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标题：Being Elsewhere: Aesthetics, Identities and Alienation in Peter Austen¡¯s Life and Poetry
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作者：PATRICK BUCKRIDGE
期刊名称：Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature
印刷版ISSN：1447-8986
电子版ISSN：1833-6027
出版年度：2006
卷号：5
页码：134-151
出版社：Association for the Study of Australian Literature
摘要：Sixty-seven years ago, under the headline BRISBANE POET WHO TURNED MOSLEM DIES IN EGYPT, the Courier-Mail teased its readers with what must have seemed a slightly familiar scenario: Aly Azir-el-Din is dead. He died in Cairo. But there are businessmen in Brisbane today who will recall Peter Austen, their schoolmate at the Normal School, their fellow student at the Queensland University. For once, Egyptian Aly Azir-el-Din was Australian Peter Austen. (1) The life and work of Peter Austen, an Australian poet and participant in the First World War, exemplify the defamiliarising function of the single instance, and suggest the possibility of unfamiliar, even ¡°strange¡± ways in which people could live out the conventional role of the ¡°soldierpoet.¡± This paper offers an account of his brief writing career from that perspective. Austen¡¯s ¡°take¡± on the war, though praised by some of his contemporaries, seems nonetheless to fall well outside the main spectrum of valued poetic responses. His poetry, to put it bluntly, is distinctly odd, and I have tried to understand, appreciate, and account for its oddity partly in terms of his particular personal experience of the war itself, and partly in terms of the specific cultural milieu in which his unusual sensibility was formed, that of Brisbane in the early years of the twentieth century.