Cirrus@Austlit

'As a medical practitioner, Peter Goldsworthy has been confronted, all too frequently, with human suffering, morbidity and mortality: he wrestles with their existential meaning in his poetry, essays and stories. Death, in Goldsworthy's works, is ubiquitous: it becomes an engine for tension between belief and scepticism, for contention between the legacy of his childhood Methodism and his professional grounding in scientific method. Goldsworthy describes incidents and presents arguments which explore the feasibility that we are not ephemeral but potentially eternal: séances and hoped-for hauntings; near-death experiences ... explained physiologically; cloned Tasmanian tigers, and a doctor's self-insemination with the DNA of Jesus; God-centred science fiction, and a convincing postulate for resurrection expressed in the language of mathematics and quantum mechanics. Detached and irreverent, Goldsworthy dissects and analyses, but avoids circumscription or dogmatism. He desires, at best, some proof that there is a dimension beyond the physical; he feels some sadness that a scientific mind is deprived of a certainty of the metaphysical; and he expresses hope that "perhaps, just perhaps ..."' (Author's abstract).

'In Indian Anglophone writing up to about the 1990s, a romantic narrative strand, working in parallel with a metafictional "encyclopaedic" form in other texts of the period, reflects a more hopeful and positive attitude towards Indian society, and an implicit confidence in its potential redemption. Many later works by Indian diasporic writers show a much more negative and critical attitude to India, catalysed by persisting socio-political problems such as corruption and communal violence. This "dark turn" in Indian Anglophone writing is very clearly seen in works such as Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger and Gautam Malkani's Londonstani, which seem to allow little or no possibility for India's social problems to be resolved, and indeed make that irresolvable violence and confusion their particular theme. Yet in a way this "dark" India ironically becomes the means of a distinct cultural focus, a narrative mode of engagement with the homeland that, irrespective of its negative social view, is a means of sustaining cultural identity within the homogenizing and deterritorializing forces of globalization' (Author's abstract).