Australian literary criticism
Articles
- Good Readers and Good Citizens : Literature, Media and the Nation
In recent decades nationalism has sometimes been classed in the same category of immoral behaviours as racism and sexism. Reading from the historical and literary record, nationalism often appears to have been little other than racism and sexism. Race was…
1 October 1999 - A.G. Stephens : The Critical Credo1 December 1964
- Vance and Nettie Palmer : The Literary Journalism1 October 1973
- Walter Murdoch : ‘A Humble Protest’?
WALTER Murdoch, Professor of English at the University of Western Australia for thirty years and once Australia's best known essayist, has been typecast as a conservative and an imperialist. Nevertheless, his essay 'A Humble Protest' takes up and disputes the…
1 October 1993 - Australian Literature : Points for Departure
In the conclusion to her germinal study of sex, race and nation in Australian women's writing, Along the Faultlines (1995), Susan Sheridan questions the prevalent orientations of Australian and literary cultural studies. In particular she draws attention to its 'fixed…
1 October 1999 - New Directions : Introduction
The publication of two essays on 'the state of the discipline' (to borrow a title from the ADE Bulletin) is not a response to or an expression of millenial anxiety - but may be a marker of a kind…
1 October 1999 - The Ethics of Abjection: Patrick White’s ‘Riders in the Chariot’
Michael Wilding has recently discussed Patrick White's modernism in terms of White's disdain for what he famously called the 'exaltation of the "average"' in Australian society (Patrick White Speaks 15). As Wilding shows it is not difficult to see…
1 October 1997 - Review of A Companion to Australian Literature since 1900, edited by Nicholas Biros and Rebecca McNeer.
A Companion to Australian Literature since 1900 offers a fresh perspective on Australian literature. This thought-provoking companion is edited by two North American scholars (many will be familiar with Nicholas Biros as the editor of Antipodes: A North American Journal…
1 May 2009 - Annual Bibliography of Studies in Australian Literature: 20071 October 2008
- Annual Bibliography of Studies in Australian Literature : 20051 May 2006
- Review of Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New New World, edited by Judith Ryan and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.
What is the value in a collection of conference papers like Imagining Australia that canvasses such a diverse array of scholarly topics? The book is the result of a colloquium sponsored by the Harvard Committee on Australian Studies held in…
1 May 2006 - ‘Deadly’ Work : Reading the Short Fiction of Archie Weller1 October 1993
- Review of Authority and Influence: A ustralian Literary Criticism I950-2000, edited by Delys Bird, Robert Dixon, and Christopher Lee.
In a recent issue of the UK journal Australian Studies, David Callahan notes a shift towards foregrounding 'questions of hermeneutics and first principles' in Australian academic life, and away from a consideration of specific cases. The publication of Authority…
1 May 2002 - Review of Rewriting God: Spirituality in Contemporary Australian Women 's Fiction, by Elaine Lindsay, and Feminist Poetics of the Sacred: Creative Suspicions, edited by Frances Devlin-Giass and Lynn McCredden.
It is not only global weather patterns that are changing, it seems. It is hard to imagine being asked to review two books dealing with theological issues even two or three years ago. The 'sceptical and utilitarian spirit' A.G. Stephens…
1 May 2002 - Review of The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and the White Australian Fantasy, by Jennifer Rutherford.
Jennifer Rutherford's The Gauche Intruder is one of tl1e few works of Australian cultural critique to use Lacanian psychoanalysis in detail as methodology and framework. In this sense, tl1en, perhaps we can say that Rutherford's text is itself sometlling of…
1 May 2002 - Review of Mapped But Not Known: The Australian Landscape of the Imagination, ed. P .R. Eadcn and F.H. Mares
This festschrift in honour of Dr Brian Elliott is to be doubly welcomed, as a tribute and as a valuable collection ofessays and poems on an important topic, 'Australian landscape of the Imagination". It is only recently that the pioneers…
1 May 1988 - Challenging History Making: Realism, Revolution and Utopia in The Timeless Land
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, letters, and official documents on which it is based. In her prefatory remarks Dark acknowledges…
1 May 1995 - ‘Greatness’ and Australian Literature in the 1930s and 1940s : Novels by Dark and Barnard Eldershaw
Literary studies has for some time now been rediscovering the value and interest of an analytical style of literary history, one that tries - not without some inferential synthesis and speculation - to place literary texts and events in richer…
1 May 1995 - Nationalising the Author: The Celebrity of Peter Carey1 October 1993
- Randolph Stow’s ‘Outrider’ and the French Voyager Poem
Whereas the negative early criticism of Tourmaline (1963) found cogent, if belated rebuttal in the articles of A.D. Hope and Helen Tiffin that appeared ten years after what became known as 'the Tourmaline affair', an equivalent process of amendment has…
1 October 1997
Contributors
- Veronica Brady
- Patrick Buckridge
- David Carter
- Robert Clarke
- Leigh Dale
- Leigh Dale
- Maryanne Dever
- Brenton Doecke
- Carol Hetherington
- Carol Hetherington
- Margaret Henderson
- Laurie Hergenhan
- S. E. Lee
- Janine Little
- Andrew McCann
- Nicole Moore
- Irmtraud Petersson
- Irmtraud Petersson
- Vivian Smith
- Graeme Turner
- Gillian Whitlock
- Carl Whitehouse