Law Commons^™

Review Of "Murdering Stepmothers - The Execution Of Martha Rendell" By Anna Haebich, Catherine Cole

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Stepmothers have received a bad press over the centuries. They are the cruel replacement mothers of fairytales, women who may not have children themselves and whose relationship with their new offspring is hostile or neglectful. Stepmothers usurp another woman’s role, generally that of the idealised, biological mother who has died tragically and can never be replaced in her children’s hearts. This antithetical role plays out in folk narratives such as Hansel and Gretel, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella, which offer murderous stepmothers and absent fathers who are blind or indifferent to their children’s peril.

The Program Era: Review By Catherine Cole, Catherine Cole

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Book review of:

Mark McGurl The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 2009 ISBN 9780674062092 Pb 466pp AUD24.95 ISBN 9780674033191 Hb 466pp AUD64.99

Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples And Settlers In 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities [Book Review], Frances Steel

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

In Australia, classical notions of the frontier and its associated histories of invasion, displacement and violence would tend to point us towards the outback or the bush rather than the urban centres where most of us live today. Penelope Edmonds thoroughly unsettles this notion of a distant frontier by moving it back to the edges of the continent, to the port towns where Europeans first landed and where most of them remained. The frontier was not simply 'out there', synonymous with the unruly boundaries of an expanding pastoral economy, but very close to home. This reorientation recognises that our cities …

Book Review: Kallendorf, Craig. The Other Virgil: "Pessimistic" Readings Of The Aeneid In Early Modern Culture, Ika Willis

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The Other Virgil is introduced as a contribution to the debate within classical scholarship over the historicity of "pessimistic" readings of Virgil’s Aeneid. This debate might at first appear to be a minor intradisciplinary quarrel, but in fact it has important implications for reception study more broadly, raising questions about the historicity of reception (and reading in general) and about the validity of various contemporary methodological approaches to reception and allusion.