Glimpses of contemporary Australian literature

Work

Atwood has written thematically diverse novels from a number of genres and traditions, including speculative fiction and Southern Ontario Gothic. She is often described as a feminist writer, as issues of gender often (but not always) appear prominently in her work. Her work has focused on Canadian national identity, Canada’s relations with the United States and Europe, human rights issues, environmental issues, the Canadian wilderness, the social myths of femininity, representations of women’s bodies in art, women’s social and economic exploitation, as well as women’s relations with each other and with men (Howells 163). In her novel Oryx and Crake and in recent essays, she has demonstrated great interest in (and wariness of) unchecked biotechnology.

Her first collection was Double Persephone (1961). The Circle Game (1964) won the Governor General's award for poetry. Of Atwood's poetry collections, the most well-known is perhaps The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), in which Atwood writes poems from the viewpoint of Susanna Moodie, a historical nineteenth-century Canadian pioneer on the frontier.

As a literary critic, she is best known as author of the seminal Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), which is credited with sparking renewed interest in Canadian literature in the 1970s. She also wrote several television scripts, The Servant Girl (1974) and Days of the Rebels: 1815-1840 (1977).

Atwood has been vice-chairman of the Writers’ Union of Canada president of International PEN (1984-1986), an international pressure group committed to freeing writers who are political prisoners. Elected a Senior Fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto, she has sixteen honorary degrees, including a doctorate from Victoria College (1987), and was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame in 2001. Her literary papers are housed at the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.

Major novels: Lady Oracle (1976); Life Before Man (1979) - finalist for the 1979 Governor General's Award; The Handmaid's Tale (1985) - winner of the 1987 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the 1985 Governor General's Award; Cat's Eye (1988) - finalist for the 1988 Governor General's Award; The Robber Bride (1993) - finalist for the 1994 Governor General's Award; Alias Grace (1996) - winner of the 1996 Giller Prize and finalist for the 1996 Governor General's Award; The Blind Assassin (2000) - winner of the 2000 Booker Prize and finalist for the 2000 Governor General's Award; Oryx and Crake (2003) - finalist for the 2003 Governor General's Award; poetry collections: The Circle Game (1964) - winner of the 1966 Governor General's Award; short fiction collections: Dancing Girls (1977) - winner of the St. Lawrence Award for Fiction and the award of The Periodical Distributors of Canada for Short Fiction

Arthur Hailey (1920 –2004) was a British/Canadian novelist.

Born in Luton, Bedfordshire, England, Hailey served in the Royal Air Force from the start of World War II in 1939 until 1947, when he went to live in Canada. After working at a number of jobs and writing part-time, he became a full-time writer in 1956, encouraged by the success of the CBC television drama, Flight into Danger (in print as Runway Zero Eight). Following the success of Hotel in 1965, he moved to California; in 1969, he moved to the Bahamas to avoid Canadian and U.S. income taxes, which were claiming 90% of his income.

Each of his novels has a different industrial or commercial setting and includes, in addition to dramatic human conflict, carefully researched information about the way that particular environments and systems function and how these affect society and its inhabitants.

Critics often dismissed Hailey's success as the result of a formulaic style in which he centered a crisis on an ordinary character, then inflated the suspense by hopping among multiple related plotlines. However, he was so popular with readers that his books were guaranteed to become best-sellers.

He would spend about one year researching a subject, followed by six months reviewing his notes and, finally, about 18 months writing the book. That aggressive research — tracking rebel guerrillas in the Peruvian jungle at age 67 for The Evening News (1990), or reading 27 books on the hotel industry for Hotel - gave his novels a realism that appealed to readers, even as some critics complained that he used it to mask a lack of literary talent.

Many of his books have reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and more than 170 million copies have been sold worldwide in 40 languages. Many have been made into movies and Hotel was made into a long-running television series. Airport became a blockbuster movie with stunning visual effects.

A Canadian citizen whose children live in Canada and California, Hailey made his home in Lyford Cay, an exclusive residential resort on New Providence Island in the Bahamas with his second wife Sheila (who wrote "I Married a Best-Seller" in 1978). Hailey's grandchildren include Paul Hailey, Emma Hailey and Charlotte Hailey who are students in Northern California; Ryan Hailey, a talented young bass player and vocalist in a San Francisco band Erogenous Jones, a trio known for writing witty, sardonic lyrics; and Chris Hailey, who is currently working towards an audio engineering degree in Seattle, Washington.

Hailey died in 2004.

Major works:

The Final Diagnosis (1959) - hospital politics as seen from the pathology department; Hotel (1965) - hotels; Airport (1968) - airport politics; Wheels (1971) - automobile industry; The Moneychangers (1975) - banks; Overload (1979) - power crisis in California; Strong Medicine (1984) - pharmaceutical industry; The Evening News (1990) - newscasters; Detective (1997) - investigation politics.

William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948, Conway, South Carolina) is an American-born Canadian science fiction author who has been called the father of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction, partly due to coining the term "cyberspace" in 1982, and partly because of the success of his first novel, Neuromancer, which has sold more than 6.5 million copies worldwide since its publication in 1984.

