"When London calls" and fleet street beckons : Daley's poem, Reg's Diary - what happens when it all goes "Bung"?
- Authors: Tasker, Meg
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Southerly - Modern Mobilities: Australian-Transnational Writing Vol. 71, no. 1 (2011), p. 107-126
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- Description: A recurrent concern in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century accounts of Australians in London is how "well" writers were doing. The common conception of the trip "Home" to Britain as a quest for cultural and professional success or recognition is reflected in the title of Angela Woollacott's feminist history, To Try Her Fortune in London, and it motivated many Australian writers, even a nationalist republican such as Henry Lawson, to regard London as the centre of literary culture, the best place in which to exercise their talents and ambitions. The emergence in these decades of a generation of "native-born" white Australian travellers who were related to but self-consciously different from the parent stock both in the colonies and in Britain created an anxious interest which fuelled ongoing discussions in newspapers and periodicals, prompted the creation of Anglo-Australian networks, clubs and publications in London, and supported many a columnist or special correspondent reporting back to Australia on the doings of their contemporaries in the great metropolis.
'That wild run to London' : Henry and Bertha Lawson in England
- Authors: Tasker, Meg , Sussex, Lucy
- Date: 2007
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australian Literary Studies Vol. 23, no. 2 (2007), p. 168-186
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- Description: C1
- Description: 2003005798
'The sweet use of London': the careers abroad of Louise Mack and Arthur Maquarie
- Authors: Tasker, Meg
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies Vol. 10, no. (2013), p. 1-20
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- Description: This paper examines the careers of two Australian writers who left Sydney for London at the end of the nineteenth century to explore questions of cultural, as well as literary, identity and affiliation. Louise Mack, as a poet, novelist, writer of romances, journalist and war correspondent, combined a fluid sense of national identity with a flexibility in writing across genres and readerships that makes her hard to categorise. Arthur Maquarie’s career as an Australian poet aspiring to fit into an essentially ‘English’ cultural niche provides a model of Anglo-Australianness that appears to fit a conservative model, called somewhat imprecisely from an Australian perspective, expatration - but which nonetheless retains layers of identity and experience which made complete assimilation virtually impossible. At a time when there was no clear or inevitable choice between being British or Australian, it is apparent that these writers never fully renounced (indeed, could not completely lose) either their British heritage or their colonial identity, whether working in commercial or literary milieux. Living and working in London, they were not simply expatriates or exiles, but carriers of complex and often shifting roles and identities that insisted on hybridity. Despite this theoretical hybridity being inevitable to some extent, it is still possible to distinguish between them. The colonial transnational writer’s position is differently inflected from the expatriate’s, as it entails the carrying of several layers of identity without an ideologically driven impulse to assert, renounce or choose between them. By comparison with Maquarie, Louise Mack appears to be far less troubled by notions of cultural identity, whether political or more broadly literary. Her greater mobility between genres, and her lack of any fixed status or position in social or institutional settings of the kind that Maquarie adhered to, correspond to a greater flexibility in her cultural affiliations, and produced a more fluid form of ‘colonial transnational’ identity.
Anglo-Australians on Fleet Street, 1892-1905
- Authors: Tasker, Meg
- Date: 2008
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Victorian Traffic: Identity, Exchange, Performance p. 95-102
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Aurora Leigh : Elizabeth Barrett Browning's novel approach to the woman poet
- Authors: Tasker, Meg
- Date: 2002
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Tradition and the poetics of self in nineteenth-century women's poetry Chapter p. 23-41
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- Description: "Tradition and how far writers fit into or diverge from the demands of tradition is one of the most debated issues in literary discussion. Gender, however, is not often part of discussions which depend on such questions at the decisiveness of the Modernist break with the Victorian period or whether Postmodernism makes tradition meaningless. By contrast the very existence of a specifically female tradition is still an urgent subject of debate, and it is clear that many nineteenth-century women writers were troubled in their search for literary foremothers. This autobiographical impetus can be located in the work of each of the poets discussed in Tradition and the Poetics of Self Nineteenth-Century Womens Poetry: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Caroline Bowles Southey, Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti. An exploration of the self, either in the abstract or in a more closely personal sense, appears in a concern with the craft of poetry and the role of the poet, in a teasing out of language as a marker of a personal encounter with the world, in an adventurous play with genre and a rewriting of myth, and in a bold confrontation with received notions of a womans place. Adventurousness marks the work of each of these poets and is a central focus of these essays."
