Panel #1 Session 2
Wednesday 29 November - 11:30
Building 25, Room 2
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​Chair: Denise Thwaites
‘And he rode a Trojan Horse': an exegetical conversation about masculinity in the historical western romances of Amy Barry
- Amy Matthews
Flinders University
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Under the names Amy Barry and Tess LeSue, I write rom-com historical romance and mass market historical romance for the US market (and by extension for the global market). These novels are Trojan Horses for my research on feminisms and romance, historical narratives of settler colonies, and masculinities in the context of heterosexual intimacy. In this paper I will focus on Amy Barry’s The McBrides of Montana series, which attempts to problematise the hypermasculine construction of the western hero (Lasco; Boatright) and to explore the potential emotional damage caused to men by the toxic hyper-masculinities embedded in the tropes common to both the western genre and the romance genre (Allen; Arvanitaki). These constructions of masculinity in the western include the elements of homosociality, outward expressions of masculinity, self-control, emotional repression, and isolation. Barry’s novels seek to address the questions: How can the western romance hero be represented without reinscribing the elements of toxic hypermasculinity? And how can I make visible the harmful effects of both the historical constructions of masculinity and the fictional constructions of heroic masculinity in the romance genre, while still delivering a romance novel that satisfies the existing market? This paper will draw heavily on bell hooks’ work, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love, and will attempt to unpack the complex cultural conversations at work in this particular romance series, in order to gesture at the conversations enacted in the romance genre more broadly.
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Dr Amy Matthews is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Flinders University and Deputy Director of Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts. She is an award-winning multi-published author under the names Amy T. Matthews, Amy Barry, and Tess LeSue; her latest books are Someone Else’s Bucket List (Amy T. Matthews, Kensington: New York, 2023) and Marrying Off Morgan McBride (Amy Barry, Penguin: New York, 2023). Amy’s research focusses on genre fictions, specifically popular romance studies, historical fiction, and fictions of climate change.
Creating an ‘authentic’ narrative voice to foreground women’s experience in historical fiction
- Christine Balint
La Trobe University
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Bryony Stocker (2012) posits three methods of writing ‘authentic’ dialogue in historical fiction: ‘immersion, hybridisation and reader guidance’¹. The technique of ‘immersion’ creates its effects by incorporating a combination of contemporary informal language structures and contextual references. The language structures give the dialogue accessibility and a verisimilitude; the inclusion of historical detail serves to signify ‘authenticity’ to the reader. Following on from Stocker’s work, this paper discusses the use of ‘immersion’ in dialogue as well as inner voice. It examines methods a historical novelist may use to bring voice to issues such as the consequences of social and economic disadvantage for women. I will examine the construction of voice in Hannah Kent’s The Good People and my fourth historical novel, which I am currently completing, The Last Music Keeper of Venice—set in a Venetian musical orphanage during the Napoleonic Invasion of Venice in 1797. As well as looking at the application of concrete research, the paper will discuss other influences on creating an ‘authentic’ voice to foreground historical women’s experience. These include using the tasks within private, domestic, women’s spaces as a backdrop to telling a larger story, language/dialect study, method writing and transforming lived experience.
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1 Stocker, B. (2012) ‘”Bygonese” – is this really the authentic language of historical fiction?’ New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. 9 (3), 308-318.
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Dr Christine Balint has been a professional writer for more than 20 years. Her most recent book, Water Music, won the 2021 Viva la Novella Prize. Her first novel, The Salt Letters, was shortlisted for the 1998 The Australian / Vogel Literary Award; her second novel, Ophelia’s Fan, was internationally published in 2004. Christine’s research into the Venetian Musical Orphanages was funded by The Australia Council, Creative Victoria and the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. Christine has a PhD in Creative Arts from The University of Melbourne. She is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at La Trobe University.
Decolonisation and diaspora hybridity: An autoethnographic exploration of post-colonial fiction writing
- Sharmila Jayasinghe
Sydney University
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This paper aims to explore decolonisation and the construction of hybridity in South Asian diaspora fiction writing. When creating fiction, authors from formerly colonised countries living in diaspora engage with themes of colonisation, displacement, identity and culture through an exploration of the complexities and impacts of colonial legacies on individuals and communities. In doing so these writers consciously engage in decolonisation through constructing hybridity in their writing. This autoethnographic study aims to explore the potential of decolonising writing through the intentional creation of hybridity in literary works. It also aims to discuss the decolonising space as providing solidarity between the West and the East for the extension of creativity and culture. This would be achieved through an understanding of pre- and post-colonial literature traditions of Sri Lanka as well as my own experience when creating fiction in English language while living as an in-between writer.
Hybridity can be seen as a decolonising method when employed as means to challenge and subvert colonial power structures and narratives. Through blending of languages, traditions and customs South Asian diaspora writers portray works which navigate the complexities of colonial influences. This blending often leads to the emergence of new and distinct identities that challenge the fixed notion of authenticity and cultural purity, which results in hybridity created through the effort of decolonised writing. This paper aims to shed light on the transformative potential of embracing hybridity as a decolonising method in literature.
As someone who crossed a border out of the homeland and made a new home, I consider myself a writer with a hybrid identity – a part of a new species of writers, a person with a then and a now, a person with a here and a there, a person who thinks in one language and writes in another, a person with more than one culture. With a Master’s in Creative Writing and Literature from Deakin University, I am currently a PhD candidate at Sydney University.