Harriet Chandler

Abstract

The thesis, 'Harriet Chandler', a study in (inter)textuality, is made up of the Major Creative Work and Critical Essay. The Major Creative Work is an imagined re-creation of Harriet Chandler, a minor character in Australian writer Murray Bail's 1987 novel Holden's Performance. The work of intertextuality includes both homage to the predecessor and the creation of something new. The thesis (re)considers Harriet Chandler's life before, during and after her contact with Holden Shadbolt, the eponymous (anti)hero of Bail's novel, with the aim of figuring and foregrounding the female and feminine, even the feminist, art work and cultural practice, conviviality and contestation, colour, movement, a becoming. Harriet Chandler represents mutability in her polio-stricken body, her art practice and her living at Manly Beach on the coastline of Sydney's harbour. The work is playful in its intertexual strategies and innovative in its hybrid writing practice. The tone varies from the comic to the serious; language varies from abstraction and the poetic to the ordinary and everyday; and genres and discourses include fiction, history, nature writing and auto/biography. The Critical Essay considers the coastline and the veranda as physical manifestations of in-between spaces, and innovative writing practice and intertextuality as textual strategies of the liminal which is characterised by the potential for change.