The poems, novels and novellas that draw from paramythic forms and tropes draw from its symbolic power and its performative function, and often use it subversively to speak the unspeakable. They often merge incommensurate forms and include foreign words and registers or dialects, which lead to the need for translation, as well as the possibilities for what Apter calls the ‘untranslatable’. Foreign words and strange customs as well as oral story-telling forms may be untranslatable to outsiders – but their usefulness is tied to what Apter refers to as a ‘linguistic form of creative failure with homeopathic uses.’ So, when the paramythic voice, forms and tropes are located, translated, compared and interpreted in works by Australian writers having a Greek heritage, we have a new way to read Australian literature. We no longer read these texts in isolation given an affiliation with an ethnic minority group, but instead we see these as works that, as Gunew says, ‘share a world’, works that include and converse with other neo-cosmopolitan writers with double or multiple cultural perspectives.

Dr. Anna Dimitriou gained a PhD in Literary Studies in 2014 from Deakin University and is currently teaching in the Dean’s School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University.

Anthem Studies in Global English Literatures

Preface and Acknowledgements; 1. Greek Australian Literature: Between Multiculturalism and World Literature; 2. Diasporic Transformations of the Oral Traditional Paramythi; 3. Dimitris Tsaloumas: Outspoken Visionary Poet or Disillusioned Exile?; 4. Antigone Kefala: Writing against Aphanisis; 5. Fotini Epanomitis’s The Mule’s Foal: A Literature of Transgression; 6. Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe: A Polyphonic Tale of Protest; 7. Helen Koukoutsis’s Cicada Chimes: Shifting between Worlds; 8. Stylianos Charkianakis: Paramythic Transformations through Poetry; 9. Dean kalimnios: Religious Surrealist or Proud Neo-Hellenic Scholar?; 10. Conclusion: Towards a Rereading of Greek Australian Literature; Index