Patrick White Research Articles

Parallel Horizons: A Comparative Voyage through Modernist and Postmodernist Waves in Australian and Indian Writing

This paper undertakes a comparative exploration of modernist and postmodernist movements in Australian and Indian literature, examining their transformative influence on the global literary landscape of the 20th century. Modernists introduced subjective expressions and disruptive narrative techniques, exploring psychic fragmentation, while postmodernists playfully challenged conventional literary representations. In Australian modernism, Patrick White's "Voss" (1957) critiques imperialism through surreal characterization, and Christina Stead's "The Man Who Loved Children" (1940) employs expressionistic symbolism to highlight marital oppression. Indian modernists, including Tagore and Anand, fused indigenous and Western influences in socially-conscious works addressing colonialism. Transitioning to postmodernism, Peter Carey's "Bliss" (1981) and Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" (1981) utilize intertextual pastiche to interrogate post-Independence national identities. Modernists disrupt narrative continuity to unveil alienation, while postmodernists expose storytelling's artifice through self-referentiality. The paper argues that narrative shifts between movements reflect changing assumptions about identity and power relations during anti/post-colonial transitions. Australian postmodernists, like Carey, reframe national myths from marginalized perspectives. In Indian postmodernism, Rushdie's carnivalesque narration destabilizes post-Independence identity constructions. In conclusion, modern and postmodern literature document the reconstitution of identity amidst profound societal change. Cross-cultural analysis enriches understanding of how global aesthetic movements intersect with localized interpretations. This study contributes to the discourse on evolving identity in literature, underscoring the significance of narrative transformations across distinct cultural and historical contexts.

Biography, History and Democracy: Contemporary Writing about Australian Lives

ABSTRACT Biography is one of the most potent arts of democracy because it links the individual to the body politic and to history. It stands in parallel with independent long-form journalism. Whereas independent journalism is under threat, biography is currently one of the most popular and productive genres of publishing, breaking down the stratification of readership associated with almost every other category of writing. In the academy, the status of biography has transformed over the last few decades, with historians embracing the genre, literary studies scholars experimenting with form, and a wealth of new infrastructure embedding biographical inquiry in Australia. The biographical turn in Australia has brought the two disciplines of history and literary studies closer together and enriched their scholarship. David Marr’s Patrick White, Fiona Capp’s My Blood’s Country, Mark McKenna’s Return to Uluru and Alexis Wright’s Tracker are just some examples of the field over the last 30 years. This article considers the principles underpinning contemporary biography and its practice. It reflects on the particular challenges of writing about living subjects, negotiating intimacy and privacy, and the uses of empathic listening in biographical interviews. It also explores the value of collective biography as a genre of current significance.

Rooted Resilience: Nature's Consolation in Patrick White's novel ‘The Tree of Man’

Rooted Resilience: Nature's Consolation in Patrick White's novel ‘The Tree of Man’

The Relationship Between THE PROTAGONISTS AND THEME in the Novel ``THE TREE OF MAN'' By Patrick White As Australian Best Seller Author

It is interesting to see the relationship between Stan and Amy and their different characteristics from which arise the conflicts in facing life in order to create the intact theme. By looking at Stan’s first appearance in the novel, it seems White has a preconceived role or set of characteristics he wants to apply to Stan’s character. His bitter experience makes him become well-known as a “pretty stubborn man” by the people around him. In the meantime, Amy’s characteristics have also been prepared by White through the function of three things which were given to her by the Parson’s wife at the wedding party. Those three things are: a bible, a blouse as good as new, and a little silver nutmeg grater. Of course, they are given to Amy, but there is an impression that both Stan and Amy will have to adopt those kinds of characteristics in life. For further analysis, let us see the appearance of the protagonists as symbolized by the three things in expressing the theme.
 Keywords: novel, protagonist, theme, relationship

Literature at the frontier of our commonwealth

Taking as its starting point the most recent, failed Australian referendum, this essay considers the efficacy of the Commonwealth of Nations — of the attendant ideological principles and values upon which the political association is based and to which its member states subscribe. Tracing the colonial histories and legacies of two current member states, Australia and South Africa — nations whose genesis in settler colonialism follow somewhat similar contours — the essay explores, in their canonical literature, the evolution of a kind of whitewashed nationalism that is not just racially exclusory but also registers, inversely, the anxieties of the self in relation to the “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983) endorsed in ideologies of nationhood. In a comparative, transnational reading of Patrick White’s Voss and J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands, this essay probes how this settler-colonial literary tradition simultaneously underwrites and complicates (continued) white imperialism and black un-belonging in ways that both suggest and test the conceptual prospects and limits of a universal, egalitarian “commonwealth”.

