Australian Literature: Traditions and Revisions

Institution: 
University of Queensland
Coordinator: 
Levy, Dr Bronwen
Code: 
ENGL2100
Year: 
2010
Levels: 
Undergraduate

The course examines Australian literature. Students read a selection of significant Australian literary texts from different genres, and discuss the literary, political, critical, and theoretical questions raised in these texts. The course focuses on Australian literature as a national literature that simultaneously develops and revises its literary traditions. Australian literature also responds to and revises traditions from other literatures, notably but not solely from Anglophone countries. What has preoccupied Australian literature? What has defined it? What dynamics are at work in it? Students gain an understanding of a lively national literature which looks within, questions, and debates its own history and place of origin, at the same time as it examines the relationship of Australia, and Australian literature, to the world. The diverse beginnings and trajectories of Australian literature are discussed.

Degrees: 
Assessment: 

Attendance

10%

Essay 1 1500 words

30%

Essay 2 1500 words

30%

Final examination

30%

Additional Information
Campus: 
St Lucia
Offering: 
Semester 1
Offered History: 
2009, 2008, 2007, 2006
Supplementary Texts: 

AustLit: Online Electronic Database Resource for Australian Literature

Wilde, William, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature. 2nd ed. Oxford: London, 1994.

Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.

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