The Sugarcane Novel: Questions of Genre and Region
Conference Contribution ResearchOnline@JCUAbstract
Cheryl Taylor and Elizabeth Perkins (2007) describe the novels of John Naish as either ‘sugar country novels’ or ‘canefields novels’. More recently, Georgic Literature and the Environment: Working Land, Reworking Genre (2023) edited by Sue Edney and Tess Somervell examines farming literature to further understandings of ‘the georgic’ as a genre. This paper builds on this work by examining the implications of establishing a genre of ‘the sugarcane novel’. Using John Frow’s Genre (2006) as a guide, I argue that the sugarcane plant rather than the land upon which it grows should be the core determinant. This allows the inclusion of novels set primarily in a town, such as Ronald McKie’s The Crushing (1977), or in other off-farm locations and thus offers a way of curating a collection of novels for a more complete understanding of the social and literary influences of sugarcane than by considering only those set on farms. Given that sugarcane grows in and symbolises a distinct geographical region, this paper also asks how we might use the boundaries, interplay and entanglement of genre and region to transcend Western notions of land and the nonhuman.
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ASAL Annual Conference 2023: Recentring the Region
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15
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Melbourne, VIC, Australia
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Association for the Study of Australian Literature
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Melbourne, VIC, Australia
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