Contemporary literature
Articles
- Review of The Novels of Alex Miller: An Introduction, edited by Robert Dixon
This collection of essays, the first to address Australian novelist Alex Miller's oeuvre, is a worthy critical companion to his ten novels, amplifying the layers…
1 November 2012 - Review of Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey, edited by Andreas Gaile
In difficult publishing times such as ours, when it becomes something of a gamble to try and sell an edited collection of essays on a…
1 May 2006 - Review of After Electra: Rage, Grief and Hope in Twentieth-Century Fiction, by Eden Liddelow
The subtitle of Eden Liddelow's After Electra, 'rage, grief and hope in twentieth-century fiction', signals that the journey/reading of it will not be for…
1 May 2005 - Review of Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism, by Mark Davis
It's a long time since I read a book by torch-light, but Mark Davis's Gangland drove me to just such lengths the first time I…
1 May 1998 - Blue Corner and Red Corner, Metropolis and Province: Literature and Education in Contemporary Australia
'It is a grave mistake—politically, morally, tactically, strategically pedagogically—in any way to defend poetry by promoting its remoteness or its professional status, such as that…
1 June 2013 - Review of J.M. Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship, by Jane Poyner
Jane Poyner's first book, the edited collection J.M Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual (Ohio UP, 2006) ranks among the most important contributions…
1 October 2010 - Review of Rainforest Narratives: The Work of Janette Turner Hospital, by David Callahan
For a long time I nursed the fancy that someone called Turner Hospital was a First Nations American who had somehow ended up in Australia…
1 October 2010 - Review of Peter Carey, by Graham Huggan, and Peter Carey, by Bruce Woodcock
Does any internationally regarded Australian writer have a more unsettled reputation than Peter Carey? This is not simply a matter, as Graham Huggan says in…
1 October 1997 - ‘Are you weaker than a woman, weaker even than a mother?’: Abjection and Infanticide in Dead Europe and Drift
'To discuss Dead Europe with Brian Castro's Drift, I return to Kristeva's claim that abjection is always rooted in our relation to the mother…
1 October 2007 - Amanda Lohrey's Vertigo: An Australian Pastoral
This essay is grounded in William Empson’s view of the pastoral tradition as deeply concerned with social relations – with how we live in the…
30 June 2015 - Barbara Kingsolver’s Singing Shepherd: The Lacuna as Pastoral Elegy
Since the 1990s, the number of novelists of ideas writing in English who have chosen the humanistic literary tradition broadly termed pastoral as a generic…
30 June 2015 - Back to Whitton Week: Tracking Tom Keneally's Career
So at fifty years, what can we say? An easy conclusion would be that Keneally is best understood (as he himself has suggested from time…
30 May 2015 - The Post-Sovereign Novel: Biopolitical Immunities in Manfred Jurgensen’s The American Brother
The Australian government’s responses to the September 11 attacks introduced a new theme into Australian literature. Novels such as Andrew McGahan’s Underground and Richard Flanagan’s…
10 August 2016 - Review of Christos Tsiolkas: The Utopian Vision, by Jessica Gildersleeve
Christos Tsiolkas: The Utopian Vision, by Jessica Gildersleeve. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2017. Web US$30.99, PDF US$41.99, E-book US$51.99, Hardback US$104.99.
19 September 2017
Contributors
- Michael Austin
- Ruth Blair
- Joseph Cummins
- Leigh Dale
- Tessa Hockly
- Melinda Harvey
- Richard Lansdown
- Andrew McCann
- Peter Pierce
- Paul Sharrad
- Judith Seaboyer
- Paul Sharrad
- Jean-François Vernay
- Jacinta Van Den Berg