The Fragmented Self and Strategies of Subversive Construction: Ania Walwicz and Rosa Cappiello

Abstract

This article is an attempt to offer a critical vision of the work of Ania Walwicz and Rosa Cappiello within the context of non-Anglophone writing in Australia. Before entering upon a critical discussion of the works concerned, a brief historical introduction to Australian literature is necessary to show how preoccupations with national identity and exile have been central to its development and how these preoccupations also form a thematic core in all migrant writing. While the analysis of the works concentrates on both the feminist and migrant consciousness at work in the texts to reveal how they attempt to restructure existing monocultural constructs of national identity as diverse, plural and multiracial by subverting the patriarchal structures imposed upon them as women and migrants and how this in turn leads to the freeing of the repressed and silenced self, it also seeks to analyse the central or peripheral nature of such writing with regard to the canon.