Review of Too Far Everywhere: The Romantic Heroine in Nineteenth-Century Australia, Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film, The Diaries of Barbara Hanrahan and Woman and Herself: A Critical Study of the Works of Barbara Hanrahan

Abstract

It is a forbidding task to review this clutch of books, the diaries of an extraordinary writer and visual artist, a critical study of her work, a discussion of the image of the desert in Australian culture and a study of the Romantic heroine in nineteenth-century Australian fiction. But maybe it offers an opportunity to practise what Ricoeur calls a 'generative poetics', a reading across genres which is the critical equivalent of a generative grammar which accounts for permissible ways of speaking and thus of thinking, and defines the characteristics of 'reality'.