Cirrus@Austlit

'For the first time in the nine-year history of the Stella Count, and perhaps in the entire history of Australian book reviewing, gender equality has become the norm in Australia’s books pages. Our new research for the Count reveals 55% of books reviewed in Australian publications in 2020 were by women.' (Introduction)

'This chapter surveys the long history of discussions around gender and book reviewing in Australia. It provides an overview of some common attitudes to books by women in Australian reviews since the nineteenth century as well as some key flashpoints in the history of Australian women’s writing in which the reviews played a part. We identify significant continuities in how women’s writing is described in the pages of book reviews, from the nineteenth century until recently: women are presumed to be writing from ‘life,’ not art; they are infantilised and/or sexualised and conflated with their protagonists; and the praise they receive is circumscribed by gendered assumptions about genre and genius. We also discuss several controversies about gender and book reviewing – in the mid-1980s and the 2010s – to think about the impact that gendered reviewing practices continue to have on the careers and aspirations of women writers.' 

Source: Abstract.

'This is the first book to focus entirely on the under-researched but crucial topic of women in the work of J. M. Coetzee, generally regarded as one of the world’s most significant living writers. The fourteen essays in this collection raise the central issue of how Coetzee’s texts address the ‘woman question’. There is a focus on Coetzee’s representation of women, engagement with women writers and the ethics of what has been termed his ‘ventriloquism’ of women’s voices in his fiction and autobiographical writings, right up to his most recent novel, The Schooldays of Jesus. As such, this collection makes important links between the disciplines of literary and gender studies. It includes essays by well-known Coetzee scholars as well as by emerging scholars from around the world, providing fascinating and timely global insights into how his works are read from differing cultural and scholarly perspectives.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This special section on book reviewing in Australia emerges from the symposium Critical Matters: Book Reviewing Now, held at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne on 9 April 2015 and hosted by Monash University’s Centre for the Book. This symposium, the first of its kind ever to take place in Australia, brought together over thirty reviewers, academics, writers, literary editors and publishers to debate a series of ‘provocations’ on topics such as the necessity of negative reviews, the problem with pitching, the anachronistic nature of critical jargon, the pros and cons of ‘clubbishness’, and the advent of online reviewing sites. Like the symposium, this special section consciously refuses two premises: namely that, before we even start to talk about book reviewing itself, we have to defend its right to exist or that it is in a state of crisis. Instead, this special section understands book reviewing to be a dynamic field that has influence beyond itself, and that can and should be treated to sustained attention by academics.' (Introduction)