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Issue Details: First known date: 2023... 2023 Murnane
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Gerald Murnane is one of Australia’s most celebrated authors whose experimental and deeply idiosyncratic style has attracted rave reviews, including profiles in The New Yorker and The New York Times. Murnane’s writing combines fiction with autobiography and returns obsessively to his particular and uncommon interests: horse- racing, marbles, stained glass, Catholic iconography, hermetic writers, and the Australian landscape. His fiction offers a window into what it means to be human, and how books and reading shape our self-understanding. Murnane examines the writer’s recent work to explain both its significance to Australian literature and provide readers with a deeper understanding of his complex and self-referential fiction.' (Publication summary) 

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Carlton, Parkville - Carlton area, Melbourne - North, Melbourne, Victoria,: Miegunyah Press , 2023 .
      image of person or book cover 2955543646890735512.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 160p.
      Note/s:
      •  Published August 2023

      ISBN: 9780522879469

Works about this Work

Samuel Cox Reviews Murnane by Emmett Stinson Samuel J. Cox , 2024 single work review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , no. 30 2024;

— Review of Murnane Emmett Stinson , 2023 single work biography
'Emmett Stinson’s Murnane offers a critical and enlightening assessment of the Gerald Murnane’s four late fictions, and through these incredibly self-reflexive works, a reading of the eponymous author’s entire oeuvre. Stinson’s superb introduction gives way to chapter- length considerations of Barley Patch (2009), A History of Books (2010), A Million Windows (2014) and Border Districts (2017), before concluding with an assessment of Murnane’s ‘late style’. The study confirms this late style is intensely introspective and genre-bending – somewhere between novel, memoir and essay – as Murnane seeks to retrospectively reform and recontextualise his entire body of work.' (Introduction)
Gerald Murnane’s Class : A Review of Murnane, by Emmett Stinson Joseph Steinberg , 2024 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 25 May vol. 39 no. 1 2024;

— Review of Murnane Emmett Stinson , 2023 single work biography

'Let us take the bull by the horns:

[Gerald Murnane] is without question both the most original and most significant Australian author of the last fifty years, and the best writer Australia has produced since Christina Stead. (Stinson 104)

'One cannot help but ask what Murnane himself might make of this claim. On the one hand, he would surely find it flattering: who would not? To have one’s work hailed as even more significant than that of – to take but a few of the usual suspects – Alexis Wright, Patrick White, Helen Garner and David Malouf is no mean feat. And this is to exclude the poets from consideration, though Stinson’s terms (‘author’ and ‘writer’, in lieu of the narrower ‘novelist’) notably do not. What about another Wright – Judith? Or Oodgeroo Noonuccal? Les Murray? Lionel Fogarty? John Kinsella? To declare it is so with nary an instance of comparison makes this seem less a self-evidently defensible claim than a provocation intended to provoke spirited debate, especially given that little indication is offered as to what constitutes significance for Stinson. His approach in the preceding hundred pages is by turns introductory, contextual, and explicatory, offering a series of useful inroads that both academic and non-academic readers might follow to arrive at a better grasp of Murnane’s four post-break fictions, rather than evaluative, as this claim might otherwise lead readers to believe. The chief virtues of Murnane (2023) as a contribution to scholarship are its careful tracking of references across and beyond the titular author’s corpus, and its account of this obsessive grammarian’s oeuvre-spanning practice of literary revisionism, both of which build steadily upon the foundation laid by Imre Salusinszky’s Gerald Murnane (1993) and Anthony Uhlmann’s edited essay collection Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One (2020). This comparatively modest scholarly endeavour makes Stinson’s big bad bold claim all the more striking. Such an unusually explicit judgment of Murnane’s place in Australian literary history arrives at the eleventh hour, just a page or two before the critic’s voice cedes the soapbox entirely (well, almost) to that of this most auto-exegetical of writers, via the interview that permits Stinson’s subject the last word on his work. Footnotes, of course, excluded. Which takes us rather neatly back to the question with which we began.' (Introduction)

Homemade and Cosmopolitan, the Idiosyncratic Writing of Gerald Murnane Continues to Attract Devotees Brigid Rooney , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 7 September 2023;

— Review of Murnane Emmett Stinson , 2023 single work biography
Late Fictions : Gerald Murnane’s Retrospective Intention Shannon Burns , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , August no. 456 2023; (p. 53)

