Style in Reverse
Joshua Barnes (University of Melbourne)
Publishing the Postcolonial: Archive and Text
Sgianach Hindhaugh (Universities of Manchester and Melbourne)
- Wednesday 6 May, 4.00-5:30pm
- 4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne
Abstract
Style in Reverse
Frances Ferguson has recently commented upon a “few striking moments” in Clarissa (1748) in which its author, Samuel Richardson, “moves to practice something like free indirect style in reverse, as if he could not actually represent the words of a malign and relatively unlettered character.” But Richardson was not the only novelist in the period to experiment with this technique. Here, I take inspiration from Ferguson but also enlarge the application of her idea. I consider a dramatic late scene in Daniel Defoe’s novel The Fortunate Mistress (1724), in which the “uneasie” heroine fears the possibility that “the Story of Roxana, that is to say, of myself” will be told by someone other than herself. I turn then to the 1740 version of the same novel, augmented with material pirated from other contemporary sources, where Roxana speaks once more in a voice not her own.
Publishing the Postcolonial
Academic journals serve as both archives and active agents in shaping literary discourse. This presentation examines the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (JPW) and the Australian Journal of Postcolonial Studies as primary sources, shifting the focus from literature itself to the critical discourse that produces it. In doing so, it proposes a meta-critical methodology for studying academic knowledge through its own sites of production. Drawing on archival theory (Michel Foucault; Jacques Derrida), the presentation explores how journals can be read as both archives and texts—curated formations structured by selection, exclusion, and institutional power. It suggests that such an approach offers a way of mapping disciplinary cultures, making visible the shifting boundaries, tensions, and epistemological formations of postcolonial studies.
Joshua Barnes
Joshua Barnes is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, working on a dissertation titled Fiction and Its Doubles that explores the early forms of the English novel. His article “Auerbach Contra Homology” is forthcoming in New Literary History.
Sgianach Hindhaugh
Sgianach A. Hindhaugh is a Cookson Scholar and final-year PhD candidate in English and American Studies at the University of Manchester, undertaking a dual PhD with the University of Melbourne.
Their research focuses on postcolonial studies, academic publishing, and epistemology examining how disciplines define and negotiate their boundaries within academic culture. They currently have two articles in pre-publication: 'Publishing the Postcolonial: Archive and Text' and 'Posting Palestine: Resistance in Popular Culture.'
