The Radical Poetics of the Gendered Urban Quotidian: Reading Anna Couani’s Literary Experimentalism of the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

Anna Couani is an important iconoclastic writer whose main body of work, published in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, redefined the parameters of the Australian literary field. This article examines Anna Couani’s formal experimentation which it locates within the gendered and cultural contexts of minoritisation. It examines how Couani’s postromantic critique of realism constitutes an exploration of subjectivity and identity formation. Her experimental fiction, I argue, in its efforts to defamiliarise reading conventions, articulates a crisis of belonging. In its radical poetics of the gendered everyday it seeks to locate the body in the alternative communities which characterise minority constituencies.