AustLit

'John A. Scott began his literary life as a poet, but a fellowship in Paris persuaded him to write novels instead. The move was a success, with Scott’s fiction winning the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and being shortlisted twice for the Miles Franklin Award. This book aims to illuminate his texts by guiding the reader through some of the key ideas and influences that have informed his Orphic journey from poet to novelist.

'John A. Scott is one of the greatest Australian writers of his generation, yet his work has largely been overlooked by the world of academic criticism. From Poet to Novelist: The Orphic Journey of John A. Scott aims to correct this oversight by providing the reader with the tools to read and understand this important author.

'The complexity of Scott’s writings makes this book an invaluable guide to his work for readers at all levels. His debt to the French avant-garde, for instance, means that there are numerous hidden references to authors like Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Breton, Aragon and, most prominently, Rimbaud, that require explanation to retrieve the work from obscurity and misunderstanding. Scott engages a wide-ranging set of texts and ideas, from nineteenth-century realism to Australian political history, which are illuminated by this book.

'Scott’s career may be divided between his initial incarnation as a poet, followed by a deeply considered decision to give up poetry and write prose fiction instead. The works that Scott produces in the lead-up to this transition thus thematize the abandonment of poetry, considering it in light of such precedents as Rimbaud, as well as the Greek myth of Orpheus. The impossibility of truly renouncing poetry is signaled by Scott’s return to the genre some twenty-five years later. The book also examines how Scott matures as a fiction writer, both in the complexity of his style and in his growing concern with ethics and politics.

'Written in an accessible manner that will be helpful to new readers, the first in-depth academic study of Scott’s work also holds the complexity and depth that will appeal to long-time connoisseurs of his work.

'From Poet to Novelist: The Orphic Journey of John A. Scott is a valuable resource for academic researchers, students, and general readers interested in Australian literature and culture.' (Publication summary)

'The Australian writer Roger McDonald is the author of ten novels, two novelisations from and for film scripts, two television scripts, one semi-fictionalised memoir, a collection of essays, and two volumes of poetry. His publication record spans half a century from the late 1960s up until the late teens with his tenth novel, A Sea Chase, published in 2017. His books have achieved a significant record in the Australian list of literary awards and he has gone close to breaking into the major international prizes that distinguish the transnational careers of other contemporary Australian writers such as Thomas Keneally, Peter Carey, David Malouf, and, more recently, Kate Grenville. McDonald’s work has been published in London and New York as well as in the key metropolitan markets of his native Australia, and it has been translated into Spanish, German, and Swedish. 1915, his first novel, was adapted into an Australian Broadcasting Commission television series, which was shown on Australian screens in the early 1980s and distributed internationally.

'McDonald writes about ordinary characters whose lives have often been overtaken by historical forces they do not understand and cannot control. These men and women are commonly defined by whom they know and what they do rather than through the display of extraordinary qualities of mind, sensibility, or virtue. McDonald often situates his characters’ within foundational Australian historical periods such as the convict period, frontier settlement, the development of the pastoral industry, the Great War, the Golden Age of Aviation, and the Second World War and its aftermath. This later post-war period saw the transformation of Anglo-Celtic Australia by waves of initially southern and eastern European migration, followed by Asian and indeed wider international migration. The emerging multicultural character of the country coincided with the decline of rural Australia and the pastoral industry as the preferred locations for representative Australian types and values. These events or periods are well entrenched within the public memory of a White Australia and that enables McDonald to explore his characters’ search for purpose and fulfillment within the mythological registers of his nation’s postcolonial history.

'This study focuses on the books (five novels and the fictionalised memoir) in which McDonald has decided to situate his characters’ search for purpose and well-being within the mythological registers of colonial history. It explores McDonald’s investments in story and his developments in idiom and literary form, as endeavors to engage a wider public in the problem of postcolonial settlement. The common narrative problem is the elusiveness of a condition of Being that is well settled in the web of social, cultural, and environmental connections that are necessary for dwelling. McDonald pursues the possibilities for a wider more satisfying sense of human connection but his representations of the common man under the conditions of postcolonial modernity never allow that to come easily.'

Source: Abstract.

