Antipodean Childhoods

Growing Up in Australia and New Zealand
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4438-2372-2
Verlag: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 215 Seiten

Though obvious, the productiveness of combining the three concepts of childhood, otherness and the postcolonial has not inspired much academic inquiry so far. The essays assembled in this book make up for this omission and address aspects of growing up in Australia and New Zealand from various angles. They base their argument on the premise that, whether in settler, migrant or indigenous communities, children tend to be ascribed a space of their own, mostly outside but never independent of that of adults. How adults configure this space both practically and imaginatively, for instance in the arts, in adult and children’s literature, in film and photography, or in historical documents, is one of the questions answered in the process. How these configurations have developed with time and under the influence of specific historical circumstances is another. Thus, the individual papers are more than a contribution to the current (re-)discovery of the theme of childhood in European cultures in that Antipodean Childhoods remains centrally concerned with the cultural specificity of childhoods lived in Australia and New Zealand and with the theoretical relevance of this specificity to postcolonial literary, cultural and historical studies.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ramsey-Kurz, Helga

Ratheiser, Ulla

Über Autor(innen)

Helga Ramsey-Kurz is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She has published widely on postcolonial literature. Her more recent publications include The Non-Literate Other: Readings of Illiteracy in Twentieth-Century Novels in English and Projections of Paradise: Ideal Elsewheres in Postcolonial Migrant Literature.

Ulla Ratheiser teaches English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Her PhD thesis focused on childhood and child characters in Patricia Grace’s novels. She has presented and published several papers on Maori and diasporic literatures.