Cirrus@Austlit

'Australian literary studies has been shaped by crises in both its own development and in the history of literary studies in higher education. As the study of a “national” literature at the university level it had both assertive and disputed beginnings, a varying but impressive history of establishment and legitimacy, and ongoing challenges in the present: uncertain educational frameworks and pedagogical practices, the continued under-funding of the humanities in universities, and the effects, on disciplinarity and employment, of repeated institutional restructuring. A determining aspect of those challenges is the constantly evolving nature of its object of study, Australian creative writing, which literary studies needs constantly to adapt to and engage with. Also on the disciplinary side, things are equally shifting. Australian literary studies, as a field of knowing, is “neither pure nor autonomous: it exists in relation to a series of distinct though overlapping domains that together make up the total field of knowledge production in the humanities” (Dixon, “Boundary Work”).' (Introduction)

'I write to answer incipient questions that trouble my mind. I write to relieve some form of anxiety, the question of anxiety being an unanswerable question, since the object cause of anxiety, the shadow of it, cannot be symbolised. I write because I must do so, exhilarating, detestable, painful though this act or impulse might be. I write because it is my joy, the paradoxical satisfaction that I derive from my symptom and the excesses of an enjoyment that is closer to pain than pleasure. My reasons for writing echo the words of Dominique Hecq, a scholar, a friend, a mentor—in her article “Writing the Unconscious: Psychoanalysis for the Creative Writer” (Hecq 4), who looked at the potential usefulness of psychoanalysis for the creative writer. These are words that speak to me personally. I think of the writer as an agent of change. As a writer, I have the persistence, the perseverance, the responsibility, the energy and desire as a creative to be an inspiration, in representing diversity, a voice for the voiceless, in connecting through storytelling.' 

(Publication abstract)

'E. G. (“Jerry”) Moll is probably the most substantial Australian poet you think you might have heard of, but aren’t quite sure. He gets brief coverage in the older standard histories like H. M. Green’s, and entries in the modern online encyclopedias like the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry. He is represented in many Australian anthologies across the twentieth century, the most recent inclusion being “On Having Grown Old” (TP 242) in Jamie Grant’s, One Hundred Australian Poems You Need to Know (2008). Earlier, he was selected by anthologists including George Mackaness, Kenneth Slessor, Douglas Stewart, Judith Wright, and Les Murray. He is well covered in AustLit (of course), and there is extra biographical material on a webpage maintained by Dirk Spennemann at https://marshall.csu.edu.au/Marshalls/html/Literature/Moll.html' (Introduction)

'Paul Giles has had an incredibly prolific and successful career as a literary academic. As an Americanist, he has reminded the institution of American literature precisely what it has neglected because of the American system—namely its transatlantic connections, and, more recently, after moving to the University of Sydney, he has also reminded it of its transpacific connections. He has explored these areas in a prolific, comprehensive, and learned series of books. These books are remarkable, not just for kicking on so much but being so scrupulous, getting the details right, being so well written, and being very generous in their citations of specialists who have worked in a far narrower field than Giles has, but whose critical explorations have provided the foundations for synthesis such as the ones he has undertaken. Giles’s achievement is a lesson to the critic that one can be ambitious without being sloppy, and that one can be conceptually daring yet still explore concrete ways, archives, publishing, history, and the nooks and crannies of critical reception. For all the heady originality of the book’s sweeping argument, the text is always kept on an argumentative throughline, and potential tensions all make sense within the book’s determinate frame.' (Introduction)

'Rachael Mead, whose poetry and debut novel have received critical acclaim, has expanded her repertoire with the release of her second novel. The Art of Breaking Ice is a historical fiction inspired by the intriguing story of how Melbourne-based artist Nelle (Nel/Nellie) Isabel Law sailed to Antarctica in 1961, making her the first Australian woman to set foot on the continent and the first female artist in the world to work there. This novel is a significant addition both to Australian Antarctic literature and Antarctic literature written by and about women.' (Introduction)

