AustLit

'This chapter investigates the response of the Australian novel to the Anthropocene. It considers ways in which new, speculative fictions have sought to represent deep time and planetary interconnection, and interrogates how this connects to long-standing settler-colonial relations to land. It considers such writers as James Bradley, George Turner, and Tara June Winch, and emphasizes the region of Western Australia as a place of particular environmental urgency.' (Publication abstract)

'The Idealist is the eighth novel by respected Australian writer and academic Nick Jose. Set in the turbulent period leading up to the referendum for East Timorese self-determination in 1999, the novel has the form of a political thriller, albeit one that remains restrained and meditative.' (Introduction)          

'Her novels paradoxically activate readers’ critical faculties while compelling us to trust the narrative voice' 

'This paper emerges from a panel discussion at the ‘Texts and Their Limits’ conference (2021) between four scholars in the field of Australian regional literary history to consider its current concerns, practices and relationship to the frameworks of Australian literary studies. The panel flagged a renewal of regional literary scholarship in Australia through exploration of the panelists’ own projects and collaborations in regional and rural Victorian and Western Australian communities. Drawing on their reflections on the doing of regional literary history, the conversation canvassed the distinct qualities of contemporary regional Australian literary scholarship; the role of place, situated practice and community engagement in this field; and the implications for the regional literary studies of the always unsettled boundaries and status of the ‘region’ in Australian life.  Following the original panel event, this paper discusses questions such as: what is regional literary history, where is it going, and what are limits? ' (Publication abstract)

'Sarah Krasnostein’s On Peter Carey is the 12th instalment of Black Inc.’s highly readable series, Writers on Writers. The series is nicely conceived, as it pitches Australian writers not just against each other, but across a generational divide.'

'In this week’s ABR Podcast, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth reviews Alexis Wright’s new novel, Praiseworthy. Expectations are high: after all, Wright is the only author to have won both the Miles Franklin Award and the Stella Prize. Praiseworthy, Hughes-d’Aeth argues, is a book unlike any other. Grounded in an Indigenous cosmology, combining realism with absurdism, it takes aim at its ‘one true enemy’: assimilation.'

'Mark Tredinnick’s latest collection of poetry, Walking Underwater, continues his exploration of the relationship between individual experience and the natural world that was visible in volumes such as A Gathered Distance (2020), Blue Wren Cantos (2013), and Fire Diary (2010). Tredinnick is well known for his writing of place, notably his innovative local history-cum-memoir The Blue Plateau (2009), a book that traces the lives, histories, and natural systems of the Blue Mountains, where he lives. His writing in both poetry and prose is noticeably belletristic, and his stance broadly romantic. This occasionally droops into piety, but Tredinnick also conjures moments of muted and moving transcendence: ‘A balcony and a morning and a lassitude / Of fog. A sky blindfolded and bound and flogged; a night-time’s / Pleasure only halfway spent. Awake early, I hear a band / Of correllas come. Chaste bandits, their flight a quiet riot, a lewd and holy throng / Of unhinged song.’'(Introduction)

'Stuart Cooke and Peter Denney’s edited collection, Transcultural Ecocriticism: Global, Romantic and Decolonial Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2021) offers a series of case studies on how the practice and study of literature responds to global ecological crisis. The emphasis on the ‘decolonial’ dimension of transcultural ecocriticism places the book in the field of postcolonial ecocriticism. The opening section of the book, ‘Planetary Localities’ invokes the key dialectic of Ursula Heise’s influential Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008). The second section, ‘Beyond the Romantic Frontier’ encompasses scholarship on eighteenth and nineteenth century cultures and imaginaries. The theme of the third and final section of the book is ‘Decolonial Poetics’ and focuses on case studies from Australia and Latin America.' (Publication abstract)

'Kim Mahood came to prominence with the publication of her first book, Craft for a Dry Lake  (2001), which detailed her efforts to reconnect with the land of her upbringing, a cattle station in the Tanami Desert.'

'Philip Salom, now 72, has built a strong reputation as a poet and novelist. Sweeney and the Bicycles is his sixth novel, and his third in four years.' 

'The book challenges the myth of the neutrality and detachment of the scholar. Its strength lies in its dynamic, engaging and passionate participation in the meeting of texts and words of different genres, geographical areas and cultures, in the pluralistic diversity of the themes explored, in its fundamental and creative relations with ecosophy, ethnophilology, ecofeminism, system theory and ecolinguistics. It brings together renowned international scholars to focus on postcolonial, ecocritical, mythical, and archetypal studies of literature, education and its partnership mediation, applied linguistics and plurilingual education.' (Publication summary)

'Judith Wright is a giant of Australian letters. Though most famous as a poet, she was also a very fine writer in prose, and it is this dimension of her writing that is brought to life in a new selection of her non-fiction.' 

'This is an edited extract of Professor Tony Hughes-d’Aeth ’s introduction to The Ascension of Sheep, first in a new, three-volume collection of John Kinsella’s luminous poetry It is not easy to still John Kinsella. He is a poet defined by constant motion, by compulsive kinesis. Kinsella, who writes so often of birds, is a poet who is really only understood in flight. Opening The Collected Poems of John Kinsella: The Ascension of Sheep (1983-2005) (UWA Publishing), the very earliest poem is about a cormorant, the next talks of a cockatoo; in fact, there are at least 123 bird species mentioned in this book.'

