Architectures of Occupation in the Australian Short Story: Literature and the Built Environment after 1900 [Hardcover]

Patrick Wests Architectures of Occupation in the Australian Short Story cultivates the potential for literary representations of architectural space to contribute to the development of a contemporary politics of Australian post-colonialism.

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Patrick West is an Associate Professor at Deakin University. He has authored many journal articles and book chapters in fields including literary studies, creative writing, and practice-led research. His PhD is from The University of Melbourne, and he is the author of the short-story collection The World Swimmers (2011).

Patrick Wests Architectures of Occupation in the Australian Short Story cultivates the potential for literary representations of architectural space to contribute to the development of a contemporary politics of Australian post-colonialism.

West argues that the predominance of tropes of place within cultural and critical expressions of Australian post-colonialism should be re-balanced through attention to spatial strategies of anti-colonial power. To elaborate the raw material of such strategies, West develops interdisciplinary close readings of keynote stories within three female-authored, pan-twentieth century, Australian short-story collections: Bush Studies by Barbara Baynton (1902); Kiss on the Lips and Other Stories by Katharine Susannah Prichard (1932); and White Turtle: A Collection of Short Stories by Merlinda Bobis (1999). The capacity of the short-story form to prompt creative and politically germinal engagements with species of space associated with architecture and buildings is underscored. Relatedly, West argues that the recent resurgence of binary thoughton local, national, and international scalesoccasions an approach to the short-story collections shaped by binary relationships lil%