School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemThe impact of the Biennale of Sydney on the collecting habits of the Art Gallery of New South Wales( 2019)The aim of this research is to examine the impact of the Biennale of Sydney on the collecting habits of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. While there is research within the area of Biennales and their impact on local economies, there is little research into their impact on how local (in this context, Australian) art is collected by public (State or Federal) institutions, whose role it is to keep safe the culture of the locality they are meant to represent. Biennales are often researched in the context of the Global internationalisation of art, with the ‘type’ of art shown being known as ‘biennale art’ - often spectacular, internationalising, and heeding little attention to the context in which the art is being shown. It can be argued that eventually, artists in the areas where Biennales have become either a source of civic pride or a tourist destination for global visitors, tend to adapt their artistic styles to mimic the work of those artists shown in such arenas. In Australia, this raises questions on how Australian artists see themselves in an international context and how this impacts on national narratives. With this in mind, I am examining, as a case study, the collection of contemporary art in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in correlation with art exhibited in the Biennale, from six years prior to the Biennale’s inception through to Australia’s Bicentennial year of 1988.
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ItemWhen romance is dead: vampires in romance narratives for girls( 2018)In this thesis, I examine how the archetype of the vampire in Western literature continues to evolve within contemporary Young Adult vampire romance narratives. Building on Auerbach’s contention that vampires mutate according to the social demands of their time, I argue that the late twentieth and early twenty-first century proliferation of romantic vampire figures in Young Adult narratives for girls is a response to cultural anxieties concerning rapidly changing societal expectations of femininity following second-wave feminist movements in the twentieth century. I study three contemporary vampire romance narratives, Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), Meyer’s Twilight (2005-2008) and Mead’s Bloodlines (2011-2015). Through my analysis of these texts, I demonstrate different ways in which the romantic vampire archetype has responded to Western anxieties concerning contemporary femininity, and I argue that the romantic vampire continues to evolve, drawing on conventions that have been set up in preceding vampire romance narratives to address changing social environments. The creative component of this thesis is an opening extract of a Young Adult vampire romance narrative titled The Blood Pact. In this extract, I explore ways in which the romantic vampire archetype can continue to transform in response to contemporary cultural concerns.