AustLit

'The Fiction of Tim Winton provides a critical study of the work of one of Australia's most celebrated authors. The book is structured in chapters, eight in total, that seek to interrogate the current significance of Winton's work and its likely influence for the future. In the introduction, McCredden suggests that as an author Tim Winton remains difficult to define. His stories about family life, subjectivity, the individual bond to landscape, and the egalitarian society are critically revisited to examine the career of an author who places himself on the margins of the literary canon. Two chapters (chapters 6 and 8) in particular analyze the impact of the editing and the marketing of stories with specific figures to situate Winton as a global and national author. These two chapters, which may at first appear to merely provide marketing details, are essential and nicely conducted, since McCredden manages to keep her focus on the act of writing. She does not, in fact, simply insert charts and figures; she connects them to the essence of Winton's writing, and this is a tour de force. The theoretical reference to Roland Barthes's use of semiology is all the more significant in that there is a questioning of Winton's use of language and his authorial intent. While his public involvement on social, political, and cultural issues is mentioned, the book does not expand on the slight rapport that some readers may see between literature and politics.'  (Introduction)

'Creative writers and artists have important things to say to us not only as individuals but as a society. These writers and artists themselves are not best placed to explicate and discuss what these things are. There is a real need for knowledgeable, sophisticated, popularising literary criticism. A discipline wholly disconnected from the public discourses of the society it is part of and that helps to sustain it, is a short-sighted and vulnerable one.' (Introduction)