SOURCE: “Dislocation and Memory in the Short Stories of Janette Turner Hospital,” in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 20, No. 1, Summer, 1996, pp. 85-95.

In the following essay, Samuels examines the Australian settings, themes of dislocation and exile, and interrelated aspects of past, place, and national identity in Hospital's short fiction, particularly in light of Hospital's Australian origins and expatriate perspective.

In the eponymous first story in the collection entitled Isobars,¹ Janette Turner Hospital describes the convolution of time and place, the region of memory: “These particular isobars connect points where the pressure of memory exerts an equivalent force” (p. 1). Hospital's “isobars,” in which memory is cyclical and identity is entangled in evocations of place, contain moments of crisis and illumination that blur the distinction between past and present. The major concerns of Hospital's short stories in the collections Dislocations² and Isobars are distinctive of the short story form and...