Associate Professor Fiona Morrison

My research and teaching interests arein the area of postcolonial literatures in English and Australian literature. I have also taught a great deal across the English literary canon as well as liteary theory, gender and rhetorical studies.

My current research project, Christina Stead in America, reads Stead’s American novels with a particular focus on her Australian and transnational background, her commitment to the mobile subject position of “fellow traveller” and her allied critique of World War II America. This project picks up sustained work on Stead’s I’m Dying Laughing, as well as material from the politics section of my recent critical edition of Dorothy Hewett’s nonfiction prose.

Under the Scientia scholarship scheme, she is looking for strong applicants for 2018 for the PhD project "Migrant Subjects, Literary Work and Literary Circulation in a Global World": In the current world, cross cultural mobility operates in a number of ways across a wide geographical scale and the Contemporary Humanities and Creative Arts have been central in representing and negotiating these ranges of experiences. We are interested in supervising projects that investigate the literary representations of migrant mobilities in late modernity, including those by refugees. We are particularly interested in the ways in which questions of gender, genre and geography frame these representations. The modes of circulation of literary texts in and around global literary systems, including aspects of translation, publication and reception might form a key aspect of this project.

Publications

Books

• Morrison, F (ed.) Dorothy Hewett: Selected Prose. Nedlands: University of Western Australian Press, 2011.
• Morrison, F and Michael Parker. Masters in Pieces: The English Canon for the Twenty-First Century. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Journal articles

• Morrison, F. “Leaving the Party: Dorothy Hewett, literary politics and the long 1960s.” Southerly 73.4 (2012) In press.

• Morrison, F. “’I must have a mask to hide behind’: Signature, Imposture and Henry Handel Richardson.” JASAL Special Issue: Archive Madness (2011).

• “The Quality of 'Life': Dorothy Hewett’s Literary Criticism” JASAL 10 (2010).

• “The Elided Middle: Christina Stead’s For Love Alone and the Colonial ‘Voyage In. ’ Southerly 69:2 (2009): 155-174.

• “On Foreign Ground: Expatriate Masculinity and the Unhomely Woman in Henry Handel Richardson’s Maurice Guest.” Southerly 61:2 (2001): 64-79.
• “Figures of the Many and the One: Gender, Genre and Narrative Structure in Tim Winton's Cloudstreet.” Sydney Studies in English 25 (1999): 133-151.

Book chapters

•  Morrison, F. ‘The American Introduction: Perfect Readers, Unread Books and Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children.’ Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia. Ed. Peter Kirkpatrick. Sydney: Sydney UP (forthcoming, January, 2012)
• “The ‘American Dilemma’: Christina Stead’s Cold War Anatomy”. Reading Across the Pacific: United States-Australian Intellectual Histories. Edited by Nicholas Birns and Robert Dixon. Sydney: University of Sydney Press. In press.
• “’The Cruel Book’: Political Satire and the Female Satirist in I'm Dying Laughing.” 2000. In The Magic Phrase: Critical Essays on Christina Stead. Ed. M.A. Harris. Studies in Australian Literature Series. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000. Reprinted in Gale/Cengage. Twentieth Century Literary Criticism vol. 226. Belmont: Gale/Cengage Learning 2010.
• “The Rhetoric of Sensation: Austen, Bronte and the ‘Gothic Romance.’” Proceedings of the English Association Conference, 2010. Ed. Richard Madeleine. Sydney: The English Association, 2010.
• “To Have Loved and Lost: Life Writing and the Rhetoric of Consolation.” New Directions: Proceedings of the English Association Conference, 2008. Ed. Richard Madeleine. Sydney: The English Association, 2008. 110-121.
• F. Morrison and M. Harris. Introduction. The Little Hotel. By Christina Stead. Sydney: Richmond, 2003.

Conference proceedings

• “Anglo-Celtic Elegy: Reading the Cultural Hyphen.” Origins and Revivals: Proceedings of the First Australian Conference of Celtic Studies 2001. Ed. G. G. Evans. Sydney Series in Celtic Studies. Sydney: The Centre for Celtic Studies, 2001. 457-470.

Academic reviews

• Morrison, F. “A Tenacious Hold.” Review of Susan Sheridan, Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making their Mark. St Lucia: UQP, 2012. In Australian Feminist Studies 27.72 (2012): 225-227.

• “The Young Dancer.” Review of Dorothy Hewett. The Gypsy Dancer. Ed. Christine Alexander and others. Sydney: Juvenilia Press, 2009. Accepted for Southerly 71:2 (2010).
• “Ghostbusting”. Review of Teresa Peterson. The Enigmatic Christina Stead: A Provocative Re-reading. Melbourne: MUP, 2000. In Overland 168 (2002): 102-106.