'The primary objectives of the essay collection are to emphasize, highlight, and examine the postcolonial nature of Australian literature. Within postcolonial studies, literature from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean is often privileged, causing the literature of settler societies such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand to be ignored. This collection provides ample evidence that Australian literature is indeed postcolonial literature, that it deserves more recognition as such, and that postcolonial reading strategies provide immensely fruitful methods for analyzing Australian texts. Moreover, the collection seeks to fill a gap in postcolonial studies.
Essay collections focusing on the postcolonial nature of national and regional literatures have previously been published; however, Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature is the first collection to focus exclusively on Australian literature as postcolonial literature and the first collection of essays on Australian literature in which all the contributors write from a postcolonial theoretical perspective. It is thus a groundbreaking work that makes an important contribution to both Australian literary studies and postcolonial studies.
'Narrow definitions of "postcolonial" that exclude settler colonies such as Australia not only serve to marginalize rich bodies of literature and literary criticism, they also ignore and/or obscure the fact that there are many kinds of postcolonialism, many types of postcolonial societies, and many ways for texts to be postcolonial. Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature, as a body of work, insists that Australian literature is postcolonial literature and deserves equal status with the literature of other postcolonial nations' (Publisher website).
