In literary terms, violence provides a readymade drama, an impetus for action and reaction, shock, emotion, transformation — from Milton’s War in Heaven to Modernist aesthetics of shock to the contemporary thriller. Literature is also a site where violent experience is variously recorded, masked, performed and objectified. The work in this issue of Southerly is situated at the intersections where intense personal experience meets the force of pervasive operations including poverty, colonialism, gendered and racialised violence from the colonial period to the present.
This issue of Southerly includes work that engages with violence across that spectrum in relation to both content and form. Three essays address Australia’s (ongoing) colonial violence. In Violence in Colonial Women’s Novels Kate Livett identifies a pattern of three interconnected forms of violence in a wide range of romance-realist novels. In addition to self-evident physical violence, she examines the workings of 'structural violence' in the novels’ accounts of capitalist-colonialism, which is often masked, she argues, 'by the displacement of direct intention or malice onto motives such as financial avarice or philanthropic charity.' The third form of violence is 'symbolic violence' in which 'assault, impoverishment and total erasure of certain subjects and groups, such as women, colonised peoples and non-gender-normative people, are performed in the symbolic system of language and representation.' Livett traces the way numerous colonial women’s novels engage with these issues, which they struggle to resolve in the genre of romance/realism.
The issue also includes a range of unthemed material and reviews as well as the shortlisted and winning poems from the David Harold Tribe Poetry Award.
