Gender, madness, and colonial paranoia in Australian literature : Australian psychoses / Laura Deane.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Deane, Laura, 1965- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Australian fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Australian fiction.

Women in literature.

Mental illness in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (215 pages)

Place of Publication:

Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, 2017.

Summary:

This book offers an original and compelling analysis of women's madness, gender and the Australian family. Taking up Anne McClintock's call for critical works that psychoanalyze colonialism, this radical re-assessment of novels by Christina Stead and Kate Grenville provides a sustained account of women's madness and masculine colonial psychosis from a feminist postcolonial perspective. This book rethinks women's madness in the context of Australian colonialism. Taking novels of madness by Christina Stead and Kate Grenville as its point of critical departure, it applies a post-Reconciliation lens to the study of Australia's gender and racial codes, to place Australian sexism and misogyny in their proper colonial context. Employing madness as a frame to rethink postcolonial theorizing in Australia, Gender, Madness, and Colonial Paranoia in Australian Literature psychoanalyses colonialism to argue that Australia suffers from a cultural pathology based in the strategic forgetting of colonial violence. This pathology takes the form of colonial paranoia about 'race' and gender, producing distorted gender codes and ways of being Australian. This book maps the contours of Australian colonial paranoia, weaving feminist literary theory, psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory with poststructuralist approaches to reassess the traditional canon of critical madness scholarship, and the place of women's writing within it. This provocative work marks a radical departure from much recent feminist, cultural, and postcolonial criticism, and will be essential reading for students of Australian literature, cultural studies and gender studies wanting a new insight into how the Australian psyche is shaped by settler colonialism.

Contents:

Introduction : made mad: women, madness and national culture

The intelligible madwoman

Theorizing the madwoman: gender, madness and colonialism

National identity and colonial paranoia in The man who loved children

Cannibalism and colonialism: Lilian's story

Dark places and the white nation: colonial manliness

Conclusions: Australian psychoses.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

979-82-16-28310-2

1-4985-4733-8