Lyn McCredden

This is not an essay claiming that literature should be the impetus for political (subversive, revisionary, transforming) acts. Nor is it an essay promoting the desire for literature to align itself with political/ ideological positions. Well before Trotsky's Revolution and…

‘Michel Foucault defined history as ‘the discourse of power’ (Society 68), arguing that the function of a ‘counter-history’ is ‘to show that laws deceive, that kings wear masks, that power creates illusions, and the historians tell lies’ (Bainbridge 58). Writing…

VINCENT Buckley's Golden Builders and Other Poems (1976) is an important poetic experiment in its direct and exulted address to the city and to the sacred. The city is Melbourne in which Buckley lived, worked and wrote for forty years…

There are many ways to peel an onion: sharp knife and tears; under water like your mother taught you; surreptitiously, creeping in, layer by layer; or with sunglasses on. And cunning poet Pam Brown knows them all. There they are…

Here are the poets, out in force for someone they love - a member of the inner sanctum, the faction, their club. And someone they want to promote to the wider world, but only to a certain extent. If the…

A pretence - or enabling lie - still haunts the writing and criticism of poetry: that it can be written for, and read by, 'the tribe'. This pretence, shared in different ways by both Romantic and Modernist, is still deeply…

A number of contradictions shape the poetry of Polish-Australian writer Ania Walwicz. These contradictions are bred partly by the literary theory which has so insistently surrounded her work, and, it will be argued, are partly inherent in the enterprise of…

“Attempts to give this narrative poem a new reading in the light of modern critical theory, calling it a neglected work that creates in the critic a desire ‘to more fully interpret’ it.” (Robert Ross, Australian Literary Criticism, 1945-1988…