Contemporary literature

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 of thematic harmony and contextual complexity that characterise Miller's work. Each of the fourteen essays…

In difficult publishing times such as ours, when it becomes something of a gamble to try and sell an edited collection ofessays on a single author, Andreas Gaile's Fabulating Beauty. Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey is an invaluable…

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 the faint hearted . I' II admit to feeling a Iittle faint, not in…

My daughter recently finished high school in provincial Queensland, where she was exposed to two plays by Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, principally by means of Baz Luhrmann's and Roman Polanski's eponymous films. Her assignment as regards Romeo…

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 to the field of Coetzee criticism of the last five years. That book featured a…

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. Of course, once I read more of her work it became clear this was not…

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 his study, Peter Carey, of the author's adeptness 'at showing a clean pair of…

THIS account of reactions to Christos Tsiolkas's Dead Europe is typical of the novel' s reception. Commentary on Dead Europe, as with Loaded and The Jesus Man, has either explicitly referred to Julia Kristeva's discussion of abjection or…

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 world and with each other – and in the conviction that the pastoral is again…

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 and generative device has become marked. Ian McEwan (Black Dogs 1992), Philip Roth (…

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 to time) as a good craftsman of readable stories that raise serious issues, a writer…

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 The Unknown Terrorist sought to address, in narrative form, threats to the rule of law…