Touching Earth Lightly disembowelled

Cor blimey. Here is a long essay about my 1996 YA novel Touching Earth Lightly. It makes me marvel at how little you know about what you're saying while you write a novel; it's kind of like being publicly psychoanalysed—and the diagnosis is not exactly one I'm proud of...I don't think. I'll have to read it again, and closer, to be sure. Here's a taste:

In order to explore these ideas in more detail, I wish to focus on Margo Lanagan's Touching Earth Lightly (1996), a text which not only represents death as a significant event influencing the development of the adolescent female subject, but which also frames mortality through themes of sexuality. The text makes an interesting study—firstly, because it has the potential to interrogate a number of familiar masculinist representations of women within Western discourses; secondly, because it engages so closely with woman/death, that twin 'enigma' which Western culture posits as what is 'radically other to the norm, the living or surviving masculine subject' (Bronfen & Goodwin 1993, p.13); and, thirdly, because, although it offers open resistance to orthodox ideas about what constitutes acceptable sexual behaviour and practices, at the same time it is evident that conflict surfaces between what the text represents in the narrative and the processes of representing it.

I mean, you just don't think about the novel you're writing in these terms, while you're blurting it out—well, I don't, anyway.

Nice review of Click here.

Blah review of Red Spikes here.

Enough of this—I should be working.