Architectures of Occupation in the Australian Short Story

<p>Patrick West’s <i>Architectures of Occupation in the Australian Short Story </i>cultivates the potential for literary representations of architectural space to contribute to the development of a contemporary politics of Australian post-colonialism.</p><p>West argues that the predominance of tropes of place within cultural and critical expressions of Australian post-colonialism should be re-balanced through attention to spatial strategies of anti-colonial power. To elaborate the raw material of such strategies West develops interdisciplinary close readings of keynote stories within three female-authored pan-twentieth century Australian short-story collections: <i>Bush Studies </i>by Barbara Baynton (1902); <i>Kiss on the Lips and Other Stories </i>by Katharine Susannah Prichard (1932); and <i>White Turtle: A Collection of Short Stories </i>by Merlinda Bobis (1999). The capacity of the short-story form to prompt creative and politically germinal engagements with species of space associated with architecture and buildings is underscored. Relatedly West argues that the recent resurgence of binary thought—on local national and international scales—occasions an approach to the short-story collections shaped by binary relationships like a dichotomy of inside and outside. Concluding his argument West connects the literary and architectural critiques of the story collections to the wicked problem linked to ongoing colonial violences of improving Australian Indigenous housing outcomes.</p><p>Innovative and interdisciplinary this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Literary Architectural and Postcolonial Studies. .</p>