'In the early twentieth century, new technologies of media, communication, and transportation opened up a world of possibilities and led to transformations of the public sphere. Amongst the hundreds of new periodicals flooding the Australian marketplace, quality culture and leisure magazines beckoned to readers with the glamour of modernity and exotic images of pre-modern paradise. Through instructive and entertaining content, these glossy modern magazines widened the horizons of non-metropolitan audiences and connected readers in rapidly urbanising cities such as Sydney and Melbourne with the latest fashions, current affairs, and cultural offerings of London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and beyond. Designed by fashionable commercial artists, travel advertisements for shipping companies such as Burns Philp, Cunard, Matson, and P&O lined their pages. The golden age of the culture and leisure magazine coincided with the golden age of sea travel, middlebrow aspiration, and modernity.

'Focusing on the Australian interwar periodicals The Home, The BP Magazine, and MAN, this book explores the contraction of vast geographical spaces and the construction of cultural hierarchies alongside the advent of new media. This book investigates the role tastemaking culture and leisure magazines played in transporting the public imagination outward beyond the shores of Australia and upward or downward on the rapidly changing scales of cultural value. By delivering a potent mix of informative instruction, entertainment, worldliness, and escape, these magazines constructed distinct geographical imaginaries connected to notions of glamour, sophistication, and aspiration. They guided their readers through the currents of international modernity and helped them find their place in the modern world.

'This book is based on thorough research into an archive of important yet under-examined modern Australian periodicals, and makes a significant contribution to the scholarly literature on magazines and middlebrow culture in the interwar period. It offers new insights into the formation of the tastes of a rapidly modernising and differentiating reading public, as well as new understandings of the cultures of vernacular modernity and colonialism. This book also offers alternative perspectives, and positions Australia’s cultural and literary history within transnational cultural flows across the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Its analysis of Australian colonial modernity thus provides a model for examining collisions of modernity and colonialism, and for investigating connections between geographical imaginaries and social mobility, in other international contexts.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This study examines the earlier writings of celebrated Australian writer David Malouf, who was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award, and the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

'This book investigates his earlier writings to uncover what the terms “poetic”, “poetic imagination” and “inner and outer ways” imply for his development as a writer. Making use of some of his correspondence, diaries, and drafts of work-in-progress, Yvonne Smith takes into fuller account the way his works relate to each other and to the circumstances in which they were written.

'By investigating what “poetic imagination” might mean across the first decades when he was finding his way into a writer’s vocation, this sturdy reaps fresh insights into the nature of David Malouf's creativity—its tensions, struggles and moments of breakthrough, as well as its potential limitations. Finding what he could not do (or did not want to do) shapes strongly what he wants to achieve by the mid 1980s when his published works are becoming better known.

'Such considerations are touched on in earlier studies, yet have been sidelined by more recent criticism informed by postcolonial perspectives, debates about myths of origins and other Australian nation-based agendas. That Malouf has played a part, not only as a writer but as a public intellectual, in what Brigid Rooney terms his “consistent cultivation of nation” adds to this trajectory in his literary career. However, there has been less attention to Malouf’s development as a writer—its transnational dimensions, for instance, as he finds his vocation through hybrid family cultures and living for many years between Australia and Europe. It is helpful that discussion is increasingly balanced by broader views of what “Australian” literature might encompass, of global connections in “worlds within” national narratives, together with consideration of notions of “world literature” and a fluid “transnation” that exceeds boundaries of the state.' (Abstract)

'More than two decades ago, Christos Tsiolkas’s his first novel Loaded was published and he had achieved a cult following in the short-lived grunge fiction scene of Australian writing. The novel was quickly adapted as the film Head On (1998), directed by Ana Kokkinos, and starring popular young Greek actor, Alex Dimitriades; like the novel, it was well-received by critics, if not by mainstream literary and cinematic culture. For the next few years, Tsiolkas worked on Jump Cuts, an experimental collaborative autobiography, with Sasha Soldatow (1996), as well as a number of theatre productions – Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? (1999, co-written with Andrew Bovell, Melissa Reeves and Patricia Cornelius, and adapted to film as Blessed, also directed by Kokkinos [2009]), Thug (1998, written with Spiro Economopolous), and Elektra AD (1999) – but when The Jesus Man (1999) was published, its violent depiction of depression and suicide received critical attention as offensive and unnecessary. Partly because of the reception of The Jesus Man, and partly because of the density of its subject matter, his next novel, Dead Europe (2005) took six years to write. In the interim, he published a critical study of the film The Devil’s Playground (2002), and several more plays and screenplays: Viewing Blue Poles (2000), Saturn’s Return (2000), Fever (2002, co-written with Bovell, Reeves and Cornelius), Dead Caucasians (2002), Non Parlo di Salo (2005, written with Economopoulous), and The Hit (2006, written with Netta Yashin). Dead Europe was a triumphant return: it won the Age Book of the Year and the Melbourne Best Writing Award in 2006.'  (Publication summary)

