The Sugarcane Novel: Questions of Genre and Region

Smyth, Elizabeth

Abstract

Cheryl Taylor and Elizabeth Perkins (2007) describe the novels of John Naish as either ‘sugar country’ or ‘canefields’ novels. More recently, contributors to Georgic Literature and the Environment: Working Land, Reworking Genre (2023) have examined farming literature to further understandings of ‘the georgic’ as either a genre or a mode. This paper builds on this work by examining the implications of establishing a genre of ‘the sugarcane novel’ and mode of ‘sugarcane literature’. Using John Frow’s Genre (2006) as a guide, I argue for the sugarcane plant rather than humans and land as the core determinant of these. This allows the inclusion of texts with urban settings, such as Ronald McKie’s The Crushing (1977), and thus offers a way of curating a collection of works to enable richer understandings of the social and environmental influences of sugarcane than by considering only those set on farms. Given that sugarcane grows in and symbolises distinct geographical regions, I also explore the boundaries, interplay and entanglement of genre and region and move away from an anthropocentric conception of region as marginal. I argue that region is locationally and temporally mutable according to perspective and circumstance, and that regional literature can be entirely disconnected from the tangible properties of a geographical region.

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Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature

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Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature

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1833-6027

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Association for the Study of Australian Literature

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