Cultural & national identity

The Battlers, generally regarded as Kylie Tennant's most successful and probably most characteristic novel, cannot be properly understood without reference to what may conveniently…

Discusses how the cases of Colin Johnson/Mudrooroo and Helen Darville/Demidenko complicate and reveal fractures in 'Australian' identity. 'By not being [the hegemonic] Australian, Mudrooroo and…

Langley undoubtedly presents difficulties, not least in the sticky, inextricable link between her own life, its troubled gender identity, incarceration in a mental health institution…

Discusses the cultural significance of architecture in Australian fiction, particularly houses.

Discusses Stow's medievalism in The Girl Green as Elderflower and Visitants. 'In its indirect and playful form [Stow's medievalism] offers reparation for colonial visiting…

‘Taking a letter from English poet Thom Gunn, resident in California, to Stow in Geraldton, WA, as a starting point, the author explores ‘correspondences’ between…

An overview of recent poetry and prose of Asian-Australian writers as they perform an artistic ‘about-face’ to reflect on racialised depictions of minority ethnicities.

Discusses Wandra Koolmatrie's autobiography, My Own Sweet Time (1994), later revealed as a fiction written by Leon Carmen. 'In this paper, I want to map…

To combine imposture with autobiography is surely to create an oxymoron. Despite the extravagantly creative strategies that some autobiographers have used (famously, Gertrude Stein writing…

The first half of this essay uses the trials to examine English discourses about Australian identity in the late nineteenth century, and it considers how…

Discusses 'the long Australian tradition of literary hoaxes and imposture', and introduces this special issue of ALS on literary hoaxes and impostures. "This volume does…

The Demidenko/Darville affair was a difficult episode in the cultural life of Australia. News of the young writer's identity fraud hit front pages of newspapers…

Trying to situate Margaret Scott in contemporary Australian poetry, I am struck by the way she stands out, among her contemporaries of British descent, as…

When the abridged English edition of Joseph Furphy's Such is Life appeared on the shelves of Australian booksellers in the middle of 1937, many of…

Writing a history of literary criticism is undoubtedly challenging in that it requires the writer’s expertise in two aspects: how to unify both theoretical and…

This essay examines intellectual exchanges between early twentieth-century Australian literary nationalists and the Irish literary revival, with attention to the transnational and imperial differences in…

Perhaps no Australian writer or thinker has probed the condition of Irishness in Australia more extensively than the poet-critic Vincent Buckley (1925-88). His first memoir…

This paper documents the literary origins of the notion of Irishness; why it mattered, and why it persists as a significant discourse running through Australian…

This article examines three collections of Australian fairy tales published between 1897 and 1925 and considers the ways in which they contributed to nation-building efforts…

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…