Cyberpunk is a science fiction genre noted for its focus on "high tech and low life". Its name was originally developed as a marketing term and coined by Bruce Bethke in his short story “Cyberpunk” written in 1980, so that his novel would have more appeal to readers. The term cyberpunk was originally intended to be a character description for Bethke’s characters, but since then it has evolved and developed into a full genre of its own. Its name is a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk. It features advanced science such as information technology and cybernetics, coupled with a degree of breakdown or a radical change in the social order. Cyberpunk plots often center on a conflict among hackers, artificial intelligences, and mega corporations. They tend to be set in a near-future Earth. The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias, but tend to be marked by extraordinary cultural ferment, and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its creators ("the street finds its own uses for things"). Much of the genre's atmosphere echoes film noir, and written works in the genre often use techniques from detective fiction.

Primary exponents of the cyberpunk field include William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker and John Shirley. Unlike New Wave Science Fiction, which imported stylistic techniques and concerns that already existed in mainstream literature, cyberpunk originated in the written science fiction genre first before gaining mainstream exposure.

During the early and mid-1980s, postmodernist investigation of cyberpunk became a fashionable topic in academic circles. In the same period, the genre reached Hollywood and became one of cinema's staple science-fiction styles. Many influential films such as Blade Runner, the Matrix trilogy or the more recent adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly can be seen as prominent examples of the cyberpunk style and theme. Computer games, board games and role-playing games (such as Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2020) often feature storylines that are heavily influenced by cyberpunk writing and movies. Beginning in the early 1990s, some trends in fashion and music were also labeled as cyberpunk.

In 1968, Gibson went to Canada "to avoid the Vietnam war draft" and settled in Vancouver, British Columbia four years later where he began to write science fiction. Although he retains U.S. citizenship, Gibson has spent most of his adult life in Canada, and still lives in the Vancouver area.

His early writings are generally futuristic stories about the influences of cybernetics and cyberspace (computer-simulated reality) technology on the human race. His themes of hi-tech shantytowns, recorded or broadcast stimulus (later to be developed into the "sim-stim" package featured so heavily in Neuromancer), and dystopic intermingling of technology and humanity, are already evident in his first published short story, "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" (1977). The latter thematic obsession was described by Gibson's friend and fellow author, Bruce Sterling, in Sterling's introduction to the Gibson short story collection, Burning Chrome, as "a one-two combination of high-tech and low-life".

In the 1980s, his fiction developed a film noir, bleak feel; short stories appearing in Omni began to develop the themes he eventually expanded into his first novel, Neuromancer. Neuromancer was the first novel to win all three major science fiction awards: the Nebula, the Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Award.

The novels rounding out his first trilogy - commonly known as the "Sprawl trilogy" - are Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Gibson's second trilogy, "The Bridge trilogy"(1993–1999), centers on San Francisco in the near future and evinces Gibson's recurring themes of technological, physical, and spiritual transcendence in an arguably more grounded, matter-of-fact style than his first trilogy. The books in this trilogy are titled Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties.

After "All Tomorrow's Parties", Gibson began to adopt a more realistic style of writing, with continuous narratives. His novel Pattern Recognition, set in the present day, broke into mainstream bestseller lists for the first time.

Gibson finished writing a new novel entitled Spook Country in October 2006. According to Amazon.com, its scheduled market release is set for August 7, 2007. Gibson says: "It's set 'in the same universe,' as they say, as Pattern Recognition. Which is more or less the one we live in now. It takes place during the spring of 2006."

Two of his short stories have been turned into movies: 1995's Johnny Mnemonic, starring Keanu Reeves (screenplay by Gibson), and 1998's New Rose Hotel, starring Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, and Asia Argento, both of which are set in the Sprawl trilogy universe. Gibson also wrote an early treatment of Alien, few elements of which found their way into the film. A film adaptation of Pattern Recognition by director Peter Weir is currently in active production, due for release in 2008. In 2006 Alex Steyermark claimed to be developing an anime adaptation of Gibson's Idoru, the status of which is currently unknown.

Gibson was the focus of a 1999 documentary by Mark Neale called No Maps for These Territories, featuring Bono and The Edge reading excerpts from Neuromancer.

He commenced writing a weblog in early 2003, which remains active, with one major hiatus, into 2007. During the process of writing Spook Country, Gibson frequently posted short excerpts from the novel to the blog.

Major works: Neuromancer (1984).

Australian literature in English began soon after the settlement of the country by Europeans. Common themes include indigenous and settler identity, alienation, exile and relationship to place - but it is a varied and contested area.

Prominent Australian poets of the twentieth century include: A. D. Hope, Judith Wright, Kenneth Slessor, Gwen Harwood, John Tranter, David Rowbotham, Les Murray, Jennifer Maiden, John Forbes and Kevin Hart to name but a few. Anthologies of some note include The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991), and the annual Best Australian Poems (Black Inc.) and Best Australian Poetry (UQP).

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11