Defining an Australian literature

Exile, expatriation, migration, travel: a rhetoric of restlessness has underpinned Australia's chimerical search for national selfhood. Torn between the need for definition and the desire…

Discusses contemporary attempts to change the 'fixed and known directions' of Australian literature by investigating the 'faultlines' (per Susan Sheridan), 'those different intersections of concurrence…

The publication of two essays on 'the state of the discipline' (to borrow a title from the ADE Bulletin) is not a response to…

Discusses the establishment and teaching of a course in Australian literature, the first of its kind, at the University of Tasmania between 1947 and 1950.

Among the many historical novels written in Australia during the thirties and forties, The Timeless Land is unique for the way it foregrounds the journals…

This paper analyses a single aspect of Australian literary culture in a particular historical period, namely its interest in 'greatness' - great books and great…

The successful writer within Australia is, at least from time to time, as much a product of the promotional world of celebrity as of the…

Peter Carey has generally preferred to fictionalise Australia at a remove, to reimagine it, shape-shifted out of its present appearance by science fiction transformations, or…

Wilding is much more than a creative writer. His contribution to Australian culture has been in a number of fields, three of which (creative writing…

Founded in the wake of the industrial revolution, Australia as a series of six British colonies was meshed into the global commercial popular entertainment industry…

Somewhere around 1915-18, Mary Gilmore worked on assembling a collection of poems translated from, or based on, Spanish originals. The Mitchell Library hold two typescript…

Examines a random group of Australian short story anthologies and their function as textual practice. Aims to uncover some of the 'submerged constitutive practices' that…

The concept of Australian literary studies is becoming increasingly the object of critical debate as exemplified, for instance, by the forum in the previous issue…

Uses Pierre Bourdieu’s theories to explore unresolved contradictions in Christina Stead concerning her feminism, politics and reputation.

Lee conducts a semiotic analysis of the reception of Henry Lawson and his works, revealing the connections critics made between the work, the hand of…

Carol Hetherington investigates the inclusion of Australian authors in Doubleday’s Crime Club lists in the period 1943-1954. She argues ‘that the important common factor in…

Greek myth relates how Pegasus, immediately after its birth, flew to Mount Helicon, where the stamping of its hoofs caused the Hippocrene Spring, the source…

For an outsider who began to familiarise himself with the literature from Australia and the concomitant critical debate on its history, its nature and status…