Cirrus@Austlit

A formal praise of Malouf from a member of the 2000 Neustadt Prize jury who successfully championed Malouf's candidacy.

Examines Malouf's representations of the natural world, the human body and landscape as the site and the acting out of a transcendental relationship - a characteristic of Romanticism to be found in Malouf's fiction.

Examines the use and function of myth in Malouf's novels Remembering Babylon and An Imaginary Life. The author argues that there is a development in Malouf's deployment of myth, which in turn reflects his deepening understanding of the genre's moral ambiguities.

Discusses intersections of Western and Aboriginal perceptions and influences in Malouf's story collection.

Argues that Malouf's story collection is an exploration fo the perplexities of individual perception, consciousness, and conscience rather than of other kinds of burdens of social, communal life, suggesting a 'testing stage of imaginative transition through which Malouf is presently working' (752). Dream Stuff 'challenges us most of all to confront a perception that now seems central to Malouf's work, a kind of gentle yet implacable skepticism about the reality of the social world' (757).

Argues that Malouf's shorter fiction, 'being more inclined toward the telling image than towards discursiveness, is able more consciously to tap into his creative strengths and provide new insights into old experiences' (760).

Explores the theme of belonging to two different worlds (the inner and outer world, or two cultures), and to have two sources of being, in Malouf's novel Remembering Babylon, and links it with some of William Golding's fiction, particularly the novel Darkness Visible.