AustLit

'Is Australian literature dead, dying, or at the very least, under threat? Given the subtitle of Nicholas Birns’s Contemporary Australian Literature: A world not yet dead, one could be forgiven for wondering. While Birns insists that he “does not mean to urge an elegiac perspective on contemporary Australia”, the “not yet” necessarily implies the event is inevitable – a disquieting prospect that laps, unseen, at the edges of this study.' (Introduction)

'This paper investigates the affective labour done by, specifically, native species images in Australian poetry, using Judith Wright's bird poems, and various poems about kangaroos as example. It uses the anthropological term, "deep hanging out", borrowed from an article about fashion models, to extend the idea of affective labour, and to measure poems' attentions to birds and animals, and their relation to iconising as the work of nationalism. It is concerned with cultural capital, and Canberra, and the human empire.'  (Publication abstract)

'In the introduction to Contemporary Australian Literature, Nicholas Birns recounts how he first came to the field as a young student studying at Columbia in the mid 1980s, his enthusiasm sparked by immersion in the work of Patrick White and Les Murray. From here Birns branched out voraciously, seeking in Australian literature an ideal he thought had been lost to the States: ‘a horizon of hope, a milieu of greater generosity and charity, tolerance and flexibility’. 1 While he quickly realised what any more seasoned or cynical Australian critic would have told him, that this was largely ‘an illusion’, it is safe to say that Birns has not entirely lost his sense of hope when it comes to Australia and its literature (7). Throughout an eclectic research career – he has published on subjects as diverse as Early Modern literature, the history of literary theory, and the SpanishAmerican novel – Australian writing has remained an abiding academic interest, and he has served as the editor of Antipodes since 2001.' (Introduction)