Cirrus@Austlit

In mapping the development of Australian literary studies as an object of scholarly endeavour, Gelder poses the questions 'why are we still producing a form of literary studies which seems to sanction' the narrow perspective of an Australian national literature and 'when will literary nationalism be supplanted by, at the very least, something akin to literary regionalism'? Gelder refers particularly to The Oxford Literary History of Australia (1998), but comments also on other works that have attempted to map the national literature.

Griffiths discusses the epic, ill-fated journey of Scott to the Antarctic and the diaries that Scott constructed in his own and his companions' final days. Griffiths then reflects on some of the imaginative re-writings of that expedition. He particularly focuses on Roland Huntford's Scott and Amundsen (1979) and also mentions Douglas Stewart's The Fire on the Snow. Griffiths is interested in 'the latitude for legitimate historical imagination, the speculative space'.