Description
Book SynopsisThe Son’s Book of the Father, as Richard Freadman termed it, is a rich field of relational autobiography, offering a unique set of tensions and insights into modes of masculinity, notions of identity and the ethics of representing another’s life in writing one’s own.
This study of modern Australian life writing by sons who focus on fathers places an emerging sub-genre within its literary ancestry and its contemporary milieu. Providing compelling readings of Raimond Gaita’s ‘Romulus, My Father’, Peter Rose’s ‘Rose Boys’ and many others, this is the first study of its kind within Australian literature.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements; 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
