Cirrus@Austlit

'This article forms part of a larger project designed to rekindle interest in the place that Romantic philosophy and aesthetics take in contemporary Australian literature. Poet Gwen Harwood's "Professor" sequences engage strongly with German Romantic philosophy, specifically the early German Romanticism of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. ... The debate waged between Dennis Douglas and A D Hope in ALS during the 1960s and 1970s over the meaning of Harwood's sequences introduces the topic of irony in these poems. By extension, this article tracks the concept of Romantic irony as central to both the formal and thematic adventure undertaken in these poems' (49).

The author focuses on Malouf's fictional and non-fictional prose 'as interventions strongly concerned with cultivating Australia's national imaginary'. Considering Malouf's writing as expressive of a refined literary habitus, she asks what this means for understanding his 'interventions as a writer who is also, and consequently, a widely respected public intellectual', and examines how his literary orientation addresses certain readerships and what the political limits are.