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.
Making a career of it: the literary and cultural production of Tom Keneally. Is being a 'national living treasure' compatible with being a serious literary figure? The project examines who actually reads what of Tom Keneally's fiction and whether facts accord with critical assessments of his work, both in Australia and overseas. Answers will clarify how Australia constructs its literary culture and writes literary history.
Future thinking: utopianism in post-colonial literatures. This project examines the critical function of creative writers around the world in their society's imagination of the future. It investigates post-colonial literatures from a wide range of countries and regions to show the prevalence and power of hope, of ideas of liberation, self-determination and future possibility.
Cognition, culture, and textual encounters: a study of what cognitive science and the earliest English poetry can do for each other. This project examines, through multidisciplinary tools drawn from cognitive science, how we are able to understand texts written over 1000 years ago, through the cognitive structures and cultural factors that shape meaning. Using cognitive approaches to literature, this study demonstrates the complex interplay of mind, culture, and literary texts.
The return of the omniscient narrator in contemporary fiction: authorship and narrative authority in the new millennium. An original study of how contemporary novelists have revived the voice of an all-knowing omniscient narrator to assert their literary authority in a multi-media age. The project will generate new knowledge about how fiction-writing techniques have adapted to historical changes, and provide fresh insight into the role of authors as public figures.