The littoral zone : Australian contexts and their writers / / introduced and edited by CA. Cranston and Robert Zeller.

• Superior document: Nature, culture and literature ; 04
• TeilnehmendeR: Cranston, CA.; Zeller, Robert.
• Year of Publication: 2007
• Language: English
• Series: Nature, culture and literature ; 4.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (322 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

In this, the first collection of ecocritical essays devoted to Australian contexts and their writers, Australian and US scholars explore the transliteration of land and sea through the works of Australian authors and through their own experiences. The littoral zone is the starting point in this fresh approach to reading literature organised around the natural environment—rainforest, desert, mountains, coast, islands, Antarctica. There’s the beach, where sexual and spiritual crises occur; the Western Australian wheatbelt; deserts, camel trekking, and the transformation of a salt flat into an inland island; New Age literature that ‘appropriates’ Aboriginal culture as the healing poultice for an ailing West; a re-examination of pastoralism; an inquiry into whether Judith Wright's work can “persuade us to rejoice” in the world; the Limestone Plains, home of the bush capital and the bogong moth; tropical North Queensland; national parks where “the mountains meet the sea”; temperate islands, with their history of sealing, Soldier Settlement, and sea country pastoral; and Antarctica, where a utopian vision gives way to an emphasis on its ‘timeless’ icescape as minimalist backdrop for human dramas. The author-terrain includes poets, playwrights, novelists, and non-fiction writers across the range of contexts constituting the littoral zone of ‘Australia’.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- Acknowledgements -- Setting the Scene: Littoral and Critical Contexts / Robert Zeller and CA. Cranston -- A Beach Somewhere: The Australian Littoral Imagination at Play / Bruce Bennett -- The Shadow on the Field: Literature and Ecology in the Western Australian Wheatbelt / Tony Hughes-d’Aeth -- Literature in the Arid Zone / Tom Lynch -- The Green Thumb of Appropriation / Mitchell Rolls -- Under the Mountains and Beside a Creek: Robert Gray and the Shepherding of Antipodean Being / Mark Tredinnick -- The Poetry of Judith Wright and Ways of Rejoicing in the World / Veronica Brady -- Ecopoetics of the Limestone Plains / Kate Rigby -- Hugging the Shore: The Green Mountains of South-East Queensland / Ruth Blair -- Tales of the Austral Tropics: North Queensland in Australian Literature / Robert Zeller -- Islands / CA. Cranston -- “A Place of Ideals in Conflict”: Images of Antarctica in Australian Literature / Elizabeth Leane -- Notes on Contributors -- List of Illustrations -- Index.