Cirrus@Austlit

'Whether you adore or despise Nick Cave, this book offers you a great deal. Far more than the stereotypes of the gothic expatriate, or the drug-loving, post-punk, underground lord, or the strutting songster with the deep, melancholy voice. All these characters appear in Faith, Hope and Carnage, but we meet full on an older, reflective, theologically-probing Cave. For many readers this might sound like challenging, even uncomfortable, territory.' (Introduction) 

'There are so many strange serendipities, and antipathies, forged across Les Murray’s work, verbal, historical and spiritual. In Continuous Creation also, Murray’s last, posthumous book (published almost three years after he died in a nursing home in Taree) these counterpoints and challenges await readers, mostly in gentle forms.' (Introduction)

'This essay examines the claims to secularity of contemporary Australia, arguing that in the context of Indigenous Australians' declaration, in the document 'Uluru: Statement from the Heart', and of many poetic expressions, we must more fully explore the category of the sacred. Further, the essay argues that in contemporary Australia, sacred and secular domains need to be mutually engaged. The essay offers the idea of the poetic sacred - where secular (political, earthed, civic) and sacred (numinous, transcendent, meaning-making) possibilities can be seen in dialogue. 'Uluru: Statement from the Heart', as well as the poetry of Bruce Dawe, Les Murray, Lionel Fogarty and Judith Beveridge are examined, as exemplars of the poetic sacred.' (Publication abstract)

'Already, in her 1974 volume Automatic Sad, poet Pam Brown's melancholy protagonist is seriously dissatisfied. S/he sees "... dark corners / and black holes here" ("The Collapse" 17), losing her head "midframe in the city again / with a bag of banal images" (17). S/he is "desperate / in similar sad thoughts / think(s) maybe some angel ... might roll into the house and unwrap the mystery I've been solving for thousands of years" (17). Poet, social critic and existential being are dose here, but distinct; each ghosts the other, playing hard to get and hard to pin down, with each other let alone with the reader. Is "The Collapse" an indicative poem of tentative hope and poetic generation, or of melancholy/ruefulness/ irony/ self-disappearance, or both? Between irony, social critique and tongue-in-cheek, Brown's poems are little disappearing acts. Or at least putative attempts at self-deconstruction, being both within language, and pressing to be somewhere beyond it: "Half here / Half gone" (106). (Introduction)
 

'One of the most rancorous, persistent and polarising dualisms today is, arguably, that between the secular and the sacred. Sacred and secular are capacious categories, but in the field of lived and popular culture, such terms are being transformed kaleidoscopically, with the songs of Nick Cave, Hozier, and many others exploring the sacred embedded in very human, secular contexts.'  (Introduction)

'Tim Winton’s new novel, The Shepherd’s Hut, is a bit of a conundrum. True, it exhibits many of the well-known traits of Winton’s earlier works: representations of hurting men, bruised women; working-class identity; high lyricism and deeply vernacular dialogue intertwined; a sense of place as much more than simply landscape, but a living, breathing reality; a brooding on the experience of home, and a lack of belonging.' (Introduction)

'There are so many words for wanting: longing, yearning, lusting, lacking, craving, desiring, aspiring, dreaming, hungering… To want is to be human, to experience both the agony and the exquisite anticipatory movement towards what is beyond present reality. So, wanting is both spiritual and earthy. It is a relishing of possibilities (yes, fantasy!), but equally, a measuring of the lack at the heart of human life, a restlessness, and sometimes a turbulence: ‘Quick, said the bird, / find them, find them, / Round the corner. Through the first gate, / Into our first world, shall we follow…’ (T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’). Wanting Only is a set of poetic meditations on how humans - individuals and collectives - are transformed by what and how they desire.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'As scholars, critics, reviewers and students of Australian literature, what are our values and our impact? Does what we research and write make any difference, make anything happen, anywhere? That is what the funders of our discipline are asking, but also what we need to ask of ourselves. This is not going to be a self-aggrandizing article, nor a nihilistic, hands-thrownup kind of essay—Whence the Humanities? Whence Literary Studies? Whence literature?— although there may be something of that along the way. The most recent, 2018 round of Australian Research Council (ARC) grants is one arguably gloomy indicator that Literary Studies and its sister disciplines of Cultural Studies and Creative Writing are not doing well, and not being seen, in the national fields of research. Of course Literary Studies may have migrated into interdisciplinary locations, and is in now ‘in competition’ with other language disciplines, so is it becoming almost invisible on ARC platforms? This paper, generously given the mantle of the 2016 Dorothy Green Lecture in its first iteration, explores authority and the making of meaning in Literary Studies as interlocking questions. However, for many within the discipline and beyond, even the notion of meaning is under fire. This paper will defend the categories of value and of meaning-making in the Humanities, and ask where Literary Studies might be going.' (Introduction)

'In The Fiction of Tim Winton, Lyn McCredden explores the eleven novels and four short story collections of an author whose works span the literary and popular divide. Throughout this work, McCredden shows Winton to be a writer of fearless and intelligent fiction, tackling themes such as belonging, gender, and redemption, all while sustaining a strong mainstream following.

Winton’s work spans many genres, ranging from children’s literature to theatrical plays to a suite of highly influential literary novels. Among many other awards, Winton has won the Miles Franklin Award a record four times, with Shallows in 1984, Cloudstreet in 1992, Dirt Music in 2002, and Breath in 2009. Dirt Music was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize in the same year, with his novel The Riders shortlisted for the 1995 Booker Prize. Along with a host of other literary prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1995 and both the New South Wales Premier’s and Queensland Premier’s Awards for The Turning, Winton is regarded as one of Australia’s most popular writers; his novel Cloudstreet has regularly been voted Australia’s Favourite Book by the ABC and the Australian Society of Authors. Cloudstreet has also achieved international success, and a theatrical adaption has toured the world to critical acclaim and adulation.' (Publication summary)

'Tim Winton’s fiction has divided critics. His writing has been characterised as nostalgic (Dixon), as too Christian (Goldsworthy), as blokey, and even misogynist (Schürholz). He has been pilloried on the blog site Worst of Perth, with its ‘Wintoning Project,’ which calls for contributions of ‘Australian or Western Australian schmaltz, in the style of our most famous literary son, master dispenser of literary cheese and fake WA nostalgia Tim Winton’ (online). And he has won the top Australian literary prize, The Miles Franklin Award, four times (Shallows, 1984; Cloudstreet, 1992; Dirt Music, 2002; and Breath, 2009). Winton’s oeuvre spans three decades. It remains highly recognisable in its use of Australian vernacular and its sun-filled, beachy Western Australian settings; but it has also taken some dramatic, dark and probingly self-questioning turns. While critics often look for common strands in an author’s oeuvre, it is revealing to consider developments and changes between individual works. How do the darker, more abject elements of Winton’s imaginative visions relate to the ‘wholesome’ if macho Aussie surfer image, or to the writer of plenitude somehow embarrassing to critics?' (Author's introduction)