The Sugarcane Novel: Questions of Genre and Region

Authors

Abstract

Cheryl Taylor and Elizabeth Perkins (2007) describe the novels of John Naish as either "sugar country" or "canefields" novels. More recently, contributors to Georgic Literature and the Environment: Working Land, Reworking Genre (2023) have examined farming literature to further understandings of "the georgic" as either a genre or a mode. This article builds on this work by examining the implications of establishing a genre of "the sugarcane novel" and mode of "sugarcane literature." Using John Frow’s Genre (2006) as a guide, I argue for the sugarcane plant rather than humans and land as the core determinant of these. This allows the inclusion of texts with urban settings, such as Ronald McKie’s The Crushing (1977), and thus offers a way of curating a collection of works to enable richer understandings of the social and environmental influences of sugarcane than by considering only those set on farms. Given that sugarcane grows in and symbolises distinct geographical regions, I also explore the boundaries, interplay and entanglement of genre and region and move away from an anthropocentric conception of region as marginal. I argue that region is locationally and temporally mutable according to perspective and circumstance, and that regional literature can be entirely disconnected from the tangible properties of a geographical region.

Author Biography

  • Elizabeth A. Smyth, James Cook University

    Elizabeth A. Smyth is a research associate at the Roderick Centre for Australian Literature and Creative Writing at James Cook University. Her research explores ecocriticism, the farm novel, creative writing research, and literary representations of the Australian wet tropics. She is published in JASAL, TEXT, Meanjin, New Writing, and Georgic Literature and the Environment: Working Land, Reworking Genre (2022).

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Published

2025-05-09

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Articles

How to Cite

The Sugarcane Novel: Questions of Genre and Region. (2025). Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 24(2). https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/JASAL/article/view/17838