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Major newspapers in Australia have forecast a depressive future for Australian fiction and publishers are taking fewer risks, stopped taking new writers and have cut down on publications as a result of low or no sales. However, a few reviewers disagree on the gloomy theories of Australian literature and feel that there are many intellectual and insightful writers with good books that are doing well.

To be permanently in exile is to be permanently in disguise: it is an extreme form of self-protection. --Mary Gordon THIS ARTICLE CONSIDERS DEPICTIONS OF SEXUAL, social and governmental power [...]

THE AMERICAN COMES TO AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE as a patient novice, with an untrained, yet willing eye. Looking to achieve a definition of Australian literature, the American reader exchanges didacticism and [...]

Australia kept on being Victorian long after the British stopped being Victorian. People arriving in Australia many years after the Victorian era well and truly ended would see its vestiges [...]

When The Tree of Man appeared in 1955, it was hailed as the first important novel by an Australian to gain world attention. In a front-page review in the New [...]

As French poet Paul Valery observed on the centenary of the new mediums invention in 1939, photography allows for the verification of history's objectivity: 'the mere notion of photography, when [...]

Seven years ago, Frank Moorhouse published Grand Days in which he introduced the likeable, impassioned, naive Australian, Edith A. Campbell Berry, who worked at the League of Nations in Geneva [...]

Australian fiction writers have had interest in the development of identity politics, multicultural and gender debates, and postmodern methods of conceiving characters in fiction writing since the 1970s. Many novelists share a concern that suggests a shift from basic assumptions about what constitutes personal and social identity is a general one. A connection between mutable identity and social disintegration is suggested. Works of Patrick White, David Malouf, Janette Turner Hospital and Brian Castro are discussed.

The image of the journey in time characterises much of twentieth-century fiction -- Joyce, Mann, Proust, Svevo and Woolf bear witness -- and finds in Australian writing a fertile ground. […]

Sybylla Melvyn, narrator of Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career (1901), has troubled readers from the start. William Blackwood, editor, felt impelled to 'tone down' her narrative, and 'religious, political and […]

Michael Wilding has recently discussed Patrick White's modernism in terms of White's disdain for what he famously called the 'exaltation of the "average"' in Australian society (Patrick White Speaks 15). […]

David Malouf's most recent novel The Conversations at Curlow Creek is written in the style of a fable, a story whose basic structure is familiar to us. Two boys grow […]

Whereas the negative early criticism of Tourmaline (1963) found cogent, if belated rebuttal in the articles of A.D. Hope and Helen Tiffin that appeared ten years after what became known […]

'And did you like Dickens at the end of it?' 'I never did like or dislike him ... All I wanted to do was understand him.' (Ackroyd 896) 'You are […]

Peter Carey's novels 'The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith' and 'Jack Maggs' portray characters who explore how colonies relate to their empires. Storytellers hold important places in colonial cultures, and Carey's central characters in these books live parallel lives to those who tell their stories in Laurence Stern's 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy' and Charles Dickens' 'Great Expectations.' Once outside their cultures, Carey's characters understand those cultures' limitations.

Adventure novels by Australian George Lewis 'Louis' Becke provide insight into late 19th-century Australian masculinity. Australia and much of the West experienced a severe economic depression, and Becke's tales of the South Seas provided welcome escape with their depiction of exciting life with abundant resources. 'By Reef and Palm,' a collection of Becke's stories, largely portrays what can now be seen as militant masculinism., At the end of the nineteenth century one of Australia's most popular writers was George Lewis `Louis' Becke. Some hailed him as the `Rudyard Kipling of the Pacific'. Although these [...]

With The Doubleman (1985), Christopher Koch laid claim to be regarded as one of Australia's serious novelists. It was a novel which won him both local and international respect, most [...]

The principal task of civilisation, its actual raison d'etre, is to defend us from nature. Sigmund Freud In 1996 two important studies of Demidenko' were published, one by Andrew Riemer […]

Despite the way The River Ophelia has been written about by the dominant reading group, it was not my intention to write or to author it as a social realist [...]

'Testostero' is David Foster's comedic novel about triplets separated at birth, whose reunion occurs with occasional glimpses of tragedy, after the Italian style. The novel's backdrop is Venice, whose history replete with its many martyrdoms and conquests provides a jarring dash of realism that Foster deftly manages to turn to humor repeatedly. Foster uses cultural difference to point up the similarities in two of the triplets that are the main characters. They are as oblivious as most of the rest of this humorous novel's denizens.

IN MANY RESPECTS, THE ART OF THE REALISTIC NOVELIST resembles that of the bricoleur. Almost all the materials that the writer encounters are likely to be broken down--in part at [...]

The intriguing facts of the Ralph de Boissiere's novel 'Crown Jewel' in the history of Australian literary nationalism is discussed. The novel consists stories of struggle Trinidad workers and unemployed against white colonial capitalism in the second half of the 1930's.

STYLE IS SOMETHING THAT SLIPS AWAY from you, like a wet melon seed.' So says writer-scholar Chris Wallace-Crabbe, as he goes on to confirm the many descriptions of David Malouf [...]

Real criticism ... occurs not in reviews or in long critical articles but in the selection and compilation of anthologies. The influence that these monuments exert has not been sufficiently [...]

`Where's Shit creek?' asked Danny. Seemed like it was in every suburb of Melbourne we laid our fingertips on. The muddy brown waters would start swirling almost the same minute [...]