Australian Patriography: How Sons Write Fathers in Contemporary Life Writing

The Sons Book of the Father, as Richard Freadman termed it, is a rich field of relational autobiography, offering a unique set of tensions and insights into modes of masculinity, notions of identity and the ethics of representing anothers life in writing ones own.

This study of modern Australian life writing by sons who focus on fathers places an emerging sub-genre within its literary ancestry and its contemporary milieu. Providing compelling readings of Raimond Gaitas Romulus, My Father, Peter Roses Rose Boys and many others, this is the first study of its kind within Australian literature.