Australian Literary Studies is a fully refereed journal of Australian and international literary scholarship and criticism.

The theme of womanizing has attracted much critical commentary – and speculation – in discussions of Coetzee’s writing. In this paper, however, I discuss an earlier, now obsolete meaning of ‘womanizing’, not as a theme, but as a distinctive fictional…

The prospect of death is one of J. M. Coetzee’s central and enduring concerns. As David Attwell observes in his biography, ‘The most trenchant of the purposes of Coetzee’s metafiction . . . is that it is a means whereby…

In this essay, I show that J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello is shaped fundamentally by an engagement with Joyce’s Ulysses. However, the relationship between the two does not reveal itself in the rewriting of Joyce’s ‘Penelope’ that Costello’s literary…

Translating is not only an exercise in the restoration of meaning. The translator’s true challenge lies in restoring meaning while preserving the way in which that meaning is expressed, because style is what is unique to a text. While working…