Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE200101675
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$419,950.00
Summary
War-Widow, Mother, Slave, Refugee: Andromache in Romantic Europe. This project aims to uncover how Andromache, a prominent classical figure in the Trojan wars, was represented and deployed to shape the literature, politics and culture of Romantic-era Europe. Its expected outcome is a significant reassessment of an understudied figure, focusing on her portrayals as a grieving widow, slave and refugee in times of national crisis and change, especially the Napoleonic wars. Its innovative method com ....War-Widow, Mother, Slave, Refugee: Andromache in Romantic Europe. This project aims to uncover how Andromache, a prominent classical figure in the Trojan wars, was represented and deployed to shape the literature, politics and culture of Romantic-era Europe. Its expected outcome is a significant reassessment of an understudied figure, focusing on her portrayals as a grieving widow, slave and refugee in times of national crisis and change, especially the Napoleonic wars. Its innovative method combines literary studies, musicology, cultural and material history, and emotions history. The project intends to strengthen Australia’s leading role in Romantic studies, enrich cultural life, and foster community reflection on the significant challenges of migration, refugees, gender and violence, war and emotions.Read moreRead less
Literature and the Face: A Critical History. The project aims to chart and analyse the representation of the human face in literary texts from the medieval to the contemporary era. It expects to generate comprehensive new knowledge about changing literary and textual discourses about the face by combining rhetorical analysis, the insights of cognitive literary theory, and digital methodologies. Significant outcomes include a deeper understanding of the cultural history of facial expression, iden ....Literature and the Face: A Critical History. The project aims to chart and analyse the representation of the human face in literary texts from the medieval to the contemporary era. It expects to generate comprehensive new knowledge about changing literary and textual discourses about the face by combining rhetorical analysis, the insights of cognitive literary theory, and digital methodologies. Significant outcomes include a deeper understanding of the cultural history of facial expression, identity and emotion, with particular attention to gender and ethnicity. The project’s engagement activities will illuminate the relationship between literary history and contemporary social understandings of the face and allow us to better understand current transformations in facial recognition.Read moreRead less
The importance of the fictional character in literary theory and cultural practice. This project is a theoretical research project which aims to make significant and innovative contributions to research excellence in literature and the history of ideas. This research focuses on the fictional character, one of the central categories of literary theory. The benefits flowing from it will primarily be an enhanced understanding of the workings and the history of a category that informs every domain o ....The importance of the fictional character in literary theory and cultural practice. This project is a theoretical research project which aims to make significant and innovative contributions to research excellence in literature and the history of ideas. This research focuses on the fictional character, one of the central categories of literary theory. The benefits flowing from it will primarily be an enhanced understanding of the workings and the history of a category that informs every domain of cultural practice.Read moreRead less
Marcus Clarke's Bohemia: Literature, Popular Culture and Urban Experience in Colonial Melbourne. This study will contextualise Marcus Clarke's career in terms of the material culture of nineteenth-century Melbourne, producing the first complete and theoretically informed monograph on Australia's most important colonial prose writer. Clarke's self-conscious bohemianism highlighted the increasingly commercialised nature of nineteenth-century writing, the centrality of mass entertainment to urban l ....Marcus Clarke's Bohemia: Literature, Popular Culture and Urban Experience in Colonial Melbourne. This study will contextualise Marcus Clarke's career in terms of the material culture of nineteenth-century Melbourne, producing the first complete and theoretically informed monograph on Australia's most important colonial prose writer. Clarke's self-conscious bohemianism highlighted the increasingly commercialised nature of nineteenth-century writing, the centrality of mass entertainment to urban life, the circulation of cultural capital between Europe and Australia, and the emergence of Australian literary nationalism in a larger imperial context. His career is thus uniquely positioned to elucidate the hitherto under-explored but pivotal relationship between literature and commodified popular culture in the specific context of an Australian settler-colony. Read moreRead less
Locating science fiction. The project will devise and develop a new 'cultural materialist' paradigm for science fiction studies and apply it to a case study of science fictional representations of catastrophe, especially nuclear war, plague and extreme climate change.
How Australians have imagined the future; possibilities for an ecologically sustainable society. In a society like ours, which is subject to more or less continuous and often rapid social change, the question of how to imagine the future is of paramount importance. The study of how better and worse futures have been imagined for Australia, and how they still continue to be imagined, is therefore a central research question for the humanities in this country. More specifically, one of the key the ....How Australians have imagined the future; possibilities for an ecologically sustainable society. In a society like ours, which is subject to more or less continuous and often rapid social change, the question of how to imagine the future is of paramount importance. The study of how better and worse futures have been imagined for Australia, and how they still continue to be imagined, is therefore a central research question for the humanities in this country. More specifically, one of the key themes in our research will be the relationship between culture, ecology and utopia or dystopia. Much of our work will be quite deliberately oriented towards the future possibilities for an ecologically sustainable society.
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Demanding the Impossible: Utopianism in Philosophy, Literature and Science Fiction. In a society like ours, which is subject to more or less continuous and often rapid social change, the question of how to imagine the future is of paramount importance. The study of how better and worse futures have been imagined for Australia, and how they still continue to be imagined, is therefore a central research question for the humanities in this country. More specifically, one of the key themes in our re ....Demanding the Impossible: Utopianism in Philosophy, Literature and Science Fiction. In a society like ours, which is subject to more or less continuous and often rapid social change, the question of how to imagine the future is of paramount importance. The study of how better and worse futures have been imagined for Australia, and how they still continue to be imagined, is therefore a central research question for the humanities in this country. More specifically, one of the key themes in our reseach will be the relationship between culture, ecology and utopia or dystopia. Much of our work will be quite deliberately oriented towards the future possibilities for an ecologically sustainable society.Read moreRead less
From colonial to modern: transnational girlhood in Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian print cultures (1840-1940). This project will produce new histories of girlhood through the examination of Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian print culture. It will shed new light on how colonial girlhood reflected transitional ideals and how Australia related to fellow colonies through its print culture and developed unique national ideals for girls in the modern period.
Transformative Utopianism: Contemporary Children's Literature Responding to Changing World Orders from Glasnost to 11 September, 2001. Political and cultural instabilities and conflicts from 1990 to the present have profoundly affected children's literature. Works of fiction in particular have deployed utopian and dystopian tropes to project possible futures to their implied readers. The project uses the concept of 'transformative utopianism' to suggest that these tropes do important social, cul ....Transformative Utopianism: Contemporary Children's Literature Responding to Changing World Orders from Glasnost to 11 September, 2001. Political and cultural instabilities and conflicts from 1990 to the present have profoundly affected children's literature. Works of fiction in particular have deployed utopian and dystopian tropes to project possible futures to their implied readers. The project uses the concept of 'transformative utopianism' to suggest that these tropes do important social, cultural and political work by challenging and reformulating ideas about power and identity, community, the body, spatio-temporal change, and ecology. In this way the project draws together multiple theoretical interpretations of texts to demonstrate the responsiveness of children's literature to broader ideological, social, theoretical and pedagogical contexts.Read moreRead less
The material cultures of early modern women's writing: editing, reception and mediation. This project provides the first comprehensive account of how early modern women's writing was produced and circulated from its original appearance to the present day. Changing the ways in which we read and value women's writing, it will produce new knowledge about early modern texts and their afterlives.