Review of Thomas Keneally by Peter Quartermaine

Abstract

Thomas Keneally is among the best-selling, most widely reviewed and financially successful of modern Australian writers. None of these results of a long, diligent devotion to his craft have done him much good within the academy. Peter Quartermaine's admirable short study of Keneally does something to redress this balance; more to indicate directly and by implication the lack of development of illuminating critical contexts in which Keneally's work might be considered. Taken another way, academic suspicion and neglect of Keneally (always a matter that an author and her or his supporters is likely to exaggerate) is less of a difficulty if the author's own words are a principal guide to critical interpretation, as they are for Quartermaine.