Cirrus@Austlit

'On my bookshelf is a copy of Morris Miller's two-volume bibliography Australian Literature, in which Bruce Sutherland pasted his bookplate, a reproduction of a Neville Cayley painting of a kookaburra. He acquired the copy shortly after the bibliography was published in 1940 and must have been one of the few academics in US or other overseas centers of learning ever to possess one. At the time, he was a young lecturer in English on the staff of the Pennsylvania State College.' (Introduction)

'David Brooks's Animal Dreams collects a range of essays that draw on literary scholarship, critical theory, philosophy, history, and environmental sciences. While Brooks's writing is informed by a wide range of disciplines, the pieces presented here all ultimately circle back to a single topic: the relationships between humans and other animals. Brooks deftly works across this array of different scholarly lenses, and he manages to bring numerous diverse literary texts into his writing, while continually revisiting some interrelated questions. For instance, how are nonhuman animals presented in literature? What does their (often obfuscated) place in art reveal about human attitudes toward other species? How can animal-oriented or "animalist" readings of art show us deep epistemological and ethical conundrums that face us humans, both as individuals and on a societal level? As eaters, breeders, herders, killers, masters, companions, conservators, observers, and dominators of other species, what kind of obligations and responsibilities do we bear toward other animals—and toward others at large, even toward the very concept of "the Other"?' (Introduction)

'A respected scholar, editor, and poet, Toby Davidson is the author of Christian Mysticism and Australian Poetry (Cambria Press, 2013), editor of Collected Poems: Francis Webb (UWAP, 2011), and author of two collections of poetry, Beast Language (Five Islands Press, 2012) and Four Oceans (Puncher and Wattmann, 2020). Although other poets have higher public profiles, often thanks to their social media presence and writers' festival appearances, Davidson is highly regarded within the Australian poetry community by fellow poets. Davidson is also an outstanding scholar, as his monograph, academic articles, and work as Francis Webb's posthumous editor proves, and thus he is well qualified to conduct the research project that culminated in the publication of Good for the Soul: John Curtin's Life with Poetry, a hybrid text combining biography, history, and literary criticism. In addition to Davidson's experience and skill as a scholar, editor, and poet, he is also the great-grandson of Australia's third wartime prime minister, which gives him unique access and insight into John Curtin's life and archives.' (Introduction)

'Many books have been written about Australia's Stolen Generations. There have been books of history and scholarship, of course, but among the most powerful and affecting books are the numerous works of life writing. Certainly, the best-known book about the Stolen Generations would have to [End Page 390] be Doris Pilkington's Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, published in 1996 and adapted as a film in 2002. Pilkington was a member of the Stolen Generations, but Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence tells the story of her mother's and aunts' escape from the Moore River Native Settlement, where they had been taken after being removed from their families. It is, therefore, an unusual book for being a secondhand account but told by a member of the Stolen Generations. It is also unusual for being Pilkington's second book; her first was a novel titled Caprice: A Stockman's Daughter (1991), which won the 1990 David Unaipon Award for an emerging Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander writer. Among the many other works of life writing on the subject of the Stolen Generations, it is more typical for these books to be an author's first—or even their only—book.' (Introduction)

'Murray Bail has broken his eight-year silence with a new book, a memoir (?) titled He. The question mark arises because "memoir" conjures up a range of familiar possibilities: a narrative of foundational events in the memoirist's life or depictions of influential figures in that life or a behind-the-curtain account of the writer's world, revealing truths and dispelling myths. But this is Murray Bail, a writer of idiosyncratic, often dazzling fictions, a man who early on rejected the "duncoloured realism" endemic to Australian writing in favor of the experimental. Now [End Page 392] eighty years old, Murray Bail has much to recall and on which to reflect. How will he do that?' (Introduction)

(Introduction)

'This is a story about words, but not just any words. Pip Williams's novel The Dictionary of Lost Words centers around the creation of the English language's most famous collection of words: The Oxford English Dictionary, or OED. Self-proclaimed as "the definitive record of the English language," today this dictionary contains over six hundred thousand words, boasts three and a half million quotations that help define these words, and represents over one thousand years of the English language.' (Introduction)

'A book that has been long awaited, Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, provides an overview of how prose poetry has come into the Australian poetic landscape while presenting a variety of prose poems written by Australian poets who are breaking away from conservative, traditional poetic forms. These poets stand next to one another here—as a sort of resistance—unified by a shared belief that prose can and should be an acceptable entry for poetics. The featured poems are varied in content while also providing examples of how a prose poem might approach taking up space on the page. Each block of text uncovers a unique truth: "Until now, and despite the excellence of prose poetry in Australia, there has never been such an anthology, although poets since 2002 … have called for one to be published, … the result of relative neglect of prose poetry by critics and editors in Australia" (1). The anthology opens with a fourteen-page essay of exposition from the editors that seeks to explain the why of the book and bring readers to a level ground of understanding before experiencing the delight to come.' (Introduction)