A suitable motto for any prospective compiler of a large-scale history of a national literature might be ‘No Place for a Nervous Editor’ (to adapt the title of Lucy Frost’s study of nineteenth-century women’s journals). A few of the portentous questions for this imagined figure include: how is ‘literature’ to be conceptualised at the beginning of the twenty-first century (witness the Balkan culture war that followed the publication of the estimably inclusive Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, 2009); how to balance the different needs and competencies of readers – students at tertiary and secondary level, academic specialists from various disciplines, a diverse non-Australian audience; how to choose contributors who combine scholarly authority with an ability to write jargon-free language for a diverse readership; how to construct a book that will satisfy both the searcher for information about a particular book or topic and the (probably rare) reader who wants to proceed from cover to cover? 

Towards the end of the fourth century BCE, the Athenian orator Hyperides found himself in a difficult predicament. His client, the notorious courtesan Phryne, was on trial for her life. Facing accusations of lewd impiety, should she be convicted, death almost certainly would follow. The case was going badly. The jurors were refusing to listen to his pleas. Their minds were made up. They couldn’t wait to convict. In one last desperate roll of the dice, Hyperides called up Phryne to the front of the courtroom and, with a sudden lunge, stripped her naked. The jury were shocked, stunned into silence. Seizing the moment, Hyperides renewed his pleas on her behalf. Overcome by her beauty, the jury acquitted her.

Long gone are the days when the discipline of classics was almost exclusively focused on the golden ages of fifth-century Greek and first-century bce Roman literature and their antecedents. During the past decades, under the leadership of the indomitable Peter Brown and others, the period of later antiquity has become a burgeoning field of research. Yet it cannot be said that the study of specifically Christian thought and literature has been fully integrated into this development. Too often it has remained the domain of departments of theology and religion and of their associated vehicles of publication. In his thought-provoking and stunningly erudite new cultural history of time, the distinguished Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill not only diagnoses this state of affairs but also seeks to remedy it. 

It is remarkable how death has loomed so large in the social sciences over the past couple of decades. From mangled bodies to mediated mass killings, from the medicalisation of dying to the ‘snuff’ movies of hardcore porn: death obsesses the sociological imagination.

In July 1887, a group of British naturalists set out from southern England bound for the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha in search of botanical specimens. They left Southampton with high expectations. Charles Darwin, in the 1830s, had visited Fernando as part of his Beagle expeditions and had remarked on the richness of the island, including its thick vegetation.

Australia’s Vietnam War has passed through several phases in the last six decades. In the mid-1960s the commitment of combat forces by the Menzies and Holt governments was strongly supported. The war and the associated conscription scheme became the focus of enormous controversy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, contributing to Labor’s electoral success in 1972. Gough Whitlam did not pull out the troops – that had already been done by his predecessor, William McMahon – but he did recognise the communist government in the north, even before the war was over.

Andrea Brady’s monumental study of poetry and constraint focuses on ‘the ways that poets invoke bondage as metaphor while effacing the actuality of bondage’. Milton’s aspiration to deliver poetry from ‘the modern bondage of rhyming’, and Blake’s injunction that ‘poetry fetter’d, fetters the human race’, associate formal freedoms with political liberation. The modernist discovery of free verse was quickly followed by a formalist reaction in the 1940s, which was in turn displaced by renewed experimentation over the following decades.

Familiarity may have inured us to Shakespeare’s violence. Poison, suffocation, suicide, rape, and assassination are among the central events of his major plays. But the upper-middle-class respectability of too many Shakespeare performances and the insipid, managerial culture of academic ‘Shakespeare studies’ threaten to reduce the greatest of all dramatists to something antiseptic and safe.

The age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has arrived, though not so much an age of sentient robots as one of ubiquitous data collection and analysis fuelling automated decisions, categorisations, predictions, and recommendations in all walks of life. The stakes of AI-enabled decision-making may be as serious as life and death (Spanish police use a system called VioGén to forecast domestic violence) or as trivial as the arrangement of pizza-toppings.

One consequence of the pandemic is that it has led many people to imagine themselves as someone else. Those whose work has dried up – actors, musicians, curators, librarians, flight attendants, and so on – have suddenly had to adapt to a world that has no place for the things they do and thus no place for people like them. What if this new world is not just a temporary blip, but the shape of things to come? Who will I be in this future world?