AustLit

'This essay examines Indigenous Australian writer Alexis Wright’s novels Plains of Promise (1997) and The Swan Book (2013), alongside debates within world literature. These debates prize open the crucial distinction between spatial and temporal understandings of the Earth and the unique agency of literature to make a world. I claim that these debates provide insights compatible with those of Wright’s fiction, which is realist, modernist, and “epical” in its style of connecting contemporary and historical stories to the “ancient literature of this land,” and in performing the interconnection of language with other nonlinguistic forces in her narratives (Wright 2008). Wright’s literature makes a strong case for thinking the material, aesthetic, and political nature of the literary work as a force that opens a world.' (Publication abstract)