'Thea Astley is one of the outstanding Australian fiction writers of the twentieth century. Four of her novels, including her last, Drylands (1999), won the prestigious Miles Franklin prize, and she was awarded numerous literary and civic honors during her lifetime. Always a writer who avoided solemnity and undercut her characters' claims to heroism of any kind, she reveled in the new-found capacity to mock male pretension and assert female rebellion. Perhaps because of this, her late masterpieces have not yet had the proper recognition that is due to them. This book examines Astley's works and reinforces her standing as a major novelist. The main organizing principle in this study of Astley's fiction is her representation of place and power relations, and the innovative work of historicizing place. Continuing threads from chapter to chapter include the modes of irony, humor, and satire; her varying use of point of view; and her characteristic compression of language and narrative. Descriptive accounts of the novels are offered to raise broader issues of interpretation. Over the period 1986 to 1999 she produced six major works which amply demonstrate her capacity to bring together a critical exploration of patriarchal power relations and a postcolonial perspective on race relations. Also important in her later stories is her satire on the worship of unbridled 'development' which dominated Australian economic and social life in this period, especially in Queensland. The currency of such political and moral issues frames her work, yet her lively engagement with them was never merely topical, but grew out of that acute yet compassionate consciousness of human weakness, formed by her Catholic upbringing, and the darkly comic sensibility draws all these elements into relationship in Astley's art. This book, which is in the Cambria Australian Literature Series (general editor: Susan Lever; see http: //www.cambriapress.com/Austlit-series) will encourage readers familiar with Astley's work to revisit it and reconsider her lifelong achievement, and it will also lead a whole new generation of readers to enter her imaginative world, to be moved and informed by it.' (Publication summary)

'Christina Stead (1902–1983) was an Australian novelist and short-story writer acclaimed for her satirical wit and penetrating psychological characterizations. Stead enjoyed an international reputation in the 1930s and beyond, then went out of favor as a communist-affiliated writer, until she was rediscovered by feminist critics. Her standing is considerable, and in Australia she vies with Patrick White for the laurel of finest Australian novelist.

'In this book, author Michael Ackland argues that the single most important influence on Stead’s life, socialism, has been seriously neglected in studies of her life and work. Ackland delves into Stead’s political formation prior to her departure for London in 1928, arguing that considerable insights can be added to the known record by reviewing these years within a specifically political context, as well as by interrogating Stead’s own accounts of key persons and events. He examines her novels, from Seven Poor Men of Sydney to I’m Dying Laughing and The Man Who Loved Children, and focuses on Stead’s conception of history, of capitalist finance, and on the significance of the key historical moments that frame her works.

'In tracing the trajectory of her work, Ackland illuminates how Stead was, as a well-informed Marxist critic underscored, a product of thirties. Steeped in socialist literature and steeled to withstand ideological adversity, Stead emerged at the end of the decade a strongly committed novelist, whose intellectual idealism and convictions could, as coming decades would show, long withstand privation, heartbreaks and the unwelcome lessons of history.

'This is an important book for collections in Australian literature, comparative literature, world literature, and women's studies.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'What does it mean to belong? When we belong, how do we recognise it as belonging? What role does belonging play in the formation of self-identity?

'First and foremost, belonging is a kind of relationship, and the connection between self and place has a long philosophical tradition. Experienced across time and place, belonging may be configured through a range of contexts, from belonging to country, belonging to a suburb, a house, even a room within a house or an object. Places and spaces are fundamental to self-identity because the interpretation of our relationships with places and spaces gives rise to meaning, and it is through meaning that a sense of belonging emerges.

'To speak of belonging necessarily entails a sense of estrangement, a recognition of the complexity that is at the heart of the relationship between individuals and what they find in the world. Belonging, like identity, requires some nexus between self and something other; belonging requires, quite literally, something to belong to, a “home” in which we seek not to be a “stranger.” Together, belonging and estrangement map the connections through which self-identity is lived. Life writing necessarily inscribes ourselves into relationships and places and, as our relationship with the past evolves over the years, and as the ever-changing present offers new possibilities for the future, so those relationships are not just written but rewritten, reconfigured, re-imagined, and renegotiated with the time since lived and the forecast of future time.

'While there is a growing interest in our understanding of place and space, the focus of this attention has come mainly from philosophers and geographers. At the same time, life writing as a genre has enjoyed an almost exponential increase in both its readership and the number of life narratives being published. A survey of recent autobiographical writing makes it clear that our contemporary lives are significantly challenged by our connection to place. More particularly, in times of increasing mobility and disruptions to conventional family structures, connections to people and locations have become characterised as much by estrangement as by belonging. This book, therefore, brings recent theorising of place to consider a range of contemporary Australian autobiographies.

'Through a provocative discussion of contemporary Australian life writing, Strangers at Home examines what it means to belong and what belonging means for self-identity. Through an examination of the intersections between personal and social identities, Strangers at Home shows how place is essential to identity: contrary to the conventions of solipsism, a sense of self always entails that the self, even when it looks inward, must always locate that self by looking outward into the world, situating the body, and recognising that neither self nor body are either in or out of that place. This important study shows how writers constitute their selves socially, historically, relationally, communally and existentially, and how their sense of attachment—to belong or feel estranged from—realises these selves into some narrative coherence. From Drusilla Modjeska’s Poppy and Second Half First, to Rebecca Huntley’s An Italian Girl, Steve Bisley’s Stillways and many more, Strangers at Home invites readers to reconsider what it is to feel “at home.”' (Publication summary)

'This book takes as its subject a body of recent fiction by white liberal writers produced in the wake of the profound cultural, political and legal transformations that have taken place in the field of Indigenous rights since the 1990s. Two milestones of this period are the High Court of Australia’s Mabo ruling on June 3, 1992, and the Rudd Labor Government’s national Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples on February 13, 2008. The novels explored in this study are Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (2002) and Landscape of Farewell (2007), Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2004), Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) and Gail Jones’ Sorry (2007). Each of these novels was written in the period between 2002 and 2007. These were the years when the Indigenous rights and reconciliation movements had all but disappeared from the national political agenda through the interventions of the Howard Liberal Government. These works attempted to counter these silences as acts of literary activism, which strived to reignite the politically stalled processes of reconciliation. Through the medium of fiction, they kept Indigenous justice issues before the reading public, provoking discussion and stirring debate.

'White Apology and Apologia engages in close readings of the Mabo ruling, the national Apology and this body of fiction as a form of cultural history, which reflects important aspects of black/white relations in the past twenty-five years. Together, these legal, political and literary texts reveal a tension that arguably came to define this period. This tension fluctuates between a reconciliatory impulse of sorrow for Indigenous loss and the defensive desire to offer exits for white culture from the ongoing demands of a violent settlement history. Taking shape as twinned register of white longing, this conflicted cultural drive is the focus of this study.

'Each of these novels has had a significant reception and impact. All were shortlisted by the Miles Franklin Award with two taking out the coveted prize. While much critical attention has been given to their fictional explorations of reconciliation and the colonial past, this is the first study to focus on the novels as a collection of cultural artefacts from a brief but remarkable time in Australia’s recent history. In their attempts to explore Indigenous loss and dispossession, the novels can be seen as complex literary engagements with issues of the greatest moment in the contemporary public sphere. Together, they provide a significant snapshot of an ambivalent postcolonial culture in flux.

'Through an exploration of these important documents and texts of reconciliation, this study is able to offer symptomatic close readings of Australian liberal whiteness in the process of coming to terms with its troubling history. Providing new insights into how legal, historical, political, and literary discourses can influence each other in the quest for justice, White Apology and Apologia attempts to understand the relation between Australian literature and the culture that produced it. In the process it reveals the riven state of Australian postcolonial whiteness itself, which has been transformed by the legal, political and cultural shifts of the 1990s, yet which paradoxically resists its own deconstructions even as it longs for the dismantling of its own hegemony. The double movement of apology and apologia explored in this timely and important study is a startling reminder of the unresolved nature of the traumatized colonial legacy bequeathed to Australian settler culture by its history, and which continues to accompany white liberal discourse in its quest to heal its relations with the other.

'White Apology and Apologia is an important book for Australian literary and cultural studies collections.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This collection is a collaborative cross-racial project that brings Anne Brewster, a white scholar of Aboriginal literature, into conversation with Aboriginal writers about a range of issues that arise directly from their work. Brewster explores the various contexts in which these writers write and in which non-Aboriginal readers read Aboriginal literature. The interviews are accompanied by a survey essay (by Brewster) on each writer’s work which aims to introduce readers to the main themes and issues of each writer.

'The book represents a range of writers. It includes highly acclaimed writers whose works are widely recognised (Kim Scott, Doris Pilkington Garimara, Melissa Lucashenko) and other writers whose works are on the ascendancy (Romaine Moreton and Jeanine Leane). Leane and Moreton have attracted some scholarly attention - for example by being set on educational syllabi and having scholarly work published on it – and their reputation continues to grow nationally and internationally. The book includes interviews with a number of emerging writers whose work is powerful and compelling but has not yet been taken up widely either because it is new (Marie Munkara) or because there has been a lack of confidence on the part of readers in taking up authors outside the present canon (Alf Taylor).

'The interviews make a unique contribution to the understanding of Aboriginal literature and of how these writers developed as writers. While many Aboriginal writers write in part for their own communities, they have expressed their strong desire that their work circulate widely among non-indigenous audiences. This book will facilitate the dissemination of Aboriginal literature and will make use of the valuable literary and cultural resources of the writers themselves in order to enrich and expand the understanding of that literature.

'In these interviews the writers talk about the development of Australian indigenous literature and the conditions which have given rise to their writing. They talk about their childhoods, family histories and the regions in which they have lived. They talk about their education and the books they have read; about the importance of humour, the reasons for their choice of a particular genre and what aesthetic and cultural work they see it as undertaking. They talk about how they conceive of their audiences and issues pertaining to cross-racial scholarship. These are all issues which allow readers to understand their work better. This understanding is further enhanced by the survey essays on each writer’s work.

'Aboriginal literature is a growing field with a rapidly expanding global audience. Unfortunately many students and scholars read only the most recognised and acclaimed writers and betray some hesitation in approaching newer authors. While this book represents three widely recognised writers, it widens the canon of Aboriginal literature by introducing readers to four lesser-known but equally important writers.

'Non-indigenous readers are sometimes unsure about the ethics of cross-racial reading and research - how to approach Aboriginal literature, how to read it, teach it and write about it. By providing rare and valuable insight into the writers’ creative process, into the ways in which they conceive of their audiences and readerships, and into their aspirations for cross-racial understanding, the interviews clarify uncertainties and provide direction for non-Aboriginal readers. They contribute to widespread discussions about the ethics of cross-racial reading, research and scholarship. They provide a timely addition to cultural debates within the public sphere beyond the academy and enable us to better comprehend the turbulent times in which we live.

'This book serves to broaden and deepen current scholarship on the literary works but also to introduce readers to writers they might not have read before. They are both accessible and scholarly. The book also fills a gap by focusing areas of that has been neglected. For example while Lucashenko’s novel Steam Pigs has attracted a lot of critical attention, her second adult novel Hard Yards remains largely unnoticed, a situation this book aims to correct.

'Giving this Country a Memory is an important book for all literature and Australasian collections and well as those of global Indigenous literature.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Australian poetry is popularly conceived as a tradition founded by the wry, secular and stoic strains of its late-nineteenth-century bush balladeers Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Lawson and 'Banjo' Paterson, consolidated into a land-based 'vigour' in publications such as the Bulletin. Yet this popular conception relies on not actually consulting the poetry itself, which for well over one hundred and fifty years has been cerebral, introspective, feminine and highly — even experimentally — religious.

'Western Christian mystics and Western Christian mystical poets of the classical world, Middle Ages and modern era have been sources of inspiration, influence and correspondence for Australian poets since the writings of Charles Harpur (1813-1868), but there have also been ongoing debates as to how mysticism might be defined, whom its true exemplars might be, and whether poets should be considered mystical authorities.

'This book dedicates whole chapters to five Australian Christian mystical poets: Ada Cambridge (1864-1926), John Shaw Neilson (1872-1943), Francis Webb (1925-1973), Judith Wright (1915-2000) and Kevin Hart (1954 - ), with additional contextual chapters on their contemporaries and new approaches by Aboriginal poets since the early 1990s.

'Scholars and students are increasingly disregarding the popular 'bush' facade and reading Australian poetry in terms of the sacred, the philosophical, the contemplative and the transcendent. At a national level this can be traced back to the post-war and 1970s generations of poets and readers who rejected the safe old bush myths for a more relentless interrogation of Australian origins, environments and metaphysics. Yet internationally, as among the general Australian public, the very idea of an Australian Christian mystical poetry seems incongruous with a metaphysically weak bush tradition which asks very little of them.

'This book casts Australian poetry in a new light by showing how Australian Christian mystical poetics can be found in every era of Australian letters, how literary hostilities towards women poets, eroticism and contemplation served to stifle a critical appreciation of mystical poetics until recent decades, and how in the twentieth century one Australian Christian mystical poet began to influence another and share their appreciations of Dante, Donne, Traherne, Blake, Wordsworth, Brontë, Rossetti, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot and Lowell.

'Despite parallel international works on British, American and European Christian mystical poets, there has never been a book-length exploration of Australian Christian mystical poets or poetics. This study draws upon eight years of research to not only consider debates around Christian mysticism during the lives of its selected poets, but to also frame its argument in terms of the twenty-first-century Christian mysticism scholarship of Kevin Hart, Amy Hollywood, Ursula King and Bernard McGinn's seminal multi-volume history of Western Christian mysticism, The Presence of God. Simultaneously, Australian literary criticism of the relevant eras as well as in the present are explicitly engaged throughout. This book is a rigorous work of original scholarship which will significantly impact future discussions on the possibilities of Australian literature.' (Publisher's description)

'Murray Bail is one of the most boldly innovative and intellectually challenging of contemporary writers. He is widely appreciated in his homeland, Australia, but too little read beyond its shores. Bail's major work began appearing in the 1970s, after an epochal change of government created a climate supportive of new talent and artistic experimentation. The enigmatic nature of his narratives, coupled with painfully slow composition habits, militated against the creation of a large following for his work, but established him as a writer of the most exacting standards, who measured himself against the best offered by European and American letters.' (Publication abstract)

'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).

'J. M. Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940 and is the author of fourteen works of narrative fiction (some of which masquerade as memoirs) and several books of literary essays. He has won the prestigious Man Booker Prize twice (for Life & Times of Michael K and Disgrace) and he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003.

'As a novelist born in and living most of his life in South Africa, Coetzee has been viewed by many readers and critics through an ideological lens, which he has always resisted to a greater or lesser extent. Much excellent criticism of Coetzee puts his work in context; historical, political, literary and theoretical. J.M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative differs from that of most commentators in that it does not concentrate mainly on the political or post-colonial aspects of his work, and resists allegorical readings--which so often ignore style, language, point of view, and narrative structure.

'This book is a consideration of various themes and techniques ranging across Coetzee's whole oeuvre. It aims to discover the "how" rather than "what" or "why": where does Coetzee's work derive its power? A discussion of themes, influences, and allegorical meanings tends to bleach out the experience of reading; and this experience is surely the only reason for choosing Coetzee's narratives over anyone else's. It examines the type of resistance to be found in his work, a resistance which seems to have little basis in a political belief or a rational philosophy of justice. The book also traces the effects of Coetzee's choice of point of view in each of his books--how it interacts with questions of complicity and impressions of realism, as well as how it relates to the subject matter and characters he is dealing with in each case. It is also an exploration of the place of the comic arts in Coetzee's work. This is a subject which has routinely been dismissed by critics who have failed to discern any humor in the novels. The contention is that a sense of the ridiculous and absurd is implicit in much of Coetzee's narrative prose and can be seen in the underlying structure of all his books. This study delves into his use of language and languages: the choice of tenses, the surprising flights of imagery to be found amidst the taut elegance of his narrative style; and also the multilingual sensibilities he shares with many of his characters, not excluding the non-verbal language of music.

'The subject of sex and desire has attracted less critical attention than various other themes, and, of those critics who have considered it, most seem bent on extracting allegories of sexual politics which are not necessarily warranted by a close examination of the texts. This book disputes some of these readings and suggests considering the subject in other ways. It also looks at another uncomfortable aspect of Coetzee's books: his treatment of the bond between parents and children. J. M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative will appeal to scholars and general readers who are interested in exploring Coetzee's work without necessarily having an extensive knowledge of literary theory.' (From the publisher's website.)

The Cambria Australian Literature Series focuses on critical studies of writing by Australians, with a particular emphasis on contemporary Australian fiction. In recent decades Australian fiction publishing has outstripped critical study, with the work of many important writers receiving little more critical attention than newspaper and journal reviews, with occasional articles in scholarly journals or collections by diverse critics. This series gives an opportunity for sustained consideration of a writer’s full career. In each book, an individual critic engages with the work of a writer, assisting other scholars, students and general readers in understanding its complexities. Each book seeks to find an appropriate, original and lively approach to the writer in question. In particular, the series places the writing not only within Australian culture but also in the context of international developments in the novel.

Source: Publisher's website.

'Brian Castro is one of the most innovative and challenging novelists writing in English today. By virtue of his childhood migration from Hong Kong to Australia, he is an Australian writer, but he writes from the margins of what might be termed mainstream Australian literature. In an Australian context, Castro has been linked with Patrick White because like White he is an intellectual, deeply ironic, modernist writer. His writing can also be comfortably situated within a wider circle of (largely European) modernist works by Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Gustav Flaubert, Vladimir Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, and the list goes on. Castro’s writing conducts richly intertextual conversations with these writers and their work.

'Castro’s writing is linguistically and structurally adventurous. He revels in the ability of good experimental writing to open up imaginative possibilities for the reader. He strives always to encourage his reader’s imagination to embrace heterogeneity and uncertainty. His extensive engagement with the great modernist writers of the 20th century, combined with his Australian-Chinese cross-cultural concerns make his work unique amongst Australian writers.

'Castro’s fiction is becoming increasingly recognized for its brilliance around the world. Readers and scholars, particularly from France, Germany and China, are discovering the delightful challenges and rewards his writing offers. In Australia, however, Castro’s writing has often been dismissed by academics and major publishing houses as being too cerebral or too literary. He has been labeled a writers’ writer because of the literariness of his concerns and the vast sweep of intertextual references that inform his narratives. Castro’s writing demands a committed, intelligent and passionate reader. He constructs narratives of absences, gaps, and multiple perspectives in the expectation that his reader will make the necessary imaginative connections and, in a sense, become the writer of his text. Castro has stated that the kind of novel he most enjoys reading is one he does not understand immediately, one that requires him to search out references and make discoveries. This is the kind of novel he writes. Perhaps, for this reason he has not attracted the large readership his work deserves.

'This study of Castro’s fiction has two major objectives: to open up multiple points of entry into Castro’s texts as a means of encouraging readers to make their own imaginative connections and to explore diverse ways of reading, as well as to initiate further published scholarly discussions and readings of Castro’s work.

'In this first critical study of Brian Castro’s work, Bernadette Brennan offers original and creative readings of Castro’s eight published novels. Brennan guides the reader through Castro’s elaborate semantics and at times dizzying language games to elucidate clearly Castro’s imaginative concerns and strategies. She opens up the many rhizomatic connections between Castro’s work and the multitude of texts and theorists that influence it and with whom it converses. And through all of this, she stays true to Castro’s imaginative project: to remain always open ended, always gesturing towards possibility rather than certainty and closure.

'Brian Castro’s Fiction is an important book for all literature and Australasian collections throughout the world.' (Publication summary)