The redemption of the larrikin at the turn of the Twentieth Century

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Abstract

While significant Australian literary mythology surrounds the bushman and masculinity in rural settings, this chapter focusses on the larrikin in fiction around the turn of the twentieth century to examine how an idealised, nationally distinctive character type was imagined in the city as part of an evolving urban Australian culture. From the 1870s, the larrikin symbolised the violence of the working class in its most threatening and sinister guise. However, several decades later, Ethel Turner’s The Little Larrikin (1896) and Louis Stone’s Jonah (1911) contribute to the ‘rescue’ of the literary larrikin in their attempts to show the figure as endearing, distinctly Australian, and ground down by poverty. Both novels present redeeming depictions of larrikin figures, one a small middle-class boy who has pretensions to becoming a larrikin, and the other, an orphaned ‘hunchback’ who gradually builds his own fortune and progressively leaves behind the pull of the ‘push.’
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Routledge Companion to Australian Literature
EditorsJessia Gildersleeve
Place of PublicationNew York NY USA
PublisherRoutledge
Pages18-24
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781003124160
ISBN (Print)9780367643560
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

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