'Kim Scott’s novel Taboo (2017) centres on the Kukenarup massacre, which followed the fatal spearing of John Dunn in 1880 on the ancestral lands of the Wirlomin Noongar people. Taboo traces the dynamics of silence that run through the lives of Noongar and settler descendants in the wake of massacre. What the novel underscores is that while a massacre may be located at a particular site and commemorated by public gestures (plaques, memorials and ceremonies), its reality cannot ultimately be separated from the inner lives of the survivors and their descendants. This article argues that the terrain of massacre is shown in Scott’s novel to be quintessentially extimate, a word that Jacques Lacan coined to describe the intimate exterior of psychic reality. As a concept, the extimate helps name the space that is routinely excluded by the deployment of public and private domains in the liberal capitalist order, whereby social suffering is consigned to a privatised interior, and private violence is made banal by empty public utterance.' (Publication abstract)

'John Kinsella’s poetry returns again and again to the landscape of the Western Australian wheatbelt. The wheatbelt is a region that was suddenly and violently re-made by capital in the service of cereal and fibre production during the course of the twentieth century. Despite this radical repurposing of land and the wholesale eradication of an ancient biome, the new farming zone quickly took on the halo of a natural landscape within state and nationalist ideologies. Against the backdrop of this event, Kinsella’s wheatbelt can be viewed as a comprehensive deconstruction of the forces that have led the wheatbelt to where it is now and which still provide the material conditions of its existence. In this essay, Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography (2008) is considered as exemplary of his wheatbelt poetry. The essay explores the basic conceits that animate Kinsella’s poetics of critique. It argues that Kinsella’s poetry offers a strategic intervention into the claims of “capitalist realism,” which is Mark Fisher’s term for the foreclosure of alternatives to profit-driven patterns of production and consumption. Capitalist realism, in the context of the wheatbelt, asserts that whether we like it or not, one cannot argue against the basic entitlement that productive imperatives (and its agents) have to use land as they see fit. This essay attempts to detail the kinds of ways that Kinsella’s poetry tries to fracture this claim to common sense that capitalist production monopolises. What it finds, somewhat counter-intuitively, is that Kinsella’s poetry draws together two things which are traditionally regarded as antinomies – the machine and the organism. In this respect, Kinsella’s poetry is distinctly different from conventional ecopoetry, which tends to uphold the distinction between an authentic nature and a corrupting technology. Kinsella’s Divine Comedy makes use of the tripartite layering of Dante’s eschatology to evolve new topologies of being in the wheatbelt, and indeed, being in the world. Further still, the essay makes the claim that Kinsella delivers us a “cybernetic wheatbelt,” which refigures nature as a communicative machine.' (Publication summary)

'Criticism on the work of John Kinsella is made particularly lively by the fact that Kinsella himself practices so much criticism, and self-criticism, in his poetry, fiction, and essays. This can make it, though, harder as well as easier for the critic to operate, to gain a foothold or angle of vision, to trace without trying to rival the primary author’s creativity, ingenuity, and verve. Also posing a daunting hurdle is the sheer stamina Kinsella has as an author; that he produces so much in so many different genres that, while always remaining in a coherent field of meaning, is consistently original and diverse.' (Nicholas Birns, A Type of House-Paint for All Weathers, introduction)

'The extraordinary literary output of John Kinsella has thus far exceeded the capacity of criticism to deal with it. This special issue of Angelaki is an attempt to close the gap, but as the guest editors we are only too aware of how we must still fall short. This issue draws on a range of scholars who have followed Kinsella’s work, often over many years. While John Kinsella was born and grew up in the southwest of Western Australia, his reach has extended globally, particularly through the anglophone centres of Britain and the United States, but increasingly through other parts of the world including continental Europe and China. We will not attempt to catalogue Kinsella’s works here since, with Kinsella, such lists are almost immediately out of date. But more importantly, the totalising gesture of doing so runs against the basic ethos of Kinsella’s project. Despite its epic scale, Kinsella’s work always exists as an intervention and not an edifice. It has a negative capability, akin to the sublime and serial grandeur of paintings of the Last Judgement in Christian eschatology or the sprawling tableaux of medieval tapestry. But if his work is a tapestry, then Kinsella presents his images from the other side, as an assemblage of knots and ends. In this issue, we as critics have occasionally presumed to flip the work around and offer an image in more conventional terms, but readers will know that this procedure is something that must always remain critically contingent. (Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, The KinsellaVerse : The Writing World of John Kinsella, introduction)

'This essay draws on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses” to test the capacity of memoir to bear witness to the Anthropocene. The essay focuses on three texts that feature memoirs of childhood on the wheat frontiers in Canada and Australia—Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow (1962), Barbara York Main’s Twice Trodden Ground (1971), and Dorothy Hewett’s Wild Card (1990). As an instrument of colonization and Indigenous dispossession, the impact of wheat was catastrophic, and these memoirs engage with the particular sites and circumstances that shape acts of remembering “wheaten childhoods.”' (Publication abstract)