On Patrick White

Author: Christos Tsiolkas

Publisher: N.A

ISBN: 9780369355072

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 102

View: 6715


Patrick White, the un-Australian writer who did more than any other writer in the twentieth century to create an imaginative language that we can call Australian, who unshackled us from the demand that we write as the English do, who recognised, through his own alienation and also through his profound love for his partner, that we were a migrant and mongrel nation forging our own culture and our own language. Christos Tsiolkas spent a year of 'discovery and rediscovery' reading Patrick White. In this passionate and original book, he shows how the Nobel Prize winner's work still speaks to us. In the Writers on Writers series, leading writers reflect on another Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work. Published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria.

On Patrick White

Author: Christos Tsiolkas

Publisher: Black Inc.

ISBN: 1743820488

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 112

View: 6250


‘Patrick White, the un-Australian writer who did more than any other writer in the twentieth century to create an imaginative language that we can call Australian, who unshackled us from the demand that we write as the English do, who recognised, through his own alienation and also through his profound love for his partner, that we were a migrant and mongrel nation forging our own culture and our own language.’ Christos Tsiolkas spent a year of ‘discovery and rediscovery’ reading Patrick White. In this passionate and original book, he shows how the Nobel Prize winner’s work still speaks to us. In the Writers on Writers series, leading writers reflect on another Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work. Also in the Writers on Writers series Alice Pung on John Marsden Erik Jensen on Kate Jennings Ceridwen Dovey on J. M. Coetzee (forthcoming) Nam Le on David Malouf (forthcoming) Michelle de Kretser on Shirley Hazzard (forthcoming)

Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s Fiction

Author: Laurence Steven

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

ISBN: 0889205922

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 175

View: 5438


Most studies of Patrick White's fiction are devoted to elucidating archetypal patterns, symbolic configurations, and thematic preoccupations, and generally to praising the way White's fictional elements combine to form a religio-mystical worldview. Few have questioned this critical approach to White; fewer still have questioned White's vision itself. Yet, according to the author, questioning is in order—for Patrick White is a man divided. One part of him strives for permanence, for the ideal, in a world he knows is contingent and temporal, a world that will undermine his striving. This leads him as a novelist to devalue human life and to impose arbitrary, symbolic resolutions on his novels. This has been the focus of most critics. But there is another side, a part of White that strains away from the dualism of idealism versus despair and towards a vital wholeness that can be found, not in a world beyond the one we live in, but in human relationships. It is this side of Patrick White, argues Laurence Steven, that is the source of his genuine power as a novelist. An important challenge for the critic is "to develop an ability to see, within the restrictive compass [White's] symbolic designs impose on the novels, 'the new shoots,' as [D. H.] Lawrence would have it, which indicate new life, new creativity, and which point towards a wholeness which human beings can embrace as their own" (Introduction).

Patrick White's Fiction

Author: Carolyn Bliss

Publisher: Springer

ISBN: 134918327X

Category: Fiction

Page: 255

View: 1143


This study examines all eleven novels of Patrick White, the great Australian writer and Nobel Prize-winner. It begins from the observation that major characters in his novels undergo a necessary, redemptive, or facilitating failure. This failure paradoxically enables their success within the context of what White has called the 'overreaching grandeur' which circumscribes human existence. Evolution of this theme is traced through forty years of White's fiction: from his first novel, Happy Valley (1939), to his most recent work, The Twyborn Affair (1979). Comprehensive in its scope, this book is informed by a thorough knowledge of White's poetry, plays, short stories, and autobiography, as well as his novels. It is also unique in stressing that White's world view derives from a distinctly Australian experience. It thus links him to a country in which he is deeply rooted and to a heritage he continued to affirm.

Laden Choirs

Author: Peter Wolfe

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

ISBN: 0813165067

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 256

View: 2624


In 1973 the Australian novelist Patrick White won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the year that his great novel of family ties and change, The Eye of the Storm, was published and became a bestseller in America and Europe. Yet White is still not widely known or read, and few writers of today have provoked so many contradictory judgments. Now Peter Wolfe has written the first book-length study of the work of this brilliant and haunting novelist. The study offers a subtle, penetrating examination of White's style, his skill in building narrative tension, and also the depth and complexity reflected in his characterization, which, in his novels, always dominates action. Fittingly, for a writer whose novels bear the indelible stamp of Australia, the study also examines White's psychological use of setting and the intense sense of place found in his work. No other critical study of White covers such a broad range of his writing. Peter Wolfe considers here the entire canon of the novels. The Tree of Man, Voss, The Vivisector, The Eye of the Storm, A Fringe of Leaves, and The Twyborn Affair (White's most recent novel) are all discussed. White's themes and settings range from the power and immensity of the wilderness of the Australian outback to the dislocations wrought in traditional values by postwar industrialization and urban sprawl. Laden Choirs makes accessible to an American audience a writer of the first rank, whose work lies at the heart of modernist concerns. Literary students and scholars who wish to explore the world of Patrick White will find this book an essential key.

Patrick White

Author: David Marr

Publisher: Penguin Books

ISBN: 9780143790860

Category:

Page: 720

View: 6106


I think this book should be called The Monster of All Time. But I am a monster . . .' Patrick WhitePatrick White, winner of the Nobel Prize and author of more than a dozen novels and plays - including Voss, The Vivisector and The Twyborn Affair - lived an extraordinary life. David Marr's brilliant biography draws not only on a wide range of original research but also on the single most difficult and important source of all- the man himself. In the weeks before his death, White read the final manuscript, which for richness of detail, authority and balance is stunning.Throughout his exciting narrative, Marr explores the roots of White's writing and unearths the raw material of his remarkable art. He makes plain the central fact of White's life as an artist- the homosexuality that formed his view of himself as an outcast and stranger able to penetrate the hearts of both men and women. Gracefully written and exhaustively researched, Patrick White is a biography of classic excellence - sympathetic, objective, penetrating and as blunt, when necessary, as White himself.

Otherness in the Novels of Patrick White

Author: Alma Budurlean

Publisher: Peter Lang

ISBN: 9783631589090

Category: Australia

Page: 188

View: 2892


The central argument of the thesis, the representation and reception of otherness, is followed throughout White's novels with the support of a complex critical instrumentarium made up of postcolonial theory, reader response theory, cultural-critical frameworks, alterity theory, and narratology. Otherness in its manifold representations is a main component of Patrick White's fiction. It functions on several levels and this requires a deeper entanglement on the part of the reader. The different levels previously referred to are embodied in the various Others who people White's novels: ethnic Others as members of the Australian multicultural society and the Aborigines as colonial Others, as well as gender Others, who also play an important role in White's fictional world. Reading Patrick White is an exercise in tolerance, endurance and acceptance of alternatives. But the efforts of the reader do not remain unrewarded. In his endeavour to change what it meant to imagine Australia, the writer broke down the barriers of what it meant to imagine otherness.

World Writers in English

Author: Jay Parini

Publisher: New York : C. Scribner's Sons

ISBN: 9780684312910

Category: Authors, Commonwealth

Page: 428

View: 4389


Provides critical and biographical essays on English writers from parts of the former British Empire.

Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction

Author: Bridget Grogan

Publisher: BRILL

ISBN: 9004365699

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 286

View: 7854


In Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction Bridget Grogan examines and interprets Patrick White’s narrative and philosophical treatment of corporeality and embodiment.