- Description: B1
- Description: 2003000084
Australia victrix : Francis Adams and The Melbournians (1892), a romance of nationalism
- Authors: Tasker, Meg
- Date: 2002
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australasian Victorian Studies Journal Vol. 8, no. (2002), p. 77-87
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- Description: C1
- Description: 2003000095
Australian plays for the colonial stage
- Authors: Tasker, Meg
- Date: 2007
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Vol. 6, no. (2007), p. 128-131
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- Description: C1
- Description: 2003005795
Christopher Lee, city bushman : Henry Lawson and the Australian imagination
- Authors: Tasker, Meg
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Vol. 4, no. (2005), p. 201-205
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- Description: A review of Christopher Lee's 'City bushman: Henry Lawson and the Australian imagination' Henry Lawson is, indubitably, an iconic figure in Australian literary and cultural history, and Chris LeChristopher Lee’s City Bushman is a study of how that status was achieved and posthumously developed. While attention is paid to his literary reputation, and to the careful study and analysis of various statues and festivals produced in Lawson’s honour, the real interest of this book is in analysing the power relations and cultural transactions implicit in the public uses of Lawson.
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003001283
Francis Adams
- Authors: Tasker, Meg
- Date: 2004
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: New Dictionary of National Biography Chapter p.
- Full Text: false
- Description: 2003004433
Francis Adams and 'Songs of the Army of the Night': Negotiating difference, maintaining commitment
- Authors: Tasker, Meg
- Date: 2002
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Victorian Poetry Vol. 40, no. 1 (Spr 2002), p. 71-86
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- Description: This essay examines the way in which, after establishing a broad literary and journalistic reputation in both England and Australia, Adams adopted a split writing position in Songs of the Army of the Night. Comprising mostly ballads in the style of Chartist protest poetry, the Songs are intertextually determined; to some extent they have a generic life of their own. Yet in adopting the form of popular verse, using vernacular forms and diction, Adams nonetheless constructs a persona that is consistent with much of his more "literary" writing. Songs of the Army of the Night does more than demonstrate conflict in Adams' work between the claims of "art" and "life," between his upper middle-class cultural affiliations and working-class political sympathies. Despite this element of conflict, the configuration of speaking positions is not dialectic, but dialogic in the Bakhtinian sense. (2) That is, the voices or speaking positions in the poetry do not work through opposition to achieve synthesis or progress, or to generate a new set of dialectical terms; rather, they co-exist in a synchronous multiplicity that allows the "implied poet" of the whole volume to be constructed as both a member of the oppressed masses and a middle-class sympathizer.
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003000082
Francis Adams: Realism and Sensation in the 1880s
- Authors: Tasker, Meg
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australian Literary Studies Vol. 30, no. 3 (2015), p. 79-95
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- Description: The English-born traveller and writer Francis Adams, who was in Australia from 1884 to 1890, was a cultural activist and a conduit in both directions for the late-Victorian migration of ideas. His book The Australians (1893) was an important source for the ‘Legend of the Nineties’, but there was a good deal more than the celebration of the Bush in his Australian writing. He was a keen critic of Britain’s management of its empire, and a sensitive observer and analyst of social and cultural life in the colonies. Stephen Murray-Smith described Adams’ impact on his contemporaries as that of an ‘active intellectual [...] who brought something of “modernity,” of sophisticated European modes, to the discussion of Australian problems’. He expressed progressive views on sex, marriage, and the rights of women; Marxist theories on class war, property and power; a huge amount of sympathy for the working class (whose poverty he sometimes shared, but to which he did not belong); and ‘advanced’ notions about art, literature and science. His respect for science came in part from his father, Andrew Leith-Adams, an army surgeon and natural historian who corresponded with and gready admired Charles Darwin. The focus of this essay is on how Adams’ first two novels can be read in relation to late nineteenth-century categories of literary and popular fiction, via two terms ubiquitous in reviews and publishing of the day: ‘realistic’ and ‘sensational’. The phrase may seem tautological to twentieth- or twenty-first century readers, whose ideas about realism may align it with representation of the everyday. However this was not the case in the late nineteenth century: British newspaper reviews and advertising feature the phrase frequently in relation to novels, plays, and other forms of entertainment, the emphasis being on spectacle as well as verisimilitude. Such generic flexibility as Adams demonstrates in his fictional output between 1886 and 1889 calls for a nuanced understanding of literary culture in Australia in the 1880s. This is particularly true with regard to definitions of ‘realism’, but it applies also to ideological and gender-based assumptions about popular genres such as ‘sensation’ and ‘romance’. Adams’ 1888 essay on ‘Realism’, and contemporary debates about realism within which it was published, remind us that colonial press and literary establishments were both responsive and hostile to ideas and trends from the northern hemisphere - not simply British, French, and American, but filtered versions, such as British accounts of French naturalism.
