Customer Reviews

The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Peter Pierce's critical study 'The Country of Lost Children: An Australaian Anxiety' is an important contribution to Australian literary criticism. The work surveys the development of the lost child motif in literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It theorises that the motif embodies human (and colonial) anxieties about the vast and untamed natural environment of nineteenth century literature, folktales and visual arts. He asserts that over time, this preoccupation has shifted to a more inward societal critique of the potential for danger and menace in humanity itself. Pierce draws on ficition, theatre (briefly), film and true stories, demonstrating the pervasiveness of this trope in collective memory, lived experience and the imaginary. This survey opens the field to more detailed critical study of texts, broader cultural formations and the reasons for this phenomenon, as well as ongoing analysis of the potency of the figure of the child in the Australian consciousness, especially when we think about the future. More study of popular culture and true stories would be beneficial to this project. Overall, an important contribution to Australian studies.