Book chapter
Animal Presence: Problems and Potential in Recent Australian Fiction
The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature, pp.282-291
Routledge
2021
Abstract
Since the mid-1990s, Australian writers have been shifting the form and function of animal representation to explore the material realities of the more-than-human as well as the violence implicit in the human/animal relationship. This chapter provides a brief overview of some of these fictive challenges, turning to a close reading of Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015). I argue that Wood’s novel operates as a taxonomic replication of some of the paradoxes and limits in contemporary, literary discourses on non-human animals. At first blush, the work’s satire of the romanticisation of animal imagery and its exposure of modernity’s entwined anthropocentricism and anthropomorphism are a challenge to the projection of human needs onto animals. Yet, the novel also deploys a symbology where animals diversely signify the female inmates and conversely pathways to freedom, a symbology that reduces the animal to a referent.
Details
- Title
- Animal Presence: Problems and Potential in Recent Australian Fiction
- Authors
- Clare Archer-Lean (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Creative Industries - Legacy
- Contributors
- Jessica Gildersleeve (Editor) - University of Southern Queensland
- Publication details
- The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature, pp.282-291
- Publisher
- Routledge
- DOI
- 10.4324/9781003124160-36; 10.4324/9781003124160
- ISBN
- 9781003124160
- Organisation Unit
- Indigenous and Transcultural Research Centre; School of Business and Creative Industries; School of Creative Industries - Legacy; University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland; Sustainability Research Centre
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 99501408902621
- Output Type
- Book chapter
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