'Patrick White (1912–1990) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973 and remains one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. This book represents new work by an outstanding list of White scholars from around the globe. This collection of diverse and original essays is notable for its acknowledgement of White’s homosexuality in relation to the development of his literary style, in its consideration of the way his writing ‘works’ on/with readers, and for its contextualizing of his life and oeuvre in relation to London and to London life.' (Publication summary)
'Harris and Webby give an overview of the newly discovered notebooks and manuscripts enhanced by their long experience researching White's writing, and their thorough examination of the 'new' collection's breadth and scope.' (Introduction 7)
In this essay Angus Nicholls gives a 'new reading of the German romanticism in Voss (1957)' [and] 'provides an inspiring example of what practised hands can do with the hoard.' (Introduction 7)
'Mark McKenna traces the ups and downs of another queer relationship, the oftentimes unreciprocated love of Australia's 'great' historian Manning Clark for the visionary he saw in White. He shows how Clark's monumental multi-volume History of Australia expresses greater allegiance to the preoccupations of Australia's 'elite' mid-century writers and artists, notably White and Sidney Nolan, than to the work of Clark's contemporaries in the academic discipline of history.' (Introduction 7-8)
'...Georgina Loveridge begins a more overt dismantling of our understanding of White in the wake of his own late re-envisioning of his work. The chapter, then, zeroes in on the potential for critical collapse threatened (or perhaps promised) in the preoccupation with jitters, tremblings, contradictory times, ambivalence, madnesses, revisions and disconcerting revelations in nearly all our chapters. She reads Flaws as a treatise on the nature of truth with White extending a continuous dismantling of his own symbolic apparatus and offering a blueprint for re-reading hes entire work.' (Introduction 8)
