A magic pudding who changes from steak and kidney to jam roll and apple dumpling in seconds. A walking, talking dessert that never runs out of pleasing things to eat. A koala bear, named Bunyip Bluegum, A sailor named Bill Barnacle, and Sam Sawnoff the penguin have a wonderful hilarious magical adventure defending the Pudding against thieves who want it for themselves.
This is Strehlow's most widely regarded work and the culmination of his anthropological work related to the Aranda (Arunta) people of the Alice Springs region. In this work Strehlow records the patrilineal chants or songs of the Aranda people and puts them into a wider context of totemic cultural understanding. Of particular interest is Chapter 10, the love songs of the Aranda people, which pre-date European romantic conventions by several thousand years.
Now in paperback The Magic Pudding is a pie, except when it’s something else, like a steak, or a jam doughnut, or an apple dumpling, or whatever its owner wants it to be. And it never runs out. No matter how many slices you cut, there’s always something left over. It’s magic. But the Magic Pudding is also alive. It walks and it talks and it’s got a personality like no other. A meaner, sulkier, snider, snarlinger Pudding you’ve never met. So Bunyip Bluegum (the koala) finds out when he joins Barnacle Bill (the sailor) and Sam Sawnoff (the penguin bold) as members of the Noble Society of Pudding Owners, whose “members are required to wander along the roads, indulgin’ in conversation, song and story, and eatin’ at regular intervals from the Pudding.” The Magic Pudding rivals The Stinky Cheese Man as one of the craziest books ever written for young readers.
History is constantly evolving, and the history of children’s literature is no exception. Since the original publication of Emer O’Sullivan’s Historical Dictionary of Children’s Literature in 2010, much has happened in the field of children’s literature. New authors have come into print, new books have won awards, and new ideas have entered the discourse within children’s literature studies. Historical Dictionary of Children's Literature, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 700 cross-referenced entries. This book will be an excellent resource for students, scholars, researchers, and anyone interested in the field of children’s literature studies.
Peter Carey is one of Australia’s finest creative writers, much admired by both literary critics and a worldwide reading public. While academia has been quick to see his fictions as exemplars of postcolonial and postmodern writing strategies, his general readership has been captivated by his deadpan sense of humour, his quirky characters, the outlandish settings and the grotesqueries of his intricate plots. After three decades of prolific writing and multiple award-winning, Carey stands out in the world of Australian letters as designated heir to Patrick White. Fabulating Beauty pays tribute to Carey’s literary achievement. It brings together the voices of many of the most renowned Carey critics in twenty essays (sixteen commissioned especially for this volume), an interview with the author, as well as the most extensive bibliography of Carey criticism to date. The studies represent a wide range of current perspectives on the writer’s fictions. Contributors focus on issues as diverse as the writer’s biography; his use of architectural metaphors; his interrogation of narrative structures such as myths and cultural master-plots; intertextual strategies; concepts of sacredness and references to the Christian tradition; and his strategies of rewriting history. Amidst predictions of the imminent death of ‘postist’ theory, the essays all attest to the ongoing relevance of the critical parameters framed by postmodernism and postcolonialism.
This book offers an original framework on how to investigate, understand and translate sense of place at a regional scale. The book explores contemporary sense of place theory and practice, drawing upon the Western District of Victoria, in Australia, being the "Country of the White Cockatoo". It offers a unique multi-temporal and thematical analytical approach towards comprehending and mapping the values that underpin and determine strengths of human relationships and nuances to this landscape. Included is a deep ethno-ecological and cross-cultural translation, that takes the reader through both the Western understanding of sense of place as well as the Australian Aboriginal understanding of Country. Both are different intellectual constructions of thoughts, values and ideologies, but which share numerous commonalities due to their archetypal meanings, feelings and values transmitted to humans.
Environmental law has aesthetic dimensions. Aesthetic values have shaped the making of environmental law, and in turn such law governs many of our nature-based sensory experiences. Aesthetics is also integral to understanding the very fabric of environmental law, in its institutions, procedures and discourses. The Art of Environmental Law, the first book of its kind, brings new insights into the importance of aesthetic issues in a variety of domains of environmental governance around the world, from climate change to biodiversity conservation. It also argues for aesthetics, and relatedly the arts, to be taken more seriously in the practice of environmental law so as to improve our emotional and ethical capacities to address the upheavals of the Anthropocene.
Some of the earliest books ever written, including The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey, deal with monsters, marvels, extraordinary voyages, and magic, and this genre, known as fantasy, remained an essential part of European literature through the rise of the modern realist novel. Tracing the history of fantasy from the earliest years through to the origins of modern fantasy in the 20th century, this account discusses contributions decade by decade--from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and Lewis's Narnia books in the 1950s to J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. It also discusses and explains fantasy's continuing and growing popularity.
