Nation and Narration that "The Nations of Europe and Asia meet in Australia. "It happens to be a seemingly simple statement for an immensely varied geographical, cultural, linguistic and literary space. A settler colony is a space to reconcile indigenous and settler population. Australia is essentially a multicultural and multiethnic country. It is suggested that Australia created its own literature from a combination of the British, American and native sources.
In this fast changing political, social and cultural milieu of our times everything has undergone a sea-change. Inter-disciplinary and transcultural studies are made so that men understand one another in a better way. Everything is "perpetually in process of cohesion and dissolution."
This special anthology of critical essays, we believe, will play a vital role in transmitting knowledge to the readers about higher areas of learning." (jacket)
