Full Description
This is a comparative textual analysis of a body of relatively neglected works by Greek Australian writers Dimitris Tsaloumas, Antigone Kefala, Stylianos Charkianakis, Dean Kalimnios, Christos Tsiolkas, Fotini Epanomitis and Helen Koukoutsis. The focus is on reading their texts as a bridge between multiculturalism and world literature given each writer identifies in various ways with peripheral cosmopolitanism as they merge high-brow literary forms with the quotidian paramythi, or the storytelling oral tradition. The different ways they do this registers the writers' ambivalent relationship with their origins through their transculturally mediated expression. Discovering new possibilities in literary texts which have oral traces becomes a productive way to look at the question of translatability as posed by scholars of multiculturalism and world literature, such as Sneja Gunew, Emily Apter and Pheng Cheah.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements; 1. Greek Australian Literature: Between Multiculturalism and World Literature; 2. Diasporic Transformations of the Oral Traditional Paramythi; 3. Dimitris Tsaloumas: Outspoken Visionary Poet or Disillusioned Exile?; 4. Antigone Kefala: Writing against Aphanisis; 5. Fotini Epanomitis's The Mule's Foal: A Literature of Transgression; 6. Christos Tsiolkas's Dead Europe: A Polyphonic Tale of Protest; 7. Helen Koukoutsis's Cicada Chimes: Shifting between Worlds; 8. Stylianos Charkianakis: Paramythic Transformations through Poetry; 9. Dean kalimnios: Religious Surrealist or Proud Neo-Hellenic Scholar?; 10. Conclusion: Towards a Rereading of Greek Australian Literature; Index
