• Author:agent Julian Croft http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/croft-julian
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 Roger Osborne, The Life of Such Is Life : A Cultural History of an Australian Classic
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'Roger Osborne’s The Life of Such Is Life lives up to its title. After finishing this book, it’s hard to disagree with that descriptor of Furphy’s novel. It is alive. That inert object we have on our bookshelves is a living entity, and possibly more than most literary texts, the history of the origin of that physical text shows many similarities to the evolution of a species under selective pressure, to use some of the terminology Furphy would have been familiar with from his reading of Darwin. Moreover, for us in the twenty-first century, hypersensitive to the insights of ecology, we can see that the physical evolution of the printed text depended on the physical ecologies of the publishing and printing industries of Australia, Great Britain, and the United States of America, as well as the metaphysical environment of the “ecology of minds” (to use Gregory Bateson’s term) of the readers whose recorded and unrecorded readings over the past 120 years have created the text(s) (we have to include Rigby’s Romance and The Buln-buln and the Brolga) as we know them today. Osborne gives us a comprehensive account of the physical and metaphysical milieux which produced the phenomenon of Furphy’s grand opus in both its trinitarian and singular manifestations. If that sounds somewhat theological, it might not be out of place, given the number of claims that Such Is Life is our foundational literary narrative, akin to Don Quixote or Moby Dick, claims that surface regularly in the various attempts to keep Such Is Life in print, as Osborne shows.' (Introduction) 

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

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    y separately published work icon JASAL vol. 22 no. 2 December 2022 25574810 2022 periodical issue 'Welcome to issue 2 of JASAL for 2022. What a year it has been! For ASAL one of the highlights of 2022 was of course the annual conference. This year’s conference was held in July in Hobart at the University of Tasmania. The title was Coming to Terms, 30 Years On: The Mabo Legacy in Australian Writing. Presenters from around the country and beyond gathered in person and online to consider how the Mabo decision of 1992 has impacted Australian writers and writing in manifold ways. We look forward to showcasing a selection of these papers in our forthcoming conference issue in late 2023.' (Robert Clarke, University of Tasmania Victoria Kuttainen, James Cook University 2022
Last amended 22 Dec 2022 07:27:31
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