'To say that Alexis Wright’s fourth novel, Praiseworthy, represents a continuation of her previous work might seem redundant, given that authors tend to possess an inescapable style and reveal a certain obsessiveness regarding themes, but one might argue that Wright’s fiction is distinctively characterised or even defined by a reiterative quality. This is something I’d like to briefly explore in this review.' (Introduction)

'Women & Children (2023) is set in a fictionalised working-class suburb of Melbourne, with a “reputation for hard men and their crimes, from robbery and violence on the street to family violence behind closed doors” (4) in the mid-1960s. This statement introduces the main premise of the novel which is how women and children survive in a family, more expressly, how they survive the men in their families. Women & Children was published in the year before Australians took to the streets to decry our almost 30% national increase in domestic violence, most of which is carried out by men,1 and significantly shifts the conversation about gender- based violence being a “women’s problem” to a whole-of-society problem.' 

(Introduction)

'Katie Hansord’s Colonial Australian Women Poets: Political Voice and Feminist Tradition explores the writings of Elizabeth Hamilton Dunlop, Mary Bailey, Caroline Leakey, Emily Manning, and Louisa Lawson within networks of imperial feminist poetics. Hansord underscores the internationally networked political approaches of these women writers, who engaged with gender equity, anti-slavery movements, and other social issues, aligning them with Romantic ideals of political resistance. Context is crucial for understanding these poets’ works, which often reflected a quick response to contemporary events despite the distance from their European influences. While her chosen women wrote from the perspective of the Australian colony, Hansord reads these poets as belonging to an “imperialist” strand of feminism that did not acknowledge the perspectives of First Nations Australians. At the same time, she challenges the notion that colonial women’s poetry should be deemed entirely genteel and moralistic, arguing for a reevaluation of settler colonial women’s political engagement through their poetry.' 

(Introduction)

'Writing Responses to Images of the Living Brain was generated from fully integrated, interdisciplinary research. As lead chief investigator of an interdisciplinary team, Julia Prendergast forged a partnership with Swinburne Neuroimaging (SNI), for an exploratory study that was titled Ideasthetic Imagining: Mapping the Brain’s Microstates Using Magnetoencephalography. The Writing Mind is a sister output to this research.' 

(Introduction)

'Bartha-Mitchell’s monograph is part of the Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media series edited by Thomas Bristow. It is a welcome addition to the critical landscape, particularly for those who are interested in the relationship between literature and environment. It comes from a fine PhD written under a cotutelle arrangement between Monash and Goethe universities. The book brings a certain European sensibility to its reading of contemporary Australian literature (focusing on novels) insofar as there is a slightly more systematic approach in the thought than we tend to produce locally. There was a more than usually valiant attempt to distil consistent premises from the writings of Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, Deborah Bird-Rose, Timothy Clark, Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, assorted new materialists and post-humanists, and proponents of Indigenous critique.' 

(Introduction)

'Blue Mountains novelist Eleanor Dark (1901–1985) is best known for The Timeless Land trilogy (1941–1953), which enjoyed such popular success in her lifetime that it overshadowed her modernist interwar fiction, including most notably Prelude to Christopher (1934). Time, Tide and History collects fifteen essays about Dark, clustered around these two highpoints of her oeuvre, but also frequently reaching out to include other, lesser-known works. The topics “arose organically out of the interests expressed by the contributors,” and yet still manage to show a wide and appropriate coverage. The editors hope to “not only . . . establish a new view of Dark’s fiction as a whole, but also to reflect on the ways in which her fiction speaks to our own present moment, in the context of a globally fraught, post-pandemic, Anthropocene era” (3). The Introduction includes a valuable survey of Dark’s career and reception. In addressing the complexity of Dark’s depiction of Aboriginal people, the editors write: “Our hope is that readers and scholars . . . will be encouraged to reflect on the never-quite-resolved dynamic in Dark’s writing between the melancholy of what her narratives picture as a lost Aboriginal past and [a] utopian dream of settler futurity” (18). (Introduction)

