The politics and poetics of passage in Canadian and Australian culture and fiction

This volume of essays assembles perspectives on Australian and Canadian fiction and culture from recognised scholars in the fields. Resolutely interdisciplinary in focus, it engages with these two nations through an examination of the discourses of `passage' that reflect their status as postcolonial cultures. Through a variety of approaches - epistemological, historicist, biofictional, socio-semiological or poetic - grounded in postcolonial and gender theory, the contributions deal in concerns ranging from the sexual politics of New World contact to that of film, from celebrity as a construct to the poetic hybridity of First Nations writing. The collection as a whole raises pertinent questions about Canadian and Australian self-representations: in particular in terms of the gendered aspect of such representations and the place of the indigenous populations within them.

Design on the cover: Marian Steen "Charlie's Letter", 2002, Passage Series (31"x60")