Cirrus@Austlit

'It must have been difficult to collect academic essays on a novel received with such a wide range of reactions as Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria. This applies to many books, but Wright’s case is remarkable. It took a while for Australians and the global readership to warm up to a 500-plus-page story about the uneasy relations between Indigenous and white culture in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Queensland. With sales and reprints pointing to the literary exceptionalism of Wright’s second novel, one may be surprised that Australia’s major publishing houses rejected the book; only for the small literary house of Giramondo to publish a milestone of Australian Literature in 2006. In their own ways, the invited contributions to Indigenous Transnationalism explain why that is.' (Introduction)