'Gail Jones is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary novelists. Her books have won or been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Miles Franklin Award, the Stella Prize, and numerous state literary awards. They are taught in high schools and universities across the country.
'This collection of essays offers reflections on Jones’ fiction by leading Australian and international literary critics. For readers who loved Sixty Lights, Five Bells, Sorry and Jones’ other novels, and for students of Jones’ work, this book will be an illuminating companion. With chapters on her use of language, her thematic preoccupations, and her place in local and global literary culture, it is a timely guide to the work of an exceptional Australian writer.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'In Gail Jones’ 2018 novel about the life and death of Noah Glass, his ‘vocation’ as an art historian begins when, as a small boy growing up in the remote north of Western Australia, he opens a book about the Great Art Museums of the World. It translates him miraculously from the Mars-orange landscape of the outback to the rarefied, Prussian-blue world of Piero della Francesca: it was a ‘window to elsewhere’ and ‘other worlds and times blazed as portents from the pages’. The significance of this moment is confirmed twenty years later when, as a student in London, Noah discovers Piero’s The Nativity (c. 1470-5) hanging in the National Gallery: ‘Noah walked around the National Gallery, taking meticulous notes, registering line by line his self-improvement’. These are instances of what Peter Wagner calls intermediality: the intertextual use of one medium, such as painting, in another medium, such as prose fiction.' (Introduction)
'Anthony Uhlmann’s edited collection, Inner and Outer Worlds, includes ten academic articles about contemporary Australian writer Gail Jones’s novels and their narrative, thematic, and intertextual concerns. As a writer interested in postcolonial and modernist themes, Jones is the author of short stories, novels, and also academic articles. Uhlmann acclaims Jones as “one of Australia’s most philosophical novelists” (76).' (Introduction)
'In 2022, Gail Jones published Salonika Burning, set during the First World War, her ninth novel and the latest entry in an impressive body of literary work. Jones began her professional life as an academic, first at Edith Cowan University and then at the University of Western Australia, and her first two works of short fiction, The House of Breathing (1992) and Fetish Lives (1997), as well as her first novel, Black Mirror (2002), are notable for their experimental integration of critical theory, feminism, and innovative reinterpretations of canonical texts. It was Jones's subsequent novels—Sixty Lights (2004), Dreams of Speaking (2006), Sorry (2007), and Five Bells (2011)—with a new focus on the historical and national issues of Australia's colonial legacy that established her as a major author. This status has been cemented by the publication of two recent academic studies of her work: Gail Jones: Word, Image, Ethics (2020), by Tanya Dalziell, and Inner and Outer Worlds: Gail Jones' Fiction (2022), edited by Anthony Uhlmann.' (Introduction)
'The novels of Gail Jones present a challenge to would-be critics. Jones being a formidable scholar in her own right, her eight novels to date pose sophisticated philosophical questions within their elegantly structured narratives. Her novels canvass aspects of human experience that are murky and complex: these are often forms of familial or romantic relationship shaped by loss, both personal and historical. The challenge for critics is that the novels are themselves thinking about the potential of fiction to do this kind of philosophical or ethical work. In this sense, Jones might seem to be one step ahead of the scholar who takes her work as their subject. Inner and Outer Worlds, a collection of essays edited by Anthony Uhlmann, steps up to this challenge.' (Introduction)
'The novels of Gail Jones present a challenge to would-be critics. Jones being a formidable scholar in her own right, her eight novels to date pose sophisticated philosophical questions within their elegantly structured narratives. Her novels canvass aspects of human experience that are murky and complex: these are often forms of familial or romantic relationship shaped by loss, both personal and historical. The challenge for critics is that the novels are themselves thinking about the potential of fiction to do this kind of philosophical or ethical work. In this sense, Jones might seem to be one step ahead of the scholar who takes her work as their subject. Inner and Outer Worlds, a collection of essays edited by Anthony Uhlmann, steps up to this challenge.' (Introduction)
'Anthony Uhlmann’s edited collection, Inner and Outer Worlds, includes ten academic articles about contemporary Australian writer Gail Jones’s novels and their narrative, thematic, and intertextual concerns. As a writer interested in postcolonial and modernist themes, Jones is the author of short stories, novels, and also academic articles. Uhlmann acclaims Jones as “one of Australia’s most philosophical novelists” (76).' (Introduction)
'In 2022, Gail Jones published Salonika Burning, set during the First World War, her ninth novel and the latest entry in an impressive body of literary work. Jones began her professional life as an academic, first at Edith Cowan University and then at the University of Western Australia, and her first two works of short fiction, The House of Breathing (1992) and Fetish Lives (1997), as well as her first novel, Black Mirror (2002), are notable for their experimental integration of critical theory, feminism, and innovative reinterpretations of canonical texts. It was Jones's subsequent novels—Sixty Lights (2004), Dreams of Speaking (2006), Sorry (2007), and Five Bells (2011)—with a new focus on the historical and national issues of Australia's colonial legacy that established her as a major author. This status has been cemented by the publication of two recent academic studies of her work: Gail Jones: Word, Image, Ethics (2020), by Tanya Dalziell, and Inner and Outer Worlds: Gail Jones' Fiction (2022), edited by Anthony Uhlmann.' (Introduction)
