Ken Gelder – författare

A bad-tempered squatter is murdered in country Victoria and the local townsfolk are swept up in the rush to solve the crime. Will the squatter's beautiful daughter, Flora McAlpin, save her lover from the gallows? Or is the circumstantial evidence against him too strong?

Ellen Davitt's Force and Fraud: A Tale of the Bush is a feisty account of a murder investigation in the colonies that takes the twists and turns of English sensation fiction in a uniquely Australian direction. The novel brings an innovative forensic eye to its crime, reinventing the squatter romance as it takes its characters from country to city and from public house to courthouse. Force and Fraud was serialised in the popular, long-running Australian Journal from 2 September to 18 November 1865.

This edition includes an introduction by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver.

‘a romance with a tight mystery plot . . . an assured whodunnit’

Lucy Sussex, Blockbuster! Fergus Hume and the Mystery of a Hansom Cab (2015)

‘Force and Fraud is pioneering in its status as the first murder mystery in Australia . . .’

Kate Watson, Women Writing Crime Fiction, 1860-1880 (2012)

An Australian Bush Track (1896) is a dark novel, a colonial fantasy-adventure by author J.D. Hennessey in the style of H. Rider Haggard’s She. The story of an expedition into the Queensland interior by a group of speculators hot on the trail of fabulous wealth, its heroine is a charismatic young bushwoman equipped with heedless courage, a fast horse and a rifle. The novel is unrepressed in its representation of colonial racism and the driving forces behind it: frontier violence and dispossession, land acquisition and the relentless pursuit of wealth and resources.

An Australian Bush Track takes us on an expedition to unknown territories, encountering lost worlds and inland seas. Along the way there are amorous train journeys, coach chases, Aboriginal attacks, shoot outs and unwanted marriage proposals. The novel also gives us an Australian girl who charts her own route through a speculative male fantasy.

The edition includes an introductions by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver.

This book presents a cultural history of subcultures, covering a remarkable range of subcultural forms and practices. It begins with London’s ‘Elizabethan underworld’, taking the rogue and vagabond as subcultural prototypes: the basis for Marx’s later view of subcultures as the lumpenproletariat, and Henry Mayhew’s view of subcultures as ‘those that will not work’. Subcultures are always in some way non-conforming or dissenting. They are social - with their own shared conventions, values, rituals, and so on – but they can also seem ‘immersed’ or self-absorbed. This book identifies six key ways in which subcultures have generally been understood:

Subcultures looks at the way these features find expression across many different subcultural groups: from the Ranters to the riot grrrls, from taxi dancers to drag queens and kings, from bebop to hip hop, from dandies to punk, from hobos to leatherfolk, and from hippies and bohemians to digital pirates and virtual communities. It argues that subcultural identity is primarily a matter of narrative and narration, which means that its focus is literary as well as sociological. It also argues for the idea of a subcultural geography: that subcultures inhabit places in particular ways, their investment in them being as much imaginary as real and, in some cases, strikingly utopian.

This book presents a cultural history of subcultures, covering a remarkable range of subcultural forms and practices. It begins with London’s ‘Elizabethan underworld’, taking the rogue and vagabond as subcultural prototypes: the basis for Marx’s later view of subcultures as the lumpenproletariat, and Henry Mayhew’s view of subcultures as ‘those that will not work’. Subcultures are always in some way non-conforming or dissenting. They are social - with their own shared conventions, values, rituals, and so on – but they can also seem ‘immersed’ or self-absorbed. This book identifies six key ways in which subcultures have generally been understood:

Subcultures looks at the way these features find expression across many different subcultural groups: from the Ranters to the riot grrrls, from taxi dancers to drag queens and kings, from bebop to hip hop, from dandies to punk, from hobos to leatherfolk, and from hippies and bohemians to digital pirates and virtual communities. It argues that subcultural identity is primarily a matter of narrative and narration, which means that its focus is literary as well as sociological. It also argues for the idea of a subcultural geography: that subcultures inhabit places in particular ways, their investment in them being as much imaginary as real and, in some cases, strikingly utopian.

Insatiable bloodlust, dangerous sexualities, the horror of the undead, uncharted Trannsylvanian wildernesses, and a morbid fascination with the `other'': the legend of the vampire continues to haunt popular imagination.Reading the Vampire examines the vampire in all its various manifestations and cultural meanings. Ken Gelder investigates vampire narratives in literature and in film, from early vampire stories like Sheridan Le Fanu''s `lesbian vampire'' tale Carmilla and Bram Stoker''s Dracula, the most famous vampire narrative of all, to contemporary American vampire blockbusters by Stephen King and others, the vampire chronicles of Anne Rice, `post-Ceausescu'' vampire narratives, and films such as FW Murnau''s Nosferatu and Bram Stoker''s Dracula.Reading the Vampire embeds vampires in their cultural contexts, showing vampire narratives feeding off the anxieties and fascinations of their times: from the nineteenth century perils of tourism, issues of colonialism and national identity, and obsessions with sex and death, to the `queer'' identity of the vampire or current vampiric metaphors for dangerous exchanges of bodily fluids and AIDS.

Insatiable bloodlust, dangerous sexualities, the horror of the undead, uncharted Trannsylvanian wildernesses, and a morbid fascination with the `other'': the legend of the vampire continues to haunt popular imagination.Reading the Vampire examines the vampire in all its various manifestations and cultural meanings. Ken Gelder investigates vampire narratives in literature and in film, from early vampire stories like Sheridan Le Fanu''s `lesbian vampire'' tale Carmilla and Bram Stoker''s Dracula, the most famous vampire narrative of all, to contemporary American vampire blockbusters by Stephen King and others, the vampire chronicles of Anne Rice, `post-Ceausescu'' vampire narratives, and films such as FW Murnau''s Nosferatu and Bram Stoker''s Dracula.Reading the Vampire embeds vampires in their cultural contexts, showing vampire narratives feeding off the anxieties and fascinations of their times: from the nineteenth century perils of tourism, issues of colonialism and national identity, and obsessions with sex and death, to the `queer'' identity of the vampire or current vampiric metaphors for dangerous exchanges of bodily fluids and AIDS.