Cirrus@Austlit

'W. G. Sebald was justly celebrated for the melancholy antiquarianism of his prose. The Anglo-German writer placed his narrators – solitary eccentrics or survivors of some traumatic past – amid historic spaces in England or Europe. There they moved through decayed mansions or unvisited museums, places emptied of life yet replete with stuff. Uncanny access to the past was granted by virtue of old postcards or Edwardian bric-a-brac.' (Introduction)   

'How do you review a novel when its author has already written a book-length work of criticism on it before it was published? The rise of the Creative Writing PhD in Australia has created this perhaps unexpected dilemma for critics, who will now find that many contemporary novels come predigested, with the exegetical section of the PhD offering more extensive analysis than any in-depth review ever could.' (Introduction)

'In an era of sentences that trend not only towards our laziest tendencies but also towards the speed and rhythm of our economy: the elevator pitch sentence, the jump-cut sentence, the news hook sentence, the perfectly manscaped short back and sides sentence, in short the short sentence; a long sentence is antiseptic, so much so that defending its intrinsic value has become something of a moral duty.' (Introduction)

'The relationship between artists and their sitters has long been a topic of fascination and enquiry – not least for artists themselves. The study of portraiture is often informed by investigations of this relationship as well as that with a third party: the viewer.' (Introduction)