'Restless Dolly Maunder follows the life trajectory of Kate Grenville’s grandmother, a novelisation mostly spanning a time now outside living memory and therefore in a field of imagined possibilities. The past can be a playground for the ideas and thoughts that exercise a writer in the present, like this novel’s attempt to understand women’s place in the society of the late 19 th and early 20th centuries. Grenville does this through imagining the entirety of her grandmother’s life and thereby, perhaps, attempting to uncover the impact of this person on subsequent generations. The novel is a creative exploration of the shifting and slippery family foundations of our existence that time so efficiently obscures. It is a recapturing and linking of three generations of women, each a product of their time and experience but questing at the ends of their lives to work out the mysterious ties of family, familial love and the deep impact they have on each other’s lives.' 

(Introduction)

'In 2023, Meanjin and Overland are known as two of Australia’s preeminent and oldest literary magazines. Both are quarterly print publications that also publish new material online through their respective websites. Their output ranges across poetry, short stories and essays (including personal essays, cultural commentary and other forms of creative nonfiction), as well as a sprinkling of visual art. If you are an Australian writer working on anything shorter than a book, Meanjin and Overland are probably near the top of your list of places to submit, and then as the rejections roll in, you work your way down that list. How writers choose between these two literary magazines is largely arbitrary, or perhaps informed by personal relationships, though one important distinction seems to be that Overland is known to be more “political” or “radical” in its publishing strategy. Another distinction is that Meanjin tends to pay writers a little bit more. But otherwise they occupy very similar territory in the cultural imagination of Australia.' 

(Introduction)

'Dougal McNeill wants his readers to believe that reinterpreting an outdated Marxism is the way forward to a better world for the Oceanic region. Such a path is evident in his incorporation of the elements of liberation ideology as the referents for his text.' (Introduction)

'It isn’t often that an academic text is as readable as a thrilling, sumptuously sexy, or absorbingly imaginative novel, yet Genre Worlds can be described using every review-trawling author’s dream description: unputdownable. Kim Wilkins, Beth Driscoll, and Lisa Fletcher have collaborated to put forth an exciting new concept for reading, contextualising, and even writing genre fiction. They propose a “genre worlds model” which “recognizes that popular fiction’s most compelling characteristics are its connected social, industrial, and textual practices” (1). While the Genre Worlds authors dabble in and draw from several theories across the interdisciplinary landscapes this book inhabits (literary, fan, genre, and publishing studies to name a few), they ultimately seek out and largely utilise Howard S. Becker’s theory of “art worlds” which they assert “acknowledges the centrality of the artist but locates the artist within a radiating network” (15). With their interview-forward approach they are successful in achieving this centrality as well as extending the concept into fresh territory where radiating networks include digital spheres. The authors claim that their update to Becker’s approach is one in which they attempt to capture the “dramatic effects of digital technological changes on genre worlds over the past two decades” (17) and they are mostly very successful in capturing the “shifting value placed on physical and live practices” (17).' (Introduction)

'There was a time when the study of Australian literature was the wild west, something that took place beyond the institutions, along the fringes and margins of journals, little magazines and newspapers. If the current institutional decay of the humanities and arts within universities is leading to the new-found surety of the discipline fraying a touch at the edges, it is nonetheless evident that the study of Australian literature has come a long way. And yet, it remains a remarkable fact that—whether we consider its origin point in those early days where men and women of letters compiled rudimentary histories, from the appointment of the first lecturer in Australian literature in 1941, or the appointment of the first professor of Australian literature in 1962 (G. A. Wilkes, see Carter 144)—no one across that great span of time has attempted to tell a standalone history of its most popular form: the novel. Given the rapid expansion of Australian publishing in the second half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first, the nature of this task has become more herculean with each passing year. With the publication of The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel, edited by David Carter, the long wait is over.' 

(Introduction)