Peter Pierce

Peter Pierce s Adjunct Professor in the School of Journalism, Australian and Indigenous Studies at Monash University. He was Professor of Australian Literature at James Cook University for ten years. His books include The Oxford Literary Guide to Australia, The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (as editor), Australian Melodramas: Thomas Keneally’s Fiction and The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety.

Affiliation

Monash University

The Making of Thomas Keneally

The making of Thomas Keneally can be conventionally addressed in regard to his Irish Catholic working-class ancestry, his discovery of a vocation that was not…

Review of London Was Full of Rooms, edited by Tully Barnett, Nena Bierbaum, Syd Harrex, Rick Hosking and Graham Tulloch

In Stella Bowen's painting, 'Embankment Gardens', dark figures pace concrete walks amid extravagantly green patches of lawn. The leafless trees, the pale skies announce winter…

The Solitariness of Alex Miller

The article presents an overview of Alex Miller’s literary career and development as a writer and examines his six novels published to date.

Les Murray’s ‘Narrowspeak’

Examines Murray’s prose which he has spoken of as “Narrowspeak”, in comparison to the “Wholespeak” of poetry.

Roy Bridge’s Fictions of Van Diemen’s Land

Had he been on their case, one can imagine F.R. Leavis intoning 'We will not reckon Bryce Courtenay a writer of historical fiction to appeal…

The Fiction of Gabrielle Lord

'Why do people do this sort of thing?' It is a child's question, from a boy called Derek, who is one of a group kidnapped…

An Interview with Gabrielle Lord

Lord discusses her career, approach to writing and thematic interests.

Review of The Oxford Book of Australian Essays, edited by Imre Salusinszky

George Cowling, who infamously remarked that no-one would need a Baedecker to conduct a literary pilgrimage through the cultural scrub of Australia, and Fumley Maurice…

Review of Peter Carey, by Graham Huggan, and Peter Carey, by Bruce Woodcock

Does any internationally regarded Australian writer have a more unsettled reputation than Peter Carey? This is not simply a matter, as Graham Huggan says in…

‘Things are Cast Adrift’: Brian Castro’s Fiction

Extensively quotes from Castro's comments on his own writing process in order to show how such 'self-referential games ... in the literary playground' construct and…

‘The Critics Made Me’: The Receptions of Thomas Keneally and Australian Literary Culture

While Thomas Keneally himself generously acknowledges that 'the critics made me' (Pierce, Interview), few Australian authors - in the course of long, productive and internationally…

Narcotic Entanglements: Recent Works of Australian Literary Criticism

Once upon a time, Australian literary criticism was written piecemeal, mainly from outside the academy. Now most of it emerges from within the walls, often…

Honi Heke: The Maori as Aboriginal Hero in Australian Colonial Poetry

The focus of most nineteenth-century Australian literary depictions of the Maori, which were by turns celebratory, admonitory, satirical, was the rebellion of Honi Heke, or…

Preying on the Past: Contexts of Some Recent Neo-Historical Fiction

Discusses the 'revisionist' historical fiction of, among others, Rodney Hall, David Malouf and Robert Drewe, in the context of Australian historical fiction from its origins…

Review of Thomas Keneally by Peter Quartermaine

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…

The Sites of War in the Fiction of Thomas Keneally

That war is both a monstrous, but an ineradicably human activity a horror for individuals but an essential element in the making and memory of…

Perceptions of the Enemy in Australian War Literature

The essay examines the literary consequences of an Australian need for an enemy in the nation-building and myth-making process, and traces how perceptions of the…

A Checklist of Australian Literature of the Vietnam War

Includes poetry, fiction, memoirs and articles.

How Australia’s Literary History Might be Written

Discusses a number of histories of Australian literature and their authors’ approaches, and suggests new modes of writing Australian literary history.

Revaluing Australian Legends: Some Plays by Jack Hibberd

In this decade Barry Oakley, Jack Hibberd, Michael Boddy and Bob Ellis among Australian playwrights have sought to revalue Australian legends from a radical perspective…