'This study examines the earlier writings of celebrated Australian writer David Malouf, who was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award, and the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.
'This book investigates his earlier writings to uncover what the terms “poetic”, “poetic imagination” and “inner and outer ways” imply for his development as a writer. Making use of some of his correspondence, diaries, and drafts of work-in-progress, Yvonne Smith takes into fuller account the way his works relate to each other and to the circumstances in which they were written.
'By investigating what “poetic imagination” might mean across the first decades when he was finding his way into a writer’s vocation, this sturdy reaps fresh insights into the nature of David Malouf's creativity—its tensions, struggles and moments of breakthrough, as well as its potential limitations. Finding what he could not do (or did not want to do) shapes strongly what he wants to achieve by the mid 1980s when his published works are becoming better known.
'Such considerations are touched on in earlier studies, yet have been sidelined by more recent criticism informed by postcolonial perspectives, debates about myths of origins and other Australian nation-based agendas. That Malouf has played a part, not only as a writer but as a public intellectual, in what Brigid Rooney terms his “consistent cultivation of nation” adds to this trajectory in his literary career. However, there has been less attention to Malouf’s development as a writer—its transnational dimensions, for instance, as he finds his vocation through hybrid family cultures and living for many years between Australia and Europe. It is helpful that discussion is increasingly balanced by broader views of what “Australian” literature might encompass, of global connections in “worlds within” national narratives, together with consideration of notions of “world literature” and a fluid “transnation” that exceeds boundaries of the state.' (Abstract)
'Plenty of novelists begin life as poets. Few, though, have managed to maintain their status as poet–novelists quite so impressively as David Malouf. But even Malouf, in his ‘middle period’, more or less dropped poetry for his ‘big’ novels – The Great World (1990), Remembering Babylon (1993), and The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996) – before a late return to poetry, kicked off with Typewriter Music (2007). Perhaps appropriately, the last novel that Malouf has so far published, Ransom (2009), is based on a poem: Homer’s Iliad.' (Introduction)
'Yvonne Smith’s attentive study of David Malouf’s ‘earlier writings’ centres on the evaluation of a dominant theme running through critical commentary that his work is ‘poetic’. Dennis Haskell, for instance, describes Malouf’s ‘ideas and values’ as ‘fundamentally poetic’ and James Tulip writes that Malouf’s achievement is ‘essentially that of a poet, whether in verse or prose’.' (Introduction)
'Yvonne Smith’s attentive study of David Malouf’s ‘earlier writings’ centres on the evaluation of a dominant theme running through critical commentary that his work is ‘poetic’. Dennis Haskell, for instance, describes Malouf’s ‘ideas and values’ as ‘fundamentally poetic’ and James Tulip writes that Malouf’s achievement is ‘essentially that of a poet, whether in verse or prose’.' (Introduction)
'Plenty of novelists begin life as poets. Few, though, have managed to maintain their status as poet–novelists quite so impressively as David Malouf. But even Malouf, in his ‘middle period’, more or less dropped poetry for his ‘big’ novels – The Great World (1990), Remembering Babylon (1993), and The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996) – before a late return to poetry, kicked off with Typewriter Music (2007). Perhaps appropriately, the last novel that Malouf has so far published, Ransom (2009), is based on a poem: Homer’s Iliad.' (Introduction)