Introduction to special issue on nineteenth-century Australian poetry
- Authors: Tasker, Meg
- Date: 2002
- Type: Journal article
- Relation: Victorian Poetry Vol. 40, no. 1 (2002), p. 1-6
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- Description: 2003004430
Nineteenth-century Australian poetry
- Authors: Tasker, Meg
- Date: 2002
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Victorian Poetry Vol. 40, no. 1 (Spr 2002), p. 1-6
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- Description: 2003004430
Struggle and storm : The life and death of Francis Adams
- Authors: Tasker, Meg
- Date: 2001
- Type: Text , Book
- Full Text: false
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- Description: A1
- Description: 2003003416
The warrior woman in Harlequin’s Bombshell Athena Force series
- Authors: Chivers, Marian , Speed, Lesley , Tasker, Meg
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australasian Journal of Popular Culture Vol. 3, no. 3 (2014), p. 335-349
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- Description: The theme of the warrior woman – the woman prepared to fight – appears in popular romance and in multiple time settings. This article will explore the way in which Silhouette Bombshell’s Athena Force series presents a series of romance heroines who are professional, trained warrior women. Rather than presenting these characters as a radical alternative to the more ‘traditional’ romance heroine, it will be shown that they attempt to accommodate a range of ideas about gender; they extend rather than reverse conventional ideas about femininity. There are, however, significant implications for the conventional romance plot as gender roles are unsettled and reconfigured. How are relationships between male and female warriors in the novels characterized, and how does this distinguish them from other contemporary romance fiction? Warrior women in fiction may be seen to subvert gender characteristics traditionally linked to biological traits and the conventional binary opposition between male and female gender roles. By stepping outside the accepted behaviour of females, the warrior woman makes us question those norms we may take for granted and provides another intriguing sub-genre for romance fiction.
Through Australian Eyes (Book)
- Authors: Tasker, Meg
- Date: 2002
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Victorian Studies Vol. 44, no. 4 (2002), p. 706-708
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- Description: Reviews the non-fiction book 'Through Australian Eyes: Colonial Perceptions of Imperial Britain,' by Andrew Hassam.
- Description: 2003004436
Two versions of colonial nationalism : The Australasian Review of Reviews v. the Sydney Bulletin
- Authors: Tasker, Meg
- Date: 2004
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Victorian Periodicals Review Vol. 37, no. 4 (2004), p. 111-122
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- Description: The independent weekly Sydney Bulletin and W.T. Stead's monthly Review of Reviews for Australia, both published for the Australian market in the early 1890s, took quite different lines on questions of national identity and imperial loyalty. Their frequently antipathetic positions were affected by many factors, not least of all being the strong personalities and political principles in the context of the late nineteenth-century Australian print culture and argues for a broader understanding of what might constitute an "Australian" voice at that period.
- Description: 2003001295
William Pember Reeves, writing the fortunate Isles
- Authors: Tasker, Meg
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Vol. 13, no. 3 (2013), p. 1-23
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- Description: William Pember Reeves seldom appears in studies of Australians in London, for the simple reason that he was from New Zealand. Nonetheless, he was one of the leading ‘Anglo-Colonials’ in London in the late 1890s (Sinclair, WPR 247), and appears often in the pages of the British-Australasian and other journals interested in colonial life and topics. A journalist, politician, socialist, legislator, economist, diplomat, historian, and poet, he produced a good deal of writing in many genres. Most of his work was concerned with ‘writing New Zealand,’ or, in one of his favourite classical allusions, ‘the fortunate isles.’ This paper traces his political and literary career, arguing that his move from New Zealand to London allowed him not only to write with the clarity of distance and the authority of being published in the cultural metropolis, but to liaise or mediate between the cultural positions of the colonial and the metropolitan. Not simply colonial, English, or even cosmopolitan, his writerly personae remained firmly based in both New Zealand and London, making him a transnational colonial Briton, writing differences as well as writing across them.