Gail Jones is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary novelists. Her books have won or been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Miles Franklin Award, the Stella Prize, and numerous state literary awards. They are taught in high schools and universities across the country.
This collection of essays offers reflections on Jones’ fiction by leading Australian and international literary critics. For readers who loved Sixty Lights, Five Bells, Sorry and Jones’ other novels, and for students of Jones’ work, this book will be an illuminating companion. With chapters on her use of language, her thematic preoccupations, and her place in local and global literary culture, it is a timely guide to the work of an exceptional Australian writer.
Anthony Uhlmann is director of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University.
Introduction by Anthony Uhlmann
1. Constellations of Light and Image | Contemplations on Deep Space: Apparent Magnitude and Scale by Lou Jillett2. Bioluminescence: Materiality, Metaphor and Trace in Sixty Lights by Elizabeth McMahon
3. Gail Jones' Novel Modernism: Sixty Lights and Literary Tradition by James Gourlay
4. Sleep’s Sweet Relief by Tanya Dalziell
5. Resisting Fixation in Gail Jones’ Sorry and Five Bells by Anthony Uhlmann
6. "Moving on Metaphorical Silk Roads of Intellectual Trade": Chinese Aesthetics in Five Bells by Valérie-Anne Belleflamme
7. Utopia and Hysteria in A Guide to Berlin by Tony Hughes-d’Aeth
8. Silent Propinquities: Literary Selfhood and Modernity in A Guide to Berlin by Brigid Rooney
9. Figure in Geometry: The Death of Noah Glass by Robert Dixon
10. Blueless and Light in the Art of Gail Jones by Meg Samuelson
Contributors
Index
"The end result is a profound sense of Gail Jones’s work as a body of fiction that proliferates ideas in all directions, leading us, as Uhlmann notes, into multiple and ‘resonant spaces of knowledge’. "
Dr Julieanne Lamond Australian Book Review
Size: 254 × 178 × 12 mm
192 pages
Copyright: © 2021
ISBN: 9781743327791
Publication: 01 Feb 2022
Series: Sydney Studies in Australian Literature