This study discusses modern Australian life writing by sons who focus on their fathers. Termed patriography (by Couser) or The Son’s Book of the Father (by Freadman), this rich field of relational autobiography offers insights into modes of masculinity, notions of identity and heritage and the ethics of representation. The current proliferation of ‘father memoirs’ in the marketplace demonstrates that such writing is fulfilling and being fuelled by the need to better understand the traditionally lesser-known parent.
Beginning with an analysis of the paradigmatic case of the sub-genre, Edmund Gosse’s Victorian masterpiece ‘Father and Son’, the study moves quickly on to embrace its Australian literary frame, demonstrating Gosse’s influence on a range of classic Australian autobiographies, including Hal Porter’s ‘The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony’. Mansfield then offers five ‘case studies’ on the seminal works of the current era: Raimond Gaita’s ‘Romulus, My Father’; Richard Freadman’s ‘Shadow of Doubt’; Peter Rose’s ‘Rose Boys’; John Hughes’s ‘The Idea of Home’; and Robert Gray’s ‘The Land I Came Through Last’.
How do these authors ‘perform’ their masculinity in the act of writing the father? What are some of the ethical complexities that must be negotiated when representing the reticent-laconic in autobiography? And, ultimately, how does one decide what an ethical representation of the father is? These are some of the questions Mansfield addresses in ‘Australian Patriography’, the first study of its kind in Australian literature.
Table of Content
Acknowledgements; List of Illustrations; Introduction Writing Patrimony: The Son’s Book of the Father as a Sub-genre; PART I: CHALLENGING AUTHORITY: Chapter One: ‘The Paradigm Case’: Contesting the Father in Edmund Gosse’s ‘Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments’; Chapter Two: ‘An Indubitable Australian’: Renouncing the Father in Hal Porter’s ‘The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony’; PART II: MEMORIALISING SELF-DENIAL: Chapter Three: ‘Words to Keep Fully Amongst Us’: Honouring the Father in Raimond Gaita’s ‘Romulus, My Father’; Chapter Four: ‘I Really Was the Son of Such a Man’: Replacing the Father in Richard Freadman’s ‘Shadow of Doubt: My Father and Myself’; PART III: PERFORMING MASCULINITY: Chapter Five: A Speaking Subject/A Watching Object: Addressing the Father in Peter Rose’s ‘Rose Boys’; Chapter Six: Choosing Patrimony: Performing for the Father in John Hughes’s ‘The Idea of Home’; Chapter Seven: ‘Neither to Vindicate nor to Vilify’: Becoming the Father in Robert Gray’s ‘The Land I Came Through Last’; Conclusion: The Turn to the Father in Autobiography; Bibliography; Index
About the author
Stephen Mansfield is an independent scholar as well as a casual research assistant and tutor in the Department of English at Sydney University, Australia.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
20,745 Ebooks in this category
