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Charlotte Sturgess (ed.). The Politics and Poetics of Passage in Canadian and Australian Culture and Fiction. Nantes, Editions du CRINI, 2006. (Canadiensis Series)

 This volume of essays assembles perspectives on Australian and Canadian fiction and culture from recognised scholars in the fields. Resolutely interdisciplinary in focus, it engages with these two nations through an examination of the discourses of ‘passage’ that reflect their status as postcolonial cultures. Through a variety of approaches - epistemological, historicist, biofictional, socio-semiological or poetic - grounded in postcolonial and gender theory, the contributions deal in concerns ranging from the sexual politics of New World contact to that of film, from celebrity as a construct to the poetic hybridity of First Nations writing. The collection as a whole raises pertinent questions about Canadian and Australian self-representations: in particular in terms of the gendered aspect of such representations and the place of the indigenous populations within them.

Introduction:
Australia and Canada: The Tropes of National Culture, the Culture in Literary Tropes
Charlotte STURGESS

Part I:
Contact Zones: History, Rights, and Literary Rites of Passage

Rites of Passage in Transatlantic Journeys
Françoise LE JEUNE

Mrs Roxburgh’s Passage from Lady to Lubra:
Racial Stereotyping and the Fantasy of Indigeneity
in A Fringe of Leaves
Sheila COLLINGWOOD-WHITTICK

The Passage of Fame: Margaret Atwood,
Carol Shields and Canadian Literary Celebrity
Lisa HAYDEN

Part II:
Transpositions: Indigeneity, Cross-Cultural Identities and the Aesthetics of Passage

Two-Spirits and Tricksters: Cross-cultural
Transpositions in Tomson Highway’s
Kiss of the Fur Queen
Susan Billingham

Readers’ Rites: Surpassing Style
Ian Henderson

The Poetics of Passage in Thomas King’s Truth & Bright Water
Taïna Tuhkunen

‘Transliterations’: The Poetics of Cultural Transfer in
Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand
Charlotte Sturgess

Part III:
Passing Muster: Self-(Re)constructions, Narrating Live(s)

Becoming Julia: Passing as a Male-to-Female Transsexual in Australia
David Coad

‘Passage’ and ‘Becoming’ in Rose Boys, by Peter Rose
Christine Nicholls

Truth-telling: a Passage to Survival in Doris Brett’s Eating the Underworld.
A Memoir in Three Voices
Jill Golden

Part IV: Place and Displacement: Passage(s), Cultural Sites, Figuration(s)

Kroetsch’s Pedagogy of the Precarious: a Reading of Gone Indian (1973) and The Hornbooks of Rita K (2001)
Claire Omhovere

Invisible and Indivisible Boundaries in David Malouf’s 12 Edmondstone Street
Deirdre Gilfedder

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