Patrick White and the path to Sarsaparilla: How a great novelist became a great unread

Patrick White and the path to Sarsaparilla: How a great novelist became a great unread

Literary sources of Patrick White’s *Voss:* *A House is Built* and *Think of Stephen*

Literary sources of Patrick White’s *Voss:* *A House is Built* and *Think of Stephen*

Patrick White's Theatre: Australian Modernism on Stage, 1960–2018. By Denise Varney. Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 2021. Pp. x + 202. £27.54/$45 Pb.

An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

‘Droughts and Flooding Rains’: Ecology and Australian Theatre in the 1950s

This article uses historical-ecological insights for a re-reading of two little-known mid-twentieth-century Australian plays, Oriel Gray’s The Torrents and Eunice Hanger’s Flood, which highlight developments relevant to the environmental disasters of today. In particular, the article focuses on the significance of key cultural assumptions embedded in the texts – and a revival of The Torrents in 2019 – including those to do with land use in a period of accelerating development. This approach offers new insights into the dominance of mining, irrigation, and dam-building activities within the Australian ethos, landscape, and economy. One of these insights is the framing of development as progressive. The article thus also examines how development projected as progressive takes place amid the continuing denial of prior occupation of the land by First Nations peoples and of knowledge systems developed over thousands of years. The intersectional settler-colonialist-ecocritical approach here seeks to capture the compounding ecosystem that is modern Australian theatre and its critique. The intention is not to apply revisionist critiques of 1950s plays but to explore the historical relationship between humans, colonialism, and the physical environment over time. Denise Varney is Professor of Theatre Studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research is in modern and contemporary theatre and performance, with published work in the areas of ecocriticism, feminism, and Australian theatre. Her most recent book is Patrick White’s Theatre: Australian Modernism on Stage 1960–2018 (Sydney University Press, 2021).

Denise Varney, Patrick White’s Theatre: Australian Modernism on Stage, 1960–2018

This monograph provides a useful study of Patrick White’s plays in the context of modernism. Target audiences include theatre historians, theatre studies students, and theatre practitioners.

A Fascinating Life: The New Biography of Elizabeth von Arnim

A Fascinating Life:The New Biography of Elizabeth von Arnim Juliane Römhild Joyce Morgan. The Countess from Kirribilli: the Mysterious and Free-spirited Literary Sensation Who Beguiled the World. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2021. Pp. viii, 344. isbn: 978-1-76087-517-6, au$32.99. Elizabeth von Arnim's readers are in a unique position: they can now choose from no less than five biographies in English (and one in German) to learn more about their favourite author. The first, written by von Arnim's daughter under the pseudonym Leslie De Charms (1958), was a collage of excerpts from diaries and letters with brief comments for context. The second, by Karen Usborne (1986), offered the first comprehensive account of von Arnim's [End Page 91] life although not all its claims hold up to closer scrutiny. The third biography, by Jennifer Walker (2013), is based on scrupulous research and is currently the go-to biography for scholars. In 2020 Gabrielle Carey used von Arnim's life as a springboard for autobiographical meditations on von Arnim's and her own quest for happiness. Now, only one year later, Joyce Morgan has added yet another biography—what, the reader wonders, could there possibly be left to tell? As it turns out a fair bit. The Countess from Kirribilli offers a fresh and eminently readable account of von Arnim's colourful life. Morgan, an experienced Australian author, biographer and journalist, traces the stations of von Arnim's biography with a deft hand: born in 1866 in Kirribilli (Sydney) into an English-Australian merchant family as Mary Annette Beauchamp, von Arnim spent only the first years of her life in Australia before her father relocated the family back to Europe. The Beauchamps were a mobile lot, and von Arnim inherited her father's travel gene. On a trip to Italy at the age of 23, she met and then married Count Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin and settled with him first in Berlin, then on a large property near the Baltic Sea, where the young Countess wrote her first book, Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1896). Published anonymously, it became a literary sensation overnight. It established "Elizabeth" as a household name and forever identified von Arnim with her literary alter ego, Elizabeth. Von Arnim wrote several sequels and quickly established herself as an author of witty novels of women's doubtful quest for personal fulfilment in marriage and an astute political satirist of German nationalism. Although she remained faithful to her themes, von Arnim's range in tone and her skilful play with genre remain impressive: The Caravaners (1909) is a bitingly comical self-portrait of a pompous Prussian officer. Vera (1921) uses the Gothic to create a devastating study of domestic abuse, which John Middleton Murry compared with Wuthering Heights—written by Jane Austen. By contrast, The Enchanted April (1922) is a light-hearted tale about the restorative effects of a holiday in Italy, which reminded Katherine Mansfield of Mozart. Today, we can appreciate von Arnim, who wrote over twenty best-selling novels, as a great—if academically still undervalued—satirist of the early twentieth century. Her contemporaries certainly recognized her as such, and von Arnim's friends included Bertrand Russell, Katherine Mansfield, her lover H. G. Wells, Hugh Walpole, Frank Swinnerton, Ethel Smyth and many others. Several of her novels were made into films; Patrick White thought The Caravaners was the funniest book he had ever read, and Virginia Woolf compared von Arnim's sense of comedy with Dickens. After living in England and Switzerland for many years, von Arnim settled at the French Riviera, before fleeing from the Nazis to the u.s. where several of her children lived. She died in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1941. [End Page 92] Morgan's biography makes important contributions to von Arnim scholarship. She offers an impressively detailed account of the slow discovery of von Arnim's identity by the press. Throughout her life von Arnim's books were signed "By the Author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden", and for the first years of her career, von Arnim, who was notoriously private, managed to avoid any connection between the august von Arnim family...

