Cirrus@Austlit

'Bruce Bennett and Anne Pender explore the lives and creative work of Australia's many expatriate writers living and working in Britain since the early nineteenth century. They contest the notion of Australia as an 'import culture' and show Australians exporting literary talent to Britain and further afield from 1820 until the present. Stories of the lives and work of writers working in all genres, from romance and crime to contemporary literary fiction, are interweaved in a collective biography.

'Bennett and Pender uncover many unknown writers and document their adventures both on and off the page. They also discover the expatriate lives of figures such as Pamela Travers (author of Mary Poppins), Frederic Manning, Randolph Stow and Madeleine St John. They explore the work of lesser known writers such as Jill Neville, as well as investigating Christina Stead's expatriate years, the modernist dramas of Patrick White and Barry Humphries, and the arguments with England expressed in the lives and work of Peter Porter, Germaine Greer, Michael Blakemore and Geoffrey Robertson.

'This book is the first historically comprehensive, detailed examination of expatriate Australian writers at work in Britain. The authors illuminate two centuries of intense literary activity and discover the major contributions by Australian writers to world literature.'

Source: Monash University Publishing website

'What are the roles of reason and imagination in secret intelligence? How do apparently normal people get involved? What happens to them?

'While British, American and Soviet empires have produced plentiful supplies of heroes, villains and stirring tales, Australians have typically averted their gaze from this country's involvement in the "second oldest profession". And yet espionage has been a part of Australia's history since the earliest European imaginings of a southern land mass.

'Australian spies have produced their share of heroes and villains and this book shows how they influenced Australia's diplomatic and military policy, and the personal price some of them paid.' (From the publisher's website.)

'The study of national images and stereotypes has slipped from fashion in some quarters since the rise of postcolonial theory in the 1980s followed by globalisation studies in the 1990s. But as Wolfgang Zach ably reminds us, opposition to the study of national images was also opposed by universalist theorists in the 1950s and 60s led by Rene Wellek (Zack & Kosok 1987:ix–xii). Despite such opposition, then and since, national studies have continued in a variety of forms ranging from the impressionistic to the systematic. Stereotypes and autostereotypes, as well as more in-depth, qualitative analyses recur as writers from one nation attempt to describe or typify another. This essay attempts to explore some of the ways in which India and Indian people were presented in prose narratives by Australians between 1850 and 1950. The approach is eclectic, taking into account historical context, genre and the use of national image-making of selves and others during a century of changing ideas of the nation.' (Introduction)

The Australian Classics Library series is intended 'to make classic texts of Australian literature more widely available for the secondary school and undergraduate university classroom, and to the general reader. The series is co-edited by Emeritus Professor Bruce Bennett of the University of New South Wales and Professor Robert Dixon, Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, in conjunction with SETIS, Sydney University Press, AustLit and the Copyright Agency Limited. Each text is accompanied by a fresh scholarly introduction and a basic editorial apparatus drawn from the resources of AustLit.'

Source: Sydney University Press website, http://www.sup.usyd.edu.au/
Sighted: 11/08/2009