Cirrus@Austlit

'Jean-François Vernay, declaring the scope of cognitive literary studies in this collection, says that the eight contributors draw on recent scientific findings "by exploring the mental processes at work in the creative minds of writers and readers" (2). Terms particular to neurocognition, he says, usefully emphasize that bodily conditions and environments alike influence individual perception and cultural development. While it would be interesting to hear a neuroscientist discuss Australian literature, all of the contributors here come from the literary side; thus, the collection seems less a radical melding of science and literature than a sometimes refreshing, even exciting, extension of conventional strategies of literary criticism in agglomerating methods that originate in other disciplines. Even without hard neuroscience, a focus here on the dynamism of interactions between writers and readers produces new opportunities, strong ones indeed, for close examination of those relationships.' (Introduction)

'In 1915, Major Richard Francis Fitz-Gerald was the last Australian to leave an exposed position at Gallipoli. He was awarded the DSO for that and served on the Western Front through to the end of the Great War. Everywhere he went, often while in danger, he collected materials that marked his experience – photographs, orders, his battalion’s timetable for evacuation, and a souvenir map of Gallipoli that he annotated by hand. He wrote careful comments on everything he kept, transforming public documents into personal sites of memory and retrieval. He also kept a diary for the first year of his experience, covering Gallipoli, Egypt, and France. Major Fitz-Gerald and the Matter of War personalises the difficult position of a front-line officer by closely examining the things he carried, collected, and preserved for the rest of his life.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'In the early decades of the twentieth century, a nation’s participation in global communities of science denoted high degrees of cultural modernity. For Australia, the accomplishments of Douglas Mawson signified that national assertion. Unlike the arts, where lines of descent and influence remained important, scientists before 1914 frequently saw themselves without borders; this claim offered vast encouragement to newer societies, who found their champion in Ernest Rutherford, born in New Zealand and awarded the Nobel in 1908 for work in Canada. Australia – the new Federation and the progressive states – heartily grasped the opportunity, and Mawson personified that demonstration, particularly in Antarctica: in calling him ‘an Australian Nansen,’ Edgeworth David drew a sharp distinction between Mawson and his British compeers, Scott and Shackleton. Both Mawson and Nansen were field scientists of utmost rigor, who directed their celebrity toward public activism on behalf of a new nation (Australia, 1901; Norway, 1905). That newness, moreover, produced a modernity that Gyan Prakash calls ‘an uncanny double, not a copy, of the European original’ (Another Reason 5); thus, while Mawson represented modern science in Australia, he also worked, consciously and originally, to reconfigure the global playing field of modernity altogether.' (Publication abstract)

'Flying foxes coasted at dusk, heavy and low, over Parramatta Road. Everyone in Sydney apologized for the smoke, and everyone added that the fire season was only beginning. In early December, no one yet knew how bad the fires would be, but even so the stores were asking customers to "round up" their purchase sums as donations for wildlife relief. When I took the train to Katoomba, the Blue Mountains unrolled like a Chinese scroll, a few details suggesting an insubstantial world. I had not traveled to Australia for the doom, however—no need, with American production of despair at such high levels—but rather to attend "From Colony to Transnation: An ASAL Conference in Honour of Robert Dixon," at the University of Sydney, 5–6 December 2019. Robert had retired after twelve years as the Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, the fourth person to hold that flag rank since 1962, following G. A. Wilkes, Leonie Kramer, and Elizabeth Webby; the university's widely denounced decision not to appoint a successor hung in the air, part and parcel of our wider habitat degradation. All the same, the conference organized by Brigid Rooney and Peter Kirkpatrick suggested a wider world as well, a model of academic commitment, skill, and generosity. Everyone in Sydney said that too.' (Introduction)

'Phyllis Fahrie Edelson, who died in July 2016, was the founding book review editor of Antipodes. In her tenure from 1987-1994, she pioneered the wide range of reviews in different genres and categories that the journal still features today. Under Phyllis's editorship, large and small presses, national and regional writer and poets, novelists, and essayists were all treated with equal care and discernment. She established relations with writers such as John Kinsella, Peter Carey, and David Malouf that we still value today.' (Introduction)

'Keneally has frequently put himself in the way of historical crises, and has risked and most often found his individual voice within epochal stories. Such patterns of risk-taking inform much of his work, including his engagement with American materials. Here I will focus on two of his several envisionings of the Civil War, the novel Confederates (1979) and the biography Abraham Lincoln (2003), and conclude with a differently focused work, the memoir Searching for Schindler (2007), which is an American autobiography in tone and strategy as much as in setting and character.'

Source: Abstract.