Dorothy Jones

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Colonial Girl: Emily Carr and Judith Wright:

In their autobiographical writing, painter Emily Carr and poet Judith Wright record a remarkably similar experience of how growing up in colonial/postcolonial Canada and Australia shaped them as artists. Although each identified strongly with the region of her birth, and felt a deep love of its landscape, issues of belonging preoccupied both women from childhood on as they negotiated their place within the family, the immediate society and the nation. Neither could fully conform to family expectations, nor comply with the restrictions society sought to impose on them as artists and each actively sought, or else found herself cast in, an outsider role. Carr and Wright’s self portraits each have something in common with James Joyce’s representation of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as an insider/outsider figure who seeks to escape the confining networks of nation and society, only to find himself thoroughly entangled in them.

Serious Laughter: On Defining Australian Humour

Australians use comedy in a particular kind of way, as a means of compensating for the natural and social disasters by which they’re continually surrounded.... European Australians . have lived with harshness, defeat, failure, all the old rhetoric about drought and flood and fire it’s a hard country and so on. Their way of reconciling themselves to impossible circumstances has been to treat it with a sardonic humour, and that is why it appears to be comedy. But underlying that it is not funny, it is not

The Eloquent Sari

Abstract As part of Indias aesthetically rich and politically complex textile tradition, saris are abundantly endowed with “the social life of things” as well as participating in the language of clothes. This article considers its representation in some Indian literary works as a focus for exploring acts of political and personal resistance against hegemonic authority. The sari can serve simultaneously as a sign both of the nation and of Indian womanhood while its rich array of associations has made it a valuable focal point for a number of Indian writers, both when representing major political events and when portraying the complexities of personal relationships and family life.