'Is Australian literature dead, dying, or at the very least, under threat? Given the subtitle of Nicholas Birns’s Contemporary Australian Literature: A world not yet dead, one could be forgiven for wondering. While Birns insists that he “does not mean to urge an elegiac perspective on contemporary Australia”, the “not yet” necessarily implies the event is inevitable – a disquieting prospect that laps, unseen, at the edges of this study.' (Introduction)
