Cyclone Country: The Language of Place and Disaster in Australian Literature

Description

The storm has become a universal trope in the literature of crisis, revelation and transformation. It can function as a trope of place, of apocalypse and epiphany, of cultural mythos and story, and of people and spirituality. This book explores the connections between people, place and environment through the image of cyclones within fiction and poetry from the Australian state of Queensland, the northern coast of which is characterized by these devastating storms. Analyzing a range of works including Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, Patrick White's The Eye of the Storm, and Vance Palmer's Cyclone it explains the cyclone in the Queensland literary imagination as an example of a cultural response to weather in a unique regional place. It also situates the cyclones that appear in Queensland literature within the broader global context of literary cyclones. Dedication Acknowledgments Table of Contents Foreword • Stephen Torre Introduction One. The Cyclone Written into the Language of Place Two. The Naming of the Disaster Three. “Big wind, he waiting there”: Vance Palmer’s Cyclones of Apocalypse and Their Power of Revelation Four. “Touching the edges of cyclones”: Thea Astley’s Cyclones of Revelation Five. Threading the Eye of the Cyclone: Elizabeth Hunter’s Epiphany in Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm Six. Earth Breathing: Susan Hawthorne’s Cyclone Within Seven. The Apocalypse and Epiphany of Cyclone in the Land of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria Eight. The Word Becomes the Cyclone: Revelations of the Literary Storm Appendix A: Fiction and Poetry Written and/or Set in Queensland Featuring Cyclones Appendix B: Selected International Novels and Poetry Works Featuring Cyclonic Storms Bibliography Index