AustLit

Buckridge writes, 'The life and work of Peter Austen, an Australian poet and participant in the First World War, exemplify the defamiliarising function of the single instance, and suggest the possibility of unfamiliar, even "strange" ways in which people could live out the conventional role of the "soldierpoet." This paper offers an account of his brief writing career from that perspective.'

Buckridge aims 'to consider Peter Austen's work historically, as the record of an encounter between a certain kind of literary sensibility and the experience of active service. I am interested, in other words, in the process by which he 'wrote his war", in the cultural capital and aesthetic assumptions he brought to the confrontation, and in how these may have enabled him to come to terms with it and survive it. I shall also touch, finally, on the question of how the prolonged assaults on his sensibility changed his personality and his life...'