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Melinda Harvey
Melinda Harvey is Lecturer in English at Monash University. She has been a book critic for nearly twenty years, with reviews and commentary appearing in major Australian newspapers and magazines including Australian Book Review, The Australian, The Age, and the Sydney Review of Books. She was a finalist in the 2020 Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism.
Evil empire or fellow citizen? It seems to me that the arguments and counterarguments about America’s role in the world today run parallel to the debates concerning cultural studies’ standing in the humanities. It’s a thought that would have Raymond Williams rolling in his grave, of course. As an academic discipline, cultural studies was born Marxist, and reared to champion the local, the un ... (read more)
Disaster has always shadowed the traveller. Today’s adventurers differ from their forebears only in the kinds of calamity they have cause to fear. Arabella Edge’s second novel – like her first, the award-winning The Company (2000) – will have readers thanking their lucky stars that shipwreck, at least, has gone the way of history. As its cover suggests, The God of Spring centres on Théodo ... (read more)
Towards the end of the current issue of Antipodes (Vol. 19, No. 2, edited by Nicholas Birns, US$18 pb, 135 pp), Bev Braune asks the questions, ‘Who is the reader? And how many of us are there?’ Braune is not referring to Antipodes and its audience. Nonetheless, the questions stand. Academic journals challenge our more romantic notions of readers and reading. As a general rule, they make poor b ... (read more)
Like Monaco, journals are sunny places for shady people. Black sheep and dark horses have often found a first sanctuary there. Precarious principalities, they are built on the shifting sands of subsidies, sponsorships and subscriptions. But their lifeblood is won or lost at the roulette wheel of submissions and commissions.
You can tell a lot about a journal by the kind of company it keeps. The l ... (read more)
Back in 2007, his academic cap firmly fastened, David Sornig wrote in the pages of Antipodes: ‘Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city [of Berlin] has, more than any other, become thought of as the place where, in Fukuyaman terms, history actually ended. In this sense it is the eschatological city par excellence.’ It is a curiosity of sorts that Australian writers have been in the front st ... (read more)
These are hostile times for literary fiction in Australia. New novels are well advised to don flak, not flap, jackets. And it’s not just a simple case of critics sniping from the sidelines, wanting their piece of the action. This is a full-blown civil war involving all the vested interests – publishers, editors, journalists, publicists and booksellers – not just writers and readers. The smar ... (read more)
Literature aspires to be read twice; journalism demands to be read once, Cyril Connolly declared. Between the book and the newspaper lies the journal, juggler of both, simply wanting to be read. In its quest for a readership over the past three hundred years – diligent or dilettantish, it hasn’t been fussy – the journal has banked on the perenniality of the literary and the urgency of the jo ... (read more)
In Second Place, the narrator, M, reminisces about the time she invited the artist L to stay on her remote property ‘on the marsh’. Fifteen years earlier in Paris, a painting of L’s on a poster advertising a major retrospective of his art had spoken to M of ‘absolute freedom’. She was then ‘a young mother on the brink of rebellion’. The night before she had allowed a famous writer ... (read more)
The Book of Human Skin details the trials and tribulations of an innocent Venetian noblewoman named Marcella Fasan, a girl ‘so sinned agin tis like Job in a dress’, Gianni delle Boccole, loyal family servant and bad speller, explains. Marcella’s principal antagonist is her older brother Minguillo, who, out of filial jealousy and a desire to be the sole heir to the family’s New World fortu ... (read more)