Cirrus@Austlit

'Ken Gelder’s notion of a ‘proximate reading’ provides a conceptual methodology for a side-by-side, transnational reading of James McAuley and Harold Stewart’s Ern Malley poetry collection The Darkening Ecliptic (1944) and Max Aub’s apocryphal biography Jusep Torres Campalans (1958). While often seen as representing a setback to Australian modernism – as ‘an Australian outcrop of literary fashion’ – here the poetry of Ern Malley is read in terms of its deconstructive potential. Jusep Torres Campalans is a little-known but fascinating text which represents a ‘provincial’ response to modernism from the margins. Writing in Mexico about an exiled Catalan artist, Aub’s novel challenges the conventional periodization of modernism through its suggestion of an alternative history of Cubism, its inclusion of a unique set of important events in an extended Annals listing, and Campalans’ scorn of theory as ‘pure nonsense’. Aub’s text ‘decomposes’ the art monograph, and playfully undermines the authority of a figure like Aub (as writer, intellectual) to capture the essence of a Catalan artist who has withdrawn from the world to live among the indigenous people of Chiapas. McAuley and Stewart similarly invent a reclusive poet whose work can be read as a poetic conversation with Anglo-American modernism. In reading the two apocryphal artists together, the intention is to recontextualise the reception of Ern Malley within a transnational frame, a ‘black swan of trespass on alien waters’, which resonates beyond Australian shores.'  (Introduction)

'Les Murray’s three huge scrapbooks, known collectively as his ‘Great Book,’ were deposited at the National Library of Australia in 2022. They offer salient insights into Murray’s aesthetic preferences and compositional procedures, in particular a preoccupation with intricate patterns in which the hierarchical relationships between components are abolished and perspective is flattened, as occurs in Greek, Roman and Byzantine mosaics. Numerous reproductions of such mosaics, assembled from miniature equalised pieces called tesserae, appear throughout the scrapbooks. This essay proposes that the mosaic is the nearest corollary for Murray’s own treatment of language in poetry. The essay offers the mosaic as a concept to focus insightful but disparate commentary on Murray’s style into a consistent analysis. The discussion then traces the evolution of Murray’s poetic style from its most likely inspirations – Gerard Manley Hopkins’s notions of inscape and instress, the Jindyworobak movement, possibly early modernist ideas of the stream of consciousness – to explore the mosaicist technique underpinning the large-scale world-building of Murray’s mature writing and the briefer poems of his late years. The mosaic concept allows us to perceive that style is as important as subject matter in evoking Murray’s ramshackle rural ‘Vernacular Republic’ and his Catholic mysticism, and it also allows a more integrative and sympathetic reading of Murray’s late poetry, despite the poetry’s shrinkage in scale and narrowing in scope.' (Introduction)

'Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab has long been celebrated for its portrayal of the spaces and places of late-nineteenth century Melbourne. In this article, we seek to interrogate the relationship between the spatiality of Hume’s Melbourne and social class. In particular, we employ a theoretical framework that combines structural Marxist literary analysis with the work of radical geographers, unified in the concept of a text’s spatial unconscious. We argue that the spatial unconscious of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab registers the impact of middle-class liberal ideology on the representation of the spaces and places of the working-class and bourgeoisie. Putting this ideology to work, Hume attempts to create a literary world in which these spaces and places are radically differentiated and strictly balkanised. However, a close reading reveals flows, or porosities, of people and capital between these locations, porosities that indicate the limits of middle-class liberal ideology and the capacity of capital to produce abstract space.' (Introduction) 

'Eleanor Dark seems for some time to have been relegated to the B-grade of Australian literary studies, though this could be an impression formed only within the changing-rooms of academe. If it is true, it must have something to do with her gender (early reviews have titles like ‘Good Novels by Women’) and with her living outside of central Sydney (Belinda McKay has an essay from the 2000s, ‘Writing from the Hinterland’, its attention to Dark’s ‘Queensland Years’ open to extension to include her Katoomba years). While Dark certainly actively engaged with other writer-critics, the later creation of her home as the Varuna ‘writer’s retreat’ indicates a remoteness from where the action is supposed to be. Politically, Dark seemed to leftists to be conservative and to conservatives she was suspected of holding communist views. The popular success of The Timeless Land shifted attention away from her literary experiments with modernist techniques, generated arguments over her mix of history and fiction, and allowed concerns about white representation of Aboriginal characters to push her work to one side. Perhaps class played a part too – an image of the comfortably-off wife of a doctor not ‘playing well’ to common Australian predilections for struggling artists wrestling with rural or worker experience. Whatever the reasons, Dark’s visibility and status as an Australian novelist has risen and fallen according to the fashions and frameworks of literary criticism and cultural politics in Australia.' (Introduction) 

'Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell’s book of ecocritical scholarship examines six contemporary narrative-prose texts from Australia and breaks new ground, both in relation to ecocriticism and to the study of Australian literature. She proposes the cosmological as an old-new reading lens in an age of climate crises – as opposed to the use of ‘ecological’ or ‘Anthropocene’ – arguing it offers a better framework for considering a broader interconnectedness of ecosystems in literary texts, as well as human and more-than-human inter-relations and collectivities in narratives. Where most ecocritical scholarship concentrates on stories set in a vulnerable future, Bartha-Mitchell’s book disrupts this temporal straight-jacketing by examining texts that – roughly arranged – examine ecological pasts, futures and presents. Cosmological Readings thus introduces readers to new ecocritical stories, to a wider range of primary texts, and challenges limited thinking about where new imaginings on the environment, ecology and climate change might be found.' (Introduction)