Review of Australian Literature to 1900: A Guide to Information Sources, comp. by Barry G. Andrews and William H. Wilde

Abstract

Over the last twenty years nineteenth-century Australian literature has received a great deal of re-assessment. It has been increasingly recognized as having more literary interest and variety, as well as more historical value, than some critics of the 1950s or the 1960s would allow. And the nature of this historical value itself has also received attention as more attempts arc made to relate literature and society and as Australian historiography becomes more self-critical and exploratory. Accompanying these developments is a growing accessibility of the literature itself, limited in no narrow sense to the formal genres, and made possible by many useful, and often courageous, reprint series. It is fitting, then, that Australian Literature to 1900 is now on hand to supply an excellent annotated reference guide to the literature and to commentary on it. This is one of a series of enterprising Gale bibliographies of Australian literature.