Concrete Horizons: Romantic Irony in the Poetry of David Malouf and Samuel Wagan Watson

Table Of Contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• About the author
• About the book
• This eBook can be cited
• Acknowledgements and Thanks
• Contents
• I. Introduction
• Introduction
• Reading Irony in Watson and Malouf: Content and Parameters
• Framing Romanticism
• Watson and Malouf: Finding Common Ground
• II. Rethinking Romanticism
• A bad Romance? Rehabilitating Romanticism in Australia
• Australian Romanticism: A Brief History
• Landscaping
• Early Australian Romantic Poets?
• Romanticism as Absence
• Romanticism Beyond Nature, Beyond Nation
• New Approaches to Romanticism: A Model of Romantic Irony
• Language and Space
• Romantic Irony
• Irony: Rhetorical, Socratic, Romantic
• Beyond Thought/Language Dualism
• Ordo Inversus as Romantic Irony
• Representing the Unrepresentable
• Productive Negativity: The Ironic Dialectic
• Irony Applied: The Subject in Australia
• Model Theory: How Romanticism Continues and Adapts
• Model Theory: A Pragmatic Alternative
• What is a Model?
• The Modelling Process
• III. David Malouf
• Malouf: An Author in Context
• Malouf and the History Wars
• Malouf: A Romantic?
• A Poetics of Place
• Water
• Edges of the Nation
• “Sheer Edge”; “At Deception Bay”; “Into the Blue”; “The Catch”; “This Day Under My Hand”; “An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton”
• Communing with the Animal Other
• “In the Sea’s Giving”; “The Crab Feast”; “Pentecostal”
• Water: Closing Remarks
• Interiors
• Fragments of the Social Self
• “This Day Under My Hand”; “An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton”
• Recollections of Childhood: Deconstructing the Indoor Self
• “Interiors from a Childhood”; “Indoor Garden”
• Inside Language
• “Dot Poem, the Connections”; “In the Beginning”
• The Wild Indoors
• “The Year of the Foxes”; “Notes from a Menagerie”; “Footnote for a Bestiary”
• Interiors: Closing Remarks
• (Sub)urban
• Civil Beasts
• “Dog Park”; “Bicycle”; “Typewriter Music”
• Liminal Transcendence and Black Coffee
• “Suburban”; “Towards Midnight”; “Windows”; “Earth Hour”
• (Sub)Urban: Closing Remarks
• Of Earth and Clay
• Gardens of the Living Word
• “Touching Earth”; “Cuisine”; “The Worm’s-Eye View”
• Gardens as Schelling’s Living Word
• Earth: Closing Remarks
• The Body
• “First Things Last”; “The Switch”; “Elegy: The Absences”; “Unholding Here”; “Afterword”; “Ode One”
• Malouf’s Imaginary of Endless Becoming
• IV. Watson: Moving Beyond Protest Poetry in the Second Generation
• Framing the Indigenous Author
• Watson: Labels and Indigenous Writing
• Collected Volumes: Themes and Development
• Australian-Aboriginal Literature: Context
• Approaching Watson: Writer; Indigenous Writer
• A Poet of the Second Generation
• Writing in the Protest Tradition
• “Labelled”; “In the Light of Two Fires”; “Enemy of the State”; “Cheap White-Goods at the Dreamtime Sale”
• Beyond the Postcolonial: A Different Take on Irony
• “Apocalyptic Quatrains: The Australian Wheat Board/Iraq Bribery Scandal”
• Irony: Between the Universal and the Specific
• Two Realities, One City
• Narrating Reality: The Gothic and the Hyperreal in Watson
• “The Dingo Lounge”; “The Crooked Men”; “Cribb Island”; “Capalaba”; “Die Dunkle Erde”
• The Hyperreal
• The Gothic
• Aboriginal Gothic Opacity vs Watson’s Glossaries
• The Fantastic Is Reality
• An Enmeshed Sacred: Layering Place in Watson’s Work
• “For the Wake and the Skeleton Dance”; “White Stucco Dreaming”; “A Bent Neck Black and Flustered Feather Mallee”
• Ironic Contingency Through the Sacred
• The Writer’s Voice in the City
• “Fly-Fishing in Woolloongabba”; “The Writer’s Suitcase”
• Language: Beyond the Embrace of a Twisted Tongue
• A Writer’s Musings on Gastank Fumes
• “Gasoline”; “Gastank Sonnets”; “After 2 a.m. ”
• Writing: A Bittersweet Necessity
• “A Blackbird of My Mind”; “Blood and Ink”; “Musing: The Graveyard Shift”
• Beyond Language’s Limits
• “Musing: The Graveyard Shift”; “Author’s Notes #2”; “Kangaroo Crossing”
• The Abstract Transcendent
• “Raindrops Fall in Vain”; “A Dead Man’s Mouth Harp”
• A New Way Forward
• “Poetry on the Green Bridge”; “Stealing Kisses”; “Let’s Talk”
• Opening Up a Dialogue
• V. Synthesis: The Actualisation of Romanticism in Contemporary Australian Poetry
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Sereis index