Literary Studies

It is easy to be complacent about the Greeks. We know they invented democracy, philosophy, drama, the principle of free speech and other things that we value highly; but how often do we read the works of Homer and Hesiod, of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, of Herodotus and Thucydides, of Plato and Aristotle? How often do we reflect that the Greeks gave the West the very idea of literature? The heritage is so rich that there are whole periods and genres that many readers may never have encountered, except in the most tangential way.

‘What is it that distinguishes “the experience of being in the archives” from other types of research?’ The introduction to The Intimate Archive indicates that this is a crucial question underpinning the book. Neither dry repositories of records nor merely the random detritus of lives, archives are understood as constructed artefacts, shaped by cultural and political practices as well as by chance. Their meaning also depends on the historical moment: what is overlooked by one generation of researchers may be important to another. What is regarded as evidence by a researcher trained in literature may be questioned by an historian. Particular interests, as well as factors like gender, may also influence the materials researchers select from papers and how they interpret them.

The latest Antipodes opens with Katherine Bode’s provocative discussion of Roger McDonald’s The Ballad of Desmond Kale. Dissecting McDonald’s ‘fantasy of an all-white, all-male Australian society’, Bode’s essay also criticises Inga Clendinnen for exempting McDonald’s novel from her much-aired arguments against historical fiction. Bernadette Brennan draws on Maurice Blanchot to explore ‘the ungraspable experience of death’ evoked in works by Alex Miller and Noel Rowe, and Lyn McCredden has philosopher René Girard in mind when revisiting the familiar territory of the Lindy Chamberlain case and the ‘rituals of perpetual scapegoating’. Helen Gildfind ‘meets’ Janet Frame through Frame’s autobiographies, and reflects on the ‘reader’s power to decide the autobiographical status of a text’. The result is interestingly self-reflexive, but some readers might prefer more Frame and less Gildfind.

‘There was a man who loved islands. He was born on one, but it didn’t suit him, as there were too many other people on it, besides himself.’ So begins D.H. Lawrence’s bleak little fable ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’. Lawrence’s islander wants control, sole possession, mastery of people and place. When his first island, fertile and beautiful, fails him because of the vast expense of making it perfect, he moves to a smaller one where, without love or desire, he drifts into marriage and fatherhood. Again he escapes. On the third and final island – a barren rock – his total isolation brings madness and death. The moral is clear. Lawrence thought of community as essential; without it we cannot be human.

While rehearsing in Martin Place for the recent Sydney Festival, my daughter found herself dancing on a plinth while a heckler below chanted ‘Wanker!’ throughout. On another platform, her fellow artists, all of them performing their intricately choreographed work, endured the calls of another passer-by, ‘You’re so predictable!’ In Australia, everybody’s a critic.

The Cambridge Companion series has been a very successful venture, presenting readers with handy, up-to-date collections of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars on a wide range of authors and topics. This co-edited volume on British Romantic poetry encompasses many of the key topics in Romantic literary studies of the last two decades: historicism, canonisation, antiquarianism, Gothicism, the lyric, the rise of standardised English, women’s writing, colonialism, poetry’s relationship with the novel and with philosophy, and the legacy of Romanticism in contemporary poetry. There are also several essays which, in their originality and complex argumentation, cannot be so easily summed up and labelled: a brilliant reading by James Chandler of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’ Ode as an important continuation of the eighteenth century’s ‘progress of poetry’ theme; an analysis of Romantic-era poetry which argues that the study of Romantic poetry belongs as much to media history as to literary scholarship; and an essay by Kevis Goodman which, by tracking the discursive migration of nostalgia from medical discourse into the heart of Romantic aesthetics, challenges the usual clichés of this period’s poetry as a de-historicising ‘exile from the present’, a poetry of return and retreat.

‘Dress me and put my shoes on; it is time, it is the hour before dawn, so that we should get ready for school.’ This colloquy, probably from Gaul in the third or fourth century, prescribes the ideal child’s conversation, from waking and greeting his parents politely to walking home, with his slave, from school at noon.

Seth Lerer’s history of children’s literature starts with papyrus and ends with Harry Potter. It is called a ‘reader’s history’ because Lerer does not only look at literature written for children – a comparatively recent phenomenon. He also looks at what children actually read: abecedaria, excerpts from Virgil and Homer, versions of Aesop, lists and plays, folktales, prayers and psalters, boy scout manuals, magazines, and chapbook versions of Robinson Crusoe.

Philip mead’s Networked Language: Culture & History in Australian Poetry is an extraordinary piece of scholarly writing: large, ambitious, meticulously researched, brilliantly written and quite original. It is laudable not only for these inherent virtues but also, it has to be said, because of its very existence. Australian Scholarly Publishing is to be commended for publishing such a work. If poetry is marginal to Australian public culture (as we are routinely told), then works about Australian poetry are all but invisible. It is all the more notable, then, that Mead’s work should join another recently published, large-scale work on modern Australian poetry: Ann Vickery’s Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry, published by Salt in 2007. Both Mead’s and Vickery’s books use Australian poetry as a way of intervening in, or instigating, debates in modern politico-cultural history. (And to these studies we may also add another ambitious piece of poetry criticism, John Kinsella’s more globally focused Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism, Manchester University Press, 2007.)

Roads are not places, but ways to and away from them, perhaps in fearful flight or in buoyant expectation. Travelling them can engender boredom (‘Are we there yet?’) and horror (‘Will we ever get there, alive?’). Roads are means of reaching those fabled and amorphous Australian locations – the city, the bush, the beach. Each of these has attracted anthologies (some from Penguin). Delia Falconer’s task, as editor of The Penguin Book of the Road, is less straightforward, being concerned with how we travel rather than where we arrive, with highways but also with indirect, crooked ways. In a masterly and challenging introduction, she warns us of what to expect.