Australian Short Fiction from While the Billy Boils to The Everlasting Secret Family

Abstract

As every writing on or of short fiction knows, beginnings and endings are vital. The boundaries of this critical outline of twentieth-century Australian short fiction were easily arrived at: Henry Lawson's first major collection and Frank Moorhouse's most recent one. How to deal with the middle was more of a problem. It would have been easy, if tedious, to make a chronological survey of developments in the Australian short story between 1896 and 1980. Instead, I have attempted to look at these developments from two perspectives, seeing them as part of the process of a relatively new literary genre as well as of that of a new national literature