‘In the End, There Was No End’: Colonial Modernism and Moral Perfectionism in Patrick White’s The Tree of Man

Abstract The modernism of Patrick White’s 1955 pastoral epic The Tree of Man is the focus of this study. The novel tracks the generational transition within one pioneering family around the time of the First World War in rural Australia, and its structure approximates the biblical pattern of edenic beginning, tragic fall, and eschatological recovery. Biblical motifs are evident in the novel’s treatment of natality and death, and in the way narrative landscapes are sign-posted with symbolic trees and riven by apocalyptic floods and fires that portend epiphany and judgement. My analysis of the novel draws on scholarship that characterises modernism in relation to settler colonialism, the temptations of scepticism, the negotiation of Christian inheritances, and the ambivalent ‘endings’ that occur in the wake of modernity’s ‘new beginnings’.

Sacred in the Secular

Francis Webb’s poetry places the significance of Jesus firmly in the miracle of the incarnation, a moment that symbolises the presence of Christ in all creation, a presence summed up in the lines ‘The tiny not the immense / Will teach our groping eyes’. Drawing energy out of the Thomist tradition and the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, Webb demonstrates a belief in the presence of Jesus in the quotidian, proximate aspects of existence, a belief he shares with other Australian writers such as Patrick White and Les Murray. Mentored in his early years by Norman Lindsay and Douglas Stewart, Webb’s maturing sense of the presence of Christ in creation required a severing of ties with their stridently anti-religious position. Consequently, his poetry is driven by the metaphor of the journey, specifically a journey towards the revelation of Jesus, a journey to the ‘Centre’—both the centre of Australia and the spiritual centre of life. But such a journey demands the apprehension of the divine in the proximate, material aspects of existence. In this way the poetry demonstrates that revelation lies in the journey, not at its end. Jesus is to be apprehended in every moment.

Imagining Incarnation

What role can the imagination and literary language play in understanding ‘the sacred’, specifically theologies of incarnation? Australian novelist Patrick White’s Voss is read, in this article, as a testing ground for the ways in which human imagination can nurture incarnational longings and beliefs; but also for registering the limits of human language confronting what can be experienced semper processus. That is, this article argues that knowledge of sacredness and the incarnational, diversely intuited in many different forms and practices—Indigenous, European, Romantic, and in the land—can be approached in literary works, but that grasping a key expression of the sacred, incarnation, will always be an agonistic, stumbling, partial human process. The figure of Voss, lonely, self-absorbed, foreign, driven by will, intends to map the country, but this novel unravels human arrogance, undoing all its characters as they reach in their own ways towards incarnational truths.

Patrick White and the agency of literary masks

Patrick White and the agency of literary masks

Contested selves and postmodern hybridity: Authorial renunciation and gender revisionism in Patrick White’s Memoirs of Many in One

This article attempted to reclaim Patrick White’s final novel, Memoirs of Many in One, from the margins of White scholarship. The novel was a significant omission from the first major study of White’s oeuvre to appear in over 25 years, entitled Remembering Patrick White: Contemporary Critical Essays, edited by Elizabeth McMahon and Brigitta Olubas. Reviled by critics such as David Tacey as demonstrating White’s systematic repudiation and trivialisation of his literary legacy, most palpably commemorated in the form of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature, the novel has been largely ignored by White scholars. Bridget Grogan’s ground-breaking new monograph on White’s work, Reading corporeality in Patrick White’s fiction also did not include a study of Memoirs. But, this was most probably because the novel does not fit the theoretical focus of her study. As I hope to demonstrate, using postmodernist, Lacanian and film theory, the book may be reinterpreted as a conscious renunciation by its author of the realist tenets, which saw the author as a God-like, omniscient figure. By placing himself as just another character in his novel and fracturing his gendered and narratological (author)ity in the form of multiple, never fully inhabited selves, White revealed the ultimate fraudulence of any claim to authorial and narrative transcendence.

