Fabulation: Toward Untimely and Inhuman Life in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book

This paper brings together Alexis Wright’s novel, The Swan Book [2013a, Artamon, NSW: Giramondo] and the concept of fabulation from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s philosophical approach to literature. I employ their approach to explore the complex relation to history and language that Wright’s highly poetic novel illustrates: a relation to untimely and inhuman life that suggests other possibilities for living within the body politic than are currently available.     

The Role of Perceived Stress and Self-Efficacy in Young People’s Life Satisfaction: A Longitudinal Study

Life satisfaction is an important indicator of successful development. However, adolescents’ life satisfaction tends to be relatively unsteady, and environmental influences play a critical role in shaping life satisfaction among adolescents in the transition to young adulthood. Given the paramount importance that education plays in adolescents’ lives, adolescents’ life satisfaction may vary as a function of school-related stress experience. At the same time, coping resources may help reduce adverse effects of stress on life satisfaction. With this in mind, we examined whether, and to what extent, perceived stress in education and general self-efficacy (a resource that facilitates coping) affect the life satisfaction of adolescents in transition to young adulthood. We distinguished between baseline levels of stress and self-efficacy and within-person change in stress and self-efficacy to determine whether life satisfaction is sensitive to fluctuations in stress and self-efficacy when person-specific levels of stress and self-efficacy are taken into account. Estimating growth curve models on data from a panel study on the life trajectories of compulsory-school leavers (n?=?5126, 55.3?% female), we found that baseline levels of stress and self-efficacy, as well as within-person change in stress and self-efficacy, affected adolescents’ life satisfaction. Moreover, our results showed that baseline self-efficacy mitigated the negative effect of baseline stress on life satisfaction. These findings improve our understanding of two major psychological determinants of adolescents’ life satisfaction and extend our knowledge of life satisfaction trajectories during the transition to young adulthood.     

‘This Spider Web of Woman's Life’: Private Space and Community Life in Peter Abelard

This essay explores such complex and ambiguous presentation of convent life in Helen Waddell's novel Peter Abelard (1933), considering Heloise's fear of women's communities as expression of concerns central to women's writing published in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. Waddell uses Peter Abelard to intervene in these contemporary debates about private and public spaces. The dislike which her Heloise expresses for women's communities may, given the text's feminist ideology, seem surprising, but, as discussed, similar anxieties are voiced in texts by several of Waddell's contemporaries, and the novel is shaped by this tension between private, autonomous individual and shared public space. Peter Abelard is read in relation to selected journalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby (late 1920s), Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1928) and Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night (1935).     

Harriet Clisby’s ‘Sketches of Australia’: travel writing and colonial refigurations in Boston’s Woman’s Journal

During the late nineteenth century, the British-born Australian physician Harriet Clisby became involved in the vibrant social reform circles of Boston, Massachusetts. Her ‘Sketches of Australia’, a journalistic series of travel writings, were published in the reform-oriented Woman’s Journal in 1873. This series provides insight into the discursive construction of Australian colonial society in a transnational context. Thematically, the ‘Sketches’ explored questions of geography, culture, class, labor, ethnicity, race, and gender, often embracing popular scientific discourses about race and universalist visions of women’s rights. While such perspectives were common among Anglophone social reformers of the era, Clisby also portrayed Australia as a multiracial nation of immigrants rather than as a collection of white settler colonies. By making colonial Australia accessible for a specifically American readership, the ‘Sketches’ also established a sense of a budding international relationship between Australia and the United States prior to the twentieth century.     

‘An Unexpected Recruit to Feminism’: Jessie Boucherett’s ‘Feminist Life’ and the importance of being wealthy

In 1859 Jessie Boucherett, the daughter of a Lincolnshire landowner possessed of an independent income, was inspired by press discussions of the need to find alternative occupations for women to make contact with the women who were already spreading this message through the English Woman’s Journal. With their rather grudging support she founded a society, which still exists, to further this aim, the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (now the Society for Promoting the Training of Women). Using the records of this Society, now housed at Girton College, Cambridge, this article looks at the way commitment to this cause allowed a woman from a wealthy, high Tory, landed background to turn herself in six years into the feminist who put up the initial money for the women’s suffrage campaign, and went on to be a leading figure in campaigns to reform the married women’s property laws and against legislation restricting women’s work. It examines in particular the use she made of her personal wealth to direct the strategies of the activist groups to which she belonged.     

Early Life Socioeconomic Disparities in Children’s Sleep: The Mediating Role of the Current Home Environment

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Despite identified concurrent socioeconomic disparities in children’s sleep, little research has examined pathways explaining such associations. This study...