Dorothy Porter’s new verse novel, Wild Surmise, takes an almost classic form. The verse novel is now well-established as a modern genre, and Porter has stamped a distinctive signature and voice on the verse form, particularly with the phenomenal success of her racy, action-packed detective novel, The Monkey’s Mask (1994). So it comes as no surprise to find this book setting a similarly crackin ... (read more)
Stephanie Trigg
Stephanie Trigg is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Melbourne, where she works on medieval and modern literature. She is author of Gwen Harwood (Oup, 1994) and several books on Chaucer and medieval studies: most recently, Affective Medievalism: Love, Abjection and Discontent (2019), and 30 Great Myths about Chaucer (2020), both co-written with Thomas A. Prendergast. She is currently working on a cultural history of the face in literature, with Joe Hughes, Tyne Sumner, and Guillemette Bolens; and a study of Melbourne’s relationship with bluestone.
A year or so after I had begun my work in the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, the immortal words of 'Ern Malley', 'The emotions are not skilled workers', bored a hole into my brain, dug around a bit, and settled there as a perpetual irritant. Malley's phrase has an oblique genealogy. Coined by James McAuley and Harold Stewart as an enigmatic pronounc ... (read more)
Binocular vision
Stephanie Trigg
Imagination, Books and Community in Medieval Europe edited by Gregory Kratzmann Macmillan Art Publishing and the State Library of Victoria, $99 hb, 256 pp, 9781921394331
In cinema the trope is familiar: an old book opens and gorgeous drawings and illuminations gradually come to life, replaced by real or animated characters. Or the book magicall ... (read more)