‘Journeys into Dirt’ in Robyn Davidson’s Tracks (1980) and Patrick White’s Voss (1957)

The 2019 Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference took as its theme the subject of ‘dirt’, and inspired this paper which examines the ‘journeys into dirt’ by explorer figures in Patrick White’s 1957 novel Voss and Robyn Davidson’s 1980 memoir Tracks . Drawing on theory of dirt developed by material ecocritic Helen Sullivan and by philosopher Olli Lagerspetz we demonstrate that the narratives of their travels show them engaged in transformative encounters with the Australian desert. In doing so we challenge Tom Lynch’s reading of the two texts as ‘traversals’ which portray the desert as ‘alien, hostile and undifferentiated void’. Using Keith Garebian’s distinction between ‘desert’ and ‘garden’ we examine how these explorers find and respond to ‘the garden in the desert’. Davidson couches her memoir as an exploration narrative and treats the desert as a ‘lived space’ which she ‘writes home’; having learned how to ‘be’ in it, and so to ‘recover’ the garden in the desert. Like her, Voss and his companions experience the desert as beautiful and inspirational, even, at times, nurturant and sustaining. Since Voss’s orientation is spiritual and transcendent, however, White’s treatment of the desert shows conceptual and corporeal boundaries between human and environment shifting and fading in their interaction with it. In both texts episodes occur of immersion in dirt – dust in Tracks and mud in Voss – which serve to illustrate and to emphasise the interconnectedness we humans have with the essential, elemental environment of dirt.

Czech translations and receptions of contemporary Australian fiction

ABSTRACT This article introduces the publication history and reception of Australian fiction in the Czech Republic, with a case study of translations of Christos Tsiolkas’s two novels, The Slap and Barracuda. The first part studies Czech book publishing and the translation context of Australian literature, showing that considerations of authors’ nationality (based upon their place of birth or residence) dominates the Czech market and discourse in determining which titles count as Australian fiction; it concludes that Australian literature is broadly represented in Czech translation, and the numbers of texts continue to grow with the presence of 20th-century classics (Patrick White), aboriginal autobiography (Sally Morgan), and contemporary novels (Tsiolkas). The article presents the challenges of translating contemporary Australian fiction in the context of postcolonial translation and the globalized English-language book market, highlighting the author’s personal experience as a translator of Tsiolkas’s novels.

The Zwergroman : Literary Dwarfs under the Australian Gaze

Abstract: Ubiquitous, highly visible, nonspecific to geography, history, race, or sex, dwarfism's connection with Australia's mythic and literary histories is remarkable enough to suggest here that it occupy its own subgenre in literature, the zwergroman (m). Australia's branding as the "Antipodes" geographically recalls its colonial past; mythographically the imaginative configuration was as an underworld of opposites ruled by the diminutive King of the Antipodes. Thus, the zwergroman is frequently fashioned from Celtic myths of the colonizing power along with the shaping power of colonial processes. In addition to introducing the conventions of the zwergroman and demonstrating the significance of dwarf characters to Australia's pre- and postcolonial narratives, this article gradually introduces concepts from disability studies (through the scholarly work of Erin Pritchard, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, and others) by examining representations and cultural meanings imposed on dwarf characters prior to the counter histories of twenty-first-century short-statured scholars whose demand for personhood required an engagement with subjective and experiential realities. The novels discussed (1970–94) represent a cluster of dwarf-centric novels by notable writers, all able-bodied at the time of writing (excepting Patrick White). They include C. J. Koch, The Year of Living Dangerously (1978; filmed 1982); James McQueen, Hook's Mountain (1982); Ruth Park, Swords and Crowns and Rings (1977); Peter Carey, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994); and Patrick White, The Vivisector (1970).

Greening White

ABSTRACT Patrick White’s support for green issues, especially in his later life, is well documented; however, relatively little attention has been paid to date to the planetary perspective of his fiction which, as Andrew McCann suggests, hints at “the possibility of a renewed relationship to the ‘earth’ ”. Focusing on what is generally considered to be his “greenest” novel, The Tree of Man, and adopting a broadly eco-materialist approach, this article assesses White’s work in the wake of the recent ecological and planetary turns. What difference does it make to position White, not as a national or an international writer, but as a planetary writer?And what if White’s work, usually looked at for the insights it provides into human subjects and subjectivities, were to be looked at instead in relation to what Jane Bennett calls “the material agency or effectivity of nonhuman or not-quite-human things”?