Foundation for Australian Literary Studies Colin Roderick Lecture 1990, The Search for Identity in Australian Biography

Abstract

Based on the 1990 Colin Roderick Lecture for the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies at James Cook University by WH (Bill) Wilde, this monograph, in which he uses the word "biography" to include all biographical writing, looks firstly at the present search for the identity of biography itself before examining how literature helped to create the particular identity of the settlement experience in colonial Australia and the identity of the 1890s. 

He then looks at some of the problems of identity raised by the autobiographical fiction of three of our notable women writers - Henry Handel Richardson, Miles Franklin and Eve Langley.