Description: Janine Burke, Beverley Farmer, and Drusilla Modjeska have made a significant contribution to Australian women's writing at the end of the twentieth century. Their original, bold narratives convey a sense of plurality and the unfixed nature of femininity in representation. By investigating the aesthetic, theoretical, and literary perspectives that ground modernism and postmodernism and by analyzing the effects that distinguish certain aspects of contemporary European paintings as well as some modernist women's visual configurations and self-constructions, Roberta Buffi explores how the fictions produced by these three Australian women writers are informed by particular linguistic and visual notions. Buffi argues how the visual - both as a subject matter and as a conspicuous quality of their prose styles - constitutes an underlying narrative strategy in their work, which adds new perspectives to available literary and theoretical frameworks in which preoccupations of feminine subjectivity are at stake.
Review Quotes: «Roberta Buffi's study of Australian art has updated and enhanced the outstanding Italian and Mediterranean tradition of intellectual criticism of the visual arts.» (Bernard J. Hickey, Professor of Australian Literature, University of Lecce, Italy)
«The originality of Roberta Buffi's investigation lies in its sustained intelligent and perceptive attention to the aesthetic concerns and qualities of three contemporary women writers in Australia for whom art is a major theme.» (Bruce Bennett, Professor of English, University College, Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra)