Cirrus@Austlit

' When Henry Lawson died in 1922, he was publicly honoured as a "national writer," but for the last twenty years of his life he had been a "derelict artist," caught in a cycle of poverty, alcoholism and depression, humiliated, frustrated, often ashamed of the work that he was producing and haunted by the sense of the writer that he might have been. Almost a century later, there is no biography that adequately portrays the man and the circumstances that contributed to his collapse. Underlying this article, which considers aspects of his struggle to realize his literary ambitions, is the assumption that because Lawson's work has such a strong autobiographical element, the way in which his life is read inevitably colours how his writing is read. Until there is a biography in which the tragic dimension of his life is fully recognized, our understanding of Lawson's literary achievement remains incomplete.' (Publication abstract)

'Stead composed House of All Nations (1938) at a time of unprecedented economic and political crisis in the West, and the urgency of this situation is reflected in the speed and scope of this composition, and in the major target of her satire: finance capitalism. Her depiction of this Marxist concept, as well as specific allusions to the master's writings, are examined in detail to demonstrate her ideological position and putative aims.' (Publication abstract)

'In 1963, Michael Wilding left Oxford for Sydney, moving from an imperial center of British education to a far-flung colonial outpost beyond the daily reach of The Times, bringing with him "a generalised left wing politics" and "a working class resentment of exclusion from privilege" (161). In addition, his intellectual baggage contained a firm decision to become a writer. It was Wilding who would "in the smithy of his soul" help forge the literary conscience of the nation whose renowned man of letters he was to become.

'Growing Wild is a memoir which reads like a Künstlerroman in postmodernist style, tracing the trajectory of intellectual awakening and artistic development of the protagonist as he negotiates relationships with his family and the politics and history of both his native and adoptive countries. Wilding's memoir picks up where Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man leaves off the protagonist-in self-exile after he has left a restrictive environment for a freedom to become an artist, a writer. It begins in epic fashion, in medias res or "Among Leavisites" rather, landing the protagonist in the midst of F. R. Leavis's acolytes at University of Sydney's English Department and then, in broken chronology, takes the reader back to the first words on the slate in the English Midlands.' (Publication abstract)

'It is not so common these days to come across what Bill Ashcroft might call a "white settler" account of growing up in the Australian bush. In Taciturn Man and Other Tales of Australia Geoffrey Gibson, a pre Baby-Boomer, of the same generation and rural provenance as Les Murray, writes of growing up in the 1940s in rural New South Wales, and also, the earlier rural life of his father Alexander (1905-1965). Alexander Gibson, the "taciturn" man of this tribute by memoir published by the Ann Arbor-based Modern History Press, was born in Somerset, and one of a number of English who migrated to Australia sometime after WWI. (D. H. Lawrence had also considered migrating but only stopped for six weeks to gather material for and write, or help write, two novels.)' (Publication abstract)