Australian literary history

Geordie Williamson's collection of short essays on Australian novels he believes deserve to be rescued from oblivion is the kind of work that should have us all cheering. We need more public discussion of our writing, and Williamson's regular book…

Some years ago I was teaching a course on nineteenth-century Australian literature which involved lectures on both Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career (1901) and Joseph Furphy's Such is Life (1903). Writing the lectures started me thinking about the links between…

Australian Letters, 'a quarterly review of writing and criticism', was launched in Adelaide in 1957. Max Harris, co-owner of the Mary Martin Bookshop, poet Geoffrey Dutton and Bryn Davies (both members of the English Department at Adelaide University) were…

The approach of the fortieth year of ALS, and a recent visit to Hobart, brought back memories of how the journal began. I would like here to recover aspects of these as I remember them.

The journal was launched…

Telling Tales is a collection of nearly ninety short essays, chock full of interesting nuggets and quirky asides, the writing often brisk and entertaining. But it can also be moving, like this, from Mark McKenna's description of Manning Clark, on…

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…

This paper will examine cultural relations through fiction and translations of fiction. More specifically it will discuss Finnish translations of Australian fiction and the role they play in the total translated literature in Finland, as well as the view of…

Aftershocks from the conflicts that shaped Australian poetic culture in the 1940s can be faintly discerned even today. One influential element of the 'legend of the '40s', for example, the Jindyworobak movement, is the source of an evolutionary strain in…

In their works on literary politics in postwar Australia, Susan McKernan (later Lever) and John McLaren mention the comparatively little known role played by the Realist Writers' movement and its journal Realist Writer (later The Realist). Ian Syson has…

This is a book I was eager to read. I have long been an admirer of Peter Pierce's writing, and the subject ofthe study- the trope ofthe lost child within Australian narrative - is a rich and fascinating one. Also…

ON 1 July 1999 I had the privilege of attending the fiftieth anniversary Foundation Day Dinner of the University of New South Wales, held in the splendid new Scientia building on the Kensington campus. During the course of the evening…

In 1943, the Advisory Board of the Commonwealth Literary Fund sensed an opportunity. Prime Minister Curtin had been approached by the AIF Women's Auxiliary for Prisoners of War, which requested that cheap editions of Australian books be made available to…

ANTHOLOGIES of any kind of writing serve as monuments, operating according to the complex functions that the term incorporates. Anthologies appear to be a record of some kind of positive knowledge or corpus and accordingly present themselves as printed forms…

Examines a dramatic change in the literary reputation of Charles Harpur and the responses to his work between 1853 and 1858, by which time he had become the centre of one of the major literary controversies of the period.

‘The extent to which a notional Australia is at stake in new ventures in Australian literary history is … a timely and productive question. These three new titles present quite varied versions of both literary history and any proffered “Australia”…

In 1856 Melbourne Punch carried an article entitled 'The Mongolian in Victoria (from the Argus of June 18th, A.D. 2000)' about the celebration of the 'centenary anniversary of the establishment of a Mongolian dynasty in Victoria' (qtd Alomes et al…