Writing Woman, Writing Place (PDF)

Writing Woman, Writing Place analyses the ways in which contemporary women writers in the two 'settler' colonies of Australia and South Africa explore notions of self, identity and place in their fiction.
Both Australian and South African societies are undergoing the process of coming to terms with their often violent colonial pasts and, in doing so, are also re-evaluating and re-examining the history of white privilege and indigenous dispossession. Contemporary women writers in these two societies are still writing about similar issues as did earlier generations of women, such as exclusions from discourses of nation, a problematic relationship to place and belonging, relations with indigenous people and the way in which women's subjectivity has been constructed through national stereotypes and representations. This book describes and analyses some contemporary responses to "writing woman, writing place" through close readings of particular texts that explore these issues.
Three main strands run through the readings offered in Writing Woman, Writing Place - the theme of violence and the violence of representational practice itself, the revisioning of history, and the writers' consciousness of their own paradoxical subject-position within the nation as both privileged and excluded. Texts by established writers from both Australia and South Africa are examined in this context, including international prize-winning novelists Kate Grenville and Thea Astley from Australia and Nadine Gordimer from South Africa, as well as those by newly-emerging and younger writers. The readings are offered not so much as comparative but as cross-cultural, taking into account both similarities and differences, inviting the reader to find links and connections across these cultures.
Writing Woman, Writing Place will be of essential interest to students and academics within the fields of Postcolonial Literature and Women's Writing.