— Review of Murnane Emmett Stinson , 2023 single work biography

'Emmett Stinson’s brief critical survey centres on Gerald Murnane’s four major ‘late fictions’, beginning with Barley Patch (Giramondo, 2009) and ending with Border Districts (Giramondo, 2017). It is a timely and illuminating companion to Murnane’s recent fiction and works well as an extension of the first monograph on his work, Imre Salusinszky’s Gerald Murnane (Oxford University Press, 1993)Although the two books have different points of focus, they are slim yet substantial studies, each dealing with a distinct period of Murnane’s literary career, and both are eminently readable.' (Introduction)

Late Fictions : Gerald Murnane’s Retrospective Intention Shannon Burns , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , August no. 456 2023; (p. 53)

— Review of Murnane Emmett Stinson , 2023 single work biography

'Emmett Stinson’s brief critical survey centres on Gerald Murnane’s four major ‘late fictions’, beginning with Barley Patch (Giramondo, 2009) and ending with Border Districts (Giramondo, 2017). It is a timely and illuminating companion to Murnane’s recent fiction and works well as an extension of the first monograph on his work, Imre Salusinszky’s Gerald Murnane (Oxford University Press, 1993)Although the two books have different points of focus, they are slim yet substantial studies, each dealing with a distinct period of Murnane’s literary career, and both are eminently readable.' (Introduction)

Homemade and Cosmopolitan, the Idiosyncratic Writing of Gerald Murnane Continues to Attract Devotees Brigid Rooney , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 7 September 2023;

— Review of Murnane Emmett Stinson , 2023 single work biography
Gerald Murnane’s Class : A Review of Murnane, by Emmett Stinson Joseph Steinberg , 2024 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 25 May vol. 39 no. 1 2024;

— Review of Murnane Emmett Stinson , 2023 single work biography

'Let us take the bull by the horns:

[Gerald Murnane] is without question both the most original and most significant Australian author of the last fifty years, and the best writer Australia has produced since Christina Stead. (Stinson 104)

'One cannot help but ask what Murnane himself might make of this claim. On the one hand, he would surely find it flattering: who would not? To have one’s work hailed as even more significant than that of – to take but a few of the usual suspects – Alexis Wright, Patrick White, Helen Garner and David Malouf is no mean feat. And this is to exclude the poets from consideration, though Stinson’s terms (‘author’ and ‘writer’, in lieu of the narrower ‘novelist’) notably do not. What about another Wright – Judith? Or Oodgeroo Noonuccal? Les Murray? Lionel Fogarty? John Kinsella? To declare it is so with nary an instance of comparison makes this seem less a self-evidently defensible claim than a provocation intended to provoke spirited debate, especially given that little indication is offered as to what constitutes significance for Stinson. His approach in the preceding hundred pages is by turns introductory, contextual, and explicatory, offering a series of useful inroads that both academic and non-academic readers might follow to arrive at a better grasp of Murnane’s four post-break fictions, rather than evaluative, as this claim might otherwise lead readers to believe. The chief virtues of Murnane (2023) as a contribution to scholarship are its careful tracking of references across and beyond the titular author’s corpus, and its account of this obsessive grammarian’s oeuvre-spanning practice of literary revisionism, both of which build steadily upon the foundation laid by Imre Salusinszky’s Gerald Murnane (1993) and Anthony Uhlmann’s edited essay collection Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One (2020). This comparatively modest scholarly endeavour makes Stinson’s big bad bold claim all the more striking. Such an unusually explicit judgment of Murnane’s place in Australian literary history arrives at the eleventh hour, just a page or two before the critic’s voice cedes the soapbox entirely (well, almost) to that of this most auto-exegetical of writers, via the interview that permits Stinson’s subject the last word on his work. Footnotes, of course, excluded. Which takes us rather neatly back to the question with which we began.' (Introduction)

Samuel Cox Reviews Murnane by Emmett Stinson Samuel J. Cox , 2024 single work review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , no. 30 2024;

— Review of Murnane Emmett Stinson , 2023 single work biography
'Emmett Stinson’s Murnane offers a critical and enlightening assessment of the Gerald Murnane’s four late fictions, and through these incredibly self-reflexive works, a reading of the eponymous author’s entire oeuvre. Stinson’s superb introduction gives way to chapter- length considerations of Barley Patch (2009), A History of Books (2010), A Million Windows (2014) and Border Districts (2017), before concluding with an assessment of Murnane’s ‘late style’. The study confirms this late style is intensely introspective and genre-bending – somewhere between novel, memoir and essay – as Murnane seeks to retrospectively reform and recontextualise his entire body of work.' (Introduction)
Last amended 12 May 2023 08:23:19
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