Cirrus@Austlit

'The Aunt's Story was published in 1948. It was White's third novel, after Happy Valley and The Living and the Dead. He began it not long after the end of the war and wrote the first section, "Meroe", at a table in London, the second section, "Jardin Exotique", on a balcony in Alexandria, and the third, "Hosstius", on the deck of a ship as he sailed home to Australia. He arrived in Sydney wielding the manuscript as "a shield of a kind", and it was accepted by his American publishers with an acknowledgement that it was very fine but probably wouldn't sell. White was dismayed by the novel's reception in Australia. When his mother Ruth read it, she said to him, "Such a pity you didn't write about a cheery aunt" (White Flaws 58). (Introduction 17)

'Boy, Lost was the book that was never going to be written. Was nearly not written. The following account is partly an answer to my own question: why not? And its echo: then why was it? It is also an attempt to understand one of the central and most vexed questions not just of this book but of the writing of memoir, a genre grounded in claims to knowledge and memory, in assumptions about the nature of 'truth'. (Introduction 55)

'The focus of this essay is the literary lives and afterlives of author Shirley Hazzard and her husband of 30 years, the late literary translator, biographer and Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller.' (73)

John Kinsella and Charmaine Papertalk-Green discuss the process of collaborative poetry writing.

'Nolan examines how Scott's 'novel depicts the ways in which different systems of literacy and adornment become entangled in cross-cultural encounters'. (Editorial, 7)

This essay 'tackles issues of the relationship between fact, fiction truth and writing.' (Editorial, 6)

'Shaun Bell recuperates Lock-Elliott from his common status as footnote or aside in accounts of literary networks, to identify common figures and set pirces across his oeuvre, as a ways of reading of his 'construction of self through nostalgia, art and life.' (Editorial, 7)