Critical theories & approaches

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…

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…

The author critiques the ways in which a set of novels by women writers published in the period 1980-2005 represent ‘wounded men’, and analyses the challenges which such texts pose for feminist critics.

‘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”…

Paper first presented at the Conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) in July 2000 in Hobart. It is concerned with “the future of literature and literary criticism in the university, and in particular with the…

The article discusses the critical reception of the work of Brian Castro, especially the responses to his use of critical theory in his novels. In analysing theory and authority in Castro’s novel Double-Wolf, Barker discovers a shift in his…

Devanny’s novel Sugar Heaven was re-released in 2002 some 65 years after its first publication. The momentous historical and political changes since the time of writing prompts the author of this article to ask : ‘what will new readers make…

Examines the mode of characterisation prevalent in Australian fiction, a mode which presents character as “the product of social, extrinsic determinants rather than as the expression of an individuated, intrinsic self” (447). Argues that the prominence of this mode of…

The essay uses Bourdieu’s theories to show the ways in which some key female characters in institutions in Lilley’s Summer Heights High and Jolley’s fiction support the workings of institutional patriarchal power. In the final section, the author draws on…

Discusses the different approaches to Wright’s poetry over the period from her first collection The Moving Image (1946) to her Collected Poems (1994) in the foreword to which Wright discussed changes in literary fashions and readership. Taking several individual poems…