Australian Patriography

Acknowledgements; List of Illustrations; Introduction Writing Patrimony: The Son’s Book of the Father as a Sub-genre; PART I: CHALLENGING AUTHORITY: Chapter One: ‘The Paradigm Case’: Contesting the Father in Edmund Gosse’s ‘Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments’; Chapter Two: ‘An Indubitable Australian’: Renouncing the Father in Hal Porter’s ‘The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony’; PART II: MEMORIALISING SELF-DENIAL: Chapter Three: ‘Words to Keep Fully Amongst Us’: Honouring the Father in Raimond Gaita’s ‘Romulus, My Father’; Chapter Four: ‘I Really Was the Son of Such a Man’: Replacing the Father in Richard Freadman’s ‘Shadow of Doubt: My Father and Myself’; PART III: PERFORMING MASCULINITY: Chapter Five: A Speaking Subject/A Watching Object: Addressing the Father in Peter Rose’s ‘Rose Boys’; Chapter Six: Choosing Patrimony: Performing for the Father in John Hughes’s ‘The Idea of Home’; Chapter Seven: ‘Neither to Vindicate nor to Vilify’: Becoming the Father in Robert Gray’s ‘The Land I Came Through Last’; Conclusion: The Turn to the Father in Autobiography; Bibliography; Index 

‘This book is about autobiographical writing in Australia, but Stephen Mansfield’s work has profound implications for patrimonial life narratives and father–son relationships everywhere. Employing scholarship from psychology, sociology and humanistic literary study, he exposes both the fault lines of Australian father–son relationships, with their emphasis on silence, privacy and repression, but also honours the way the life writers strive to understand and repair the damage arising from those affiliations. Mansfield renders the voices in those memoirs with a powerful, reverberative voice of his own.’ —Roger Porter, author of ‘Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers’