AustLit

Esutace argues that 'in calling attention to the way the pastoral is performed as a legitimizing ritual by the narrators of Bliss, Peter Carey invites readers to consider how its continued iteration in contempoary Australian discourse is essential to negotiations of national identity and contemporary Australian subjectivities. He invites readers to see beyond the narrative romanticizations of the bush to consider the psychological and ideological impulses behind Australian performances of the bush. And he highlights how the process of going bush - and narrating the journey - ... carry fairly significant territorial implications.'

Rauwerda argues that Peter Carey's character Tristan Shandy 'becomes the Disney Mouse. He shows the ugly face of corporate politics and how they racialize discources of poverty, powerlessness and exclusion.'

Highfield compares and contrasts formations of national identity in Peter Carey's character, Herbert Badgery, in Illywhacker and Steve Irwin's The Crocodile Hunter.

Donal Pulford examines Andrew Bovell's Holy Day in the context of the so-called history wars.

'Throughout her writing, Wright has engaged with both the social and environmental consequences of unmitigated exploitation of the natural world. She has also sought to articulate attitudes to the environment and Australia's indigenous peoples. Along with writers such as Les Murray, John Kinsella, and Gary Snyder, her work is amenable to a reading inspired by the social ecology of Murray Bookchin. ... The applicability of his theories to Wright's poetry and prose suggests one of the many ways in which social ecology may be utilized by literary ecologists.'

John Beston discusses Patrick White's 'borrowings' from the novels of American writer Willa Cather, highlighting links between several White novels and Cather's O Pioneers!, Death Comes for the Archbishop and A Lost Lady. Beston contends that White's novels show 'almost no influence of other Australian authors', but do indicate the influence of American writers.

Mary Ann Rygiel argues: 'The Belgian settings of the early pages of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and that of David Malouf's short story, 'The Sun in Winter', represent striking thematic similarities of history, time, civilization, and the decay of civilization.'

Emily Potter argues that Andrew McGahan's The White Earth exhibits a 'poetic of memory' whereby 'subjects, events and effects' cross-pollinate. This she terms 'an ecological poetics of memory' and suggests that ecology, rather than chronology, offers 'a different poetics to temporal relations', one that refuses 'the silence that has settled over postcolonial negotiations' in Australia.