'It is a pleasure and an honour to commence my term as Editor of Literature & Aesthetics in the twenty-fifth year of this journal’s production, and I thank Dr Catherine Runcie, Honorary President of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics, for the opportunity to contribute to the SSLA and the journal. This twenty-fifth volume is a milestone that merits celebration, as the SSLA (while being formed in 1990 with a seventeen member Executive drawn from various departments in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney), has always been an independent organisation, separate from the University that has provided it with a home. Literature & Aesthetics’ flourishing over two and a half decades is testimony to the goodwill and hard work of previous Editors, members of the Editorial Board, office bearers of the SSLA, and the scholars who have published their work in it. Catherine Runcie wrote a short history of SSLA to 2005, which showcased the activities of the Society to that date: these included evening seminars, local conferences, and hosting the highly successful First and Second Pacific Rim Conferences in Transcultural Aesthetics in 1997 and 2004. In the years since 2006, the date of the history’s publication, Literature & Aesthetics has been the vehicle for much exciting research in literary, philosophical, aesthetic, religious, and cultural studies. From 2011 the journal was digitised and it is now available as a free, open access resource for scholars the world over to consult. In the five years since the establishment of the Literature & Aesthetics website (http://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/LA), half a million articles have been downloaded, a resounding popular vote on both the journal’s quality and relevance.' (Editorial introduction)
'Australian Literature is, at least internationally, understudied, and far more so than Australian visual arts. A unique, dedicated academic programme within the English department has existed at the University of Sydney since 1962; nevertheless Australian Literature still feels the effect of the cultural cringe associated with colonial countries. Despite this, certain authors and texts inspire a relatively steady stream of scholarship. Randolph Stow is one of these. Stow’s compelling, complex, often metaphysical style allows him to use literature to explore religious and spiritual life and its intersections with community. Stow’s Tourmaline (1963) is part of the mid twentieth century post-apocalyptic movement most notably represented by Neville Shute’s 1957 novel On the Beach. In Tourmaline Randolph Stow mitigates the fraught relationship between perception and experiences, specifically those relating to the interplay of human responses to spirituality, social structure and character, essential forces in community construction. Stow’s vibrant prose, layered plot, philosophical thematics, and a set of characters painfully human in their lack of holistic appeal absorb his reader. Tourmaline is concerned with a potential conflict between the active and inactive experiential religion dealing with the confusion of spiritual and religious leadership, disenchantment, pain, hope, salvation and myth. (Introduction)
