Settler Romances and the Australian Girl

Description

With incisive and highly original readings of popular late nineteenth and early twentieth century settler adventure romances and popular ethnography, this book unmasks a deep-seated anxiety about the stability of concepts of whiteness and femininity in colonial Australia. It considers in detail Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career, Cathrine Martin's An Australian Girl, the adventure novels An Australian Bush Track by J D Hennessey and Rosa Campbell Praed's Fugitive Anne: A Romance of the Unexplored Bush and the ethnographic works of Katharine Langloh Parker. By taking as a starting point the perceived fictitiousness of white settler subjects, the book suggests that our current knowledge of British colonialism needs to be radically rethought.

Dr Tanya Dalziell is Lecturer in English, Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. She has published in the areas of postcolonial theory, gender studies, film studies, Australian studies and modernism, and is also the author of several short stories. In 1997 she was awarded the Katharine Susannah Prichard Short Story Award, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation produced one of her pieces in 2000 for Radio National.