Australian novels & novelists

Hamer provides a survey of early Australian novels by writers including Henry Kingsley, Rosa Praed, Ada Cambridge, and Charles de Boos. The essay tracks the…

Beverley Farmer is an award-winning writer but critical assessment of her achievement has been minimal. Her short stories have been reviewed in tandem with other…

There is a clear autobiographical dimension to Beverley Farmer's fiction: her own life and experience provide the material that goes into her writing, and the…

Ada Cambridge is now well-known for her 'autobiography' and delightful collection of memoirs, Thirty Years in Australia (London: Methuen, 1903). What is not well-known is…

Discusses the growing (and shifting) interest of Australian writers in Asian cultures, religions and philosophies and gives an overview of the representation of Asia in…

Discusses Barbara Hanrahan's The Scent of Eucalyptus as 'autobiographical fiction', describing this genre as allowing for 'greater scope and range', and increased openness to 'the…

Examines the relationship between autobiographical truths and 'fictional embroidering' in Richardson's autobiography in terms of its representation of familial relationships, arguing that the work is…

Discusses the necessity for a theory of Australian woman's culture through which to read Australian novels authored by women. Drawing on insights from Virginia Woolf…

David Marr's monumental biography of Patrick White invites a rereading of White's novels. Marr, like any good biographer intent on revealing the life rather than…

In the Epilogue to Wild Card: An Autobiography 1923-1958 (1990) Dorothy Hewett returns to her 'first house', the house of childhood at Lambton Downs. The…

Malouf's choice of subject matter is not arbitrary. His story is one version of an archetypal Romantic story, whose particulars change according to the teller…

Provides an account of letters sent to the Age during 1933, in response to a call for recommendations for the Fifty Best Australian Novels.

The gloves are off, it might seem, when a male critic declares that the latest prize-winning woman author 'talks dirty and passes it off as…

This essay ‘offers some thoughts on the transformative possibility of the littoral in Beverley Farmer’s novel The Seal Woman, and a brief discussion of…

Using AustLit database records, the author examines the number and proportion of Australian novels published from 1930 to 2006 by wo/men, the genre of these…

Marion Halligan's writing dwells on the pleasures of daily life, and while readers can readily connect with this celebration of ordinariness, recognising in it patterns…

McFarlane challenges Richardson’s assertion that The Getting of Wisdom is a “merry little book” by revealing the bleakness of the narrative in several key scenes…

The nature of art and reality and their relation to each other has always been a major preoccupation of artists and acquired a new intensity…

Once overlooked in Australian literature, recent writing from Western Sydney is now among the field’s most dynamic and vital. Over the past two decades, Western…

Many literary sources have been suggested for Patrick White’s fifth novel, Voss, ranging from the surreal symbolism of Rimbaud’s poetry, to T.S. Eliot’s Four…