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Australian Literary Studies

Transnational Literature is an online, open-access journal that is published by Flinders University. The May 2014 edition certainly lives up to the title. This edition provides an overview of literary texts and theories from across the world.

The academic contributions explore a diverse range of topics. These include the work of Marion Halligan, literary representations of Islam and the veil, and the notion of ‘home’ as this is invoked in Shani Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night (1996). There is a review essay on a selection of books dedicated to the theme of ‘world literature’, plus the paper delivered by Satendra Nandan at the December 2013 launch of Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally’s edited collection A Country Too Far (the latter is reviewed in this edition). Readers will also find poems, short stories and life narratives.

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Never heard of him – that’s the most common reaction when I mention Gerry Glaskin. Some Western Australians remember him, as they should: he was born and spent his last years there. Yet in between he was a bestselling novelist in the 1950s and 1960s. He was translated into French, German, Swedish, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Danish, and Norwegian. Doubleday commissioned him to write a book about northern Australia. He was also a prolific short story writer, with two published collections. All of this is documented in the appendix and reference list of Dare Me! So how and why has Glaskin been erased from the Australian literary consciousness?

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It is a brilliant summer day in July 1935. The scene is a house called Green Ridges, near Hastings, Sussex. Two women, seated but not relaxed, face each other across a formal drawing room. This is the first time they have met. Nettie Palmer, Australian writer and journalist, has come to stay overnight with the novelist Henry Handel Richardson.

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Medievalism – the inspiration of the Middle Ages and their Gothic-Romantic and Aesthetic descendants for modern writing – is one of the more fascinating historical discourses to have emerged in Western criticism in recent decades. In Australia, this criticism has been led by Stephanie Trigg, Andrew Lynch, and Louise D’Arcens, who has written perceptively (among other topics) of the architectural culture demonstrated by The Mediaeval Court, showpiece of the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition. Civic and ecclesiastical architecture – the Gothic cathedrals and university buildings designed by Wardell and Blacket, for example – offer, because of their solid visual presence, an obvious entry point to the colonial medievalising imagination, but in the present book D’Arcens has chosen an equally fruitful but rather more challenging subject, medievalist literature, which, in many cases, is more characteristic of Shakespeare’s ‘unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time’ than of his ‘gilded monuments’.

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 Oz Lit at Melbourne University

Dear Editor,

The English program at the University of Melbourne has offered courses on Australian literature every year since 1982, when it was first introduced as a full seminar subject. Stephanie Guest’s article in last month’s issue of ABR, ‘Oz Lit in the Moot Court Room: Finding Australian Literature at the ...

In a 1995 interview for the Paris Review, Ted Hughes was asked if the 1960s boom in translated poetry, particularly with series such as the Penguin Modern European Poets, had influenced poetry written in England. ‘Has it modified the British tradition!’ he replied. ‘Everything is now completely open, every approach, with infinite possibilities. Obviou ...

A Cool and Shaded Heart by Noel Rowe & Ethical Investigations by Noel Rowe

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March 2011, no. 329

Noel Rowe, poet and critic, was something of an enigma to me. It is hard to believe that he was still in his thirties (just) when I met him in 1990 at the University of Sydney, he a lecturer, I a postgraduate student. Noel seemed to have an enormous wealth of experience, though he was never showy with it ...

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Starlight: 150 Poems by John Tranter & The Salt Companion to John Tranter edited by edited by Rod Mengham

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October 2010, no. 325

John Tranter has published more than twenty books since 1970. They include long dramatic monologues, a type of verse novel (The Floor of Heaven, 1992), prose poems and traditional verse forms. Starlight, his new collection, continues his ‘evisceration’, as he calls it, of other poets.

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Australian Literary Studies is a journal of the old school, independent of the international academic publishers that have absorbed so many others, and difficult to obtain for casual reading. It has maintained a solid reputation among scholars. From the evidence presented here, it is easy to see why.

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Perhaps the most influential guide to ‘theory’ in Australia in the 1980s was Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983). The cover of my paperback edition features a detail from Jan Vermeer’s painting Mistress and Maid, in which a respectful domestic servant hands a document to her mistress, who is seated at a writing table. I take this to be a visual allusion to Alexander Pope’s formulation in An Essay on Criticism that ‘Criticism [is] the Muse’s Handmaid’. Eagleton’s polemical refusal of that secondary and facilitating role was influential in turning a generation of Australian literary critics from ‘criticism’ to ‘critique’. From Graeme Turner’s National Fictions (1986) and Kay Schaffer’s Women and the Bush (1987) to my own Writing the Colonial Adventure (1995) and Susan Sheridan’s Along the Faultlines (1995), the cultural-nationalist and new-critical canons alike were supplemented by alternative canons – feminist, realist, postcolonial and ‘popular’ – as texts were subjected to rigorous ideological critique for their representations of class, race, gender and nation. Criticism was no longer the handmaid to literature; a hermeneutics of scepticism and suspicion prevailed.

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