Elfriede Jelinek Goes Australia

Austrian writer and 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Elfriede Jelinek has never shied away from bringing up painful issues within the discourse of modernity. In her oeuvre of over sixty plays and novels she has worked time and again on a vast variety of related topics spanning from the repression of the weak to the fascisms of everyday life in consumerist societies. Elfriede Jelinek Goes Australia: Indigenising an Austrian Nobel Prize Winner is the first volume entirely published on Jelinek’s work in Australia and gathers a series of analyses around Princess Dramas at Red Stitch Actors Theatre—the first-ever production of one of her plays on an Australian stage, in Melbourne, 2011. It discusses questions of the Austrian writer’s complex writing strategies, potential problems of cultural transfer, the international reception of Jelinek’s work, and the contribution her work for theatre can make to a series of fundamental aspects of the global discourse of current times: feminism, sports and racism.