Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 60.00

Building upon the approach to reading literature pioneered by Dr Bruce Gardiner at the University of լ�е��� for over four decades, Literature and Pedagogy is devoted to the way that texts, literary texts in particular, seek to instruct us.

Bruce Gardiner has inspired generations of professionals in the field of literary criticism. He stands, if you like, for a scholarly ethos, which is at risk of disappearing. His distinctive academic career, which was almost entirely devoted to teaching, invites us to think about the relationships between literary studies and pedagogy. It also invites us to ask what role a unique pedagogical style plays in the evolution of a discipline. How does intergenerational transmission between teacher and student play out both with and beyond disciplinary boundaries?

This collection explores these questions as a contribution to efforts to resist the neo-liberalisation and neo-conservatism of contemporary academic culture. Contributors draw from inspiring encounters with Bruce Gardiner to reflect upon the reading of pedagogy in literary works, put this method into practice by offering new interpretations of pedagogical mechanisms employed within important literary works and cultural phenomena, and present pieces inspired by Gardiner such as poetry, art, translation and creative non-fiction.

Techniques and methodologies of education are traditionally believed to offer students the keys with which to unlock the secrets of literature and foster its appreciation. Literature and Pedagogy offers a new perspective, showing teachers and students of both education and literature how literary works present their own methods for reflecting critically upon how and why we learn, read and teach.

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 60.00

Time, Tide and History: Eleanor Dark’s Fiction is the first book-length edited collection of scholarly essays to treat the full span of Eleanor Dark’s fiction, advancing a recent revival of critical and scholarly interest in Dark’s writing.

This volume not only establishes a new view of Dark’s fiction as a whole, but also reflects on the ways in which her fiction speaks to our present moment, in the context of a globally fraught, post-pandemic, Anthropocene era. Above all, the revisiting of Dark’s fiction is mandated by a desire to recognise the ways in which it anticipates vital debates in Australian literary and national culture today, about settler colonialism and its legacies, and with regard to the histories, condition and status of Australia’s First Nations people.

This volume interweaves varied topical themes, from formal debates about modernism, historical realism and melodrama, to questions about modernity’s time and space, about gender and cultural difference, and about the specifics of built and natural environments. Time, Tide and History intentionally loosens the conventions of literary scholarship by including other kinds of work alongside critical and scholarly readings: a written dialogue between two contemporary historians about Dark’s legacy, and a biographical piece on the life and role of Eleanor Dark’s husband, Eric Payten Dark.

Bringing together the interwar fiction’s feminist and modernist dimensions with the historical turn of The Timeless Land trilogy, the essays in Time, Tide and History collectively pursue ethical and political questions while teasing out the distinctive thematic, formal and aesthetic features of Dark’s fiction.

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 60.00

This is the first collection in print of the letters of Australian colonial poet Charles Harpur (1813–68) and his circle. Supported by extensive annotation newly prepared for this edition, the 200 letters and life-documents open up successive phases of colonial culture from the 1830s to the 1860s in a newly focused way. Harpur’s two-way correspondence with poet Henry Kendall, and with poet and future premier of NSW Henry Parkes, is especially impressive.

The letters selected for this edition document Harpur’s life in a previously unavailable way. They reveal the intriguing struggle of a high-minded young man to pursue a serious vocation as a poet amidst the unpromising contours of colonial New South Wales society. Despite bearing the taint of a convict family background, Harpur took his vocation with utmost seriousness and had much to endure before he would find recognition as a poet, mainly in colonial newspapers where his poems made over 900 appearances.

This edition captures the process in detail, as well as the production in 1883 of his Poems in book form. Even though editorially mangled, Poems confirmed his reputation and led to his presence in dozens of anthologies down to the present day.

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Hardback
Price: 120.00

This is the first collection in print of the letters of Australian colonial poet Charles Harpur (1813–68) and his circle. Supported by extensive annotation newly prepared for this edition, the 200 letters and life-documents open up successive phases of colonial culture from the 1830s to the 1860s in a newly focused way. Harpur’s two-way correspondence with poet Henry Kendall, and with poet and future premier of NSW Henry Parkes, is especially impressive.

The letters selected for this edition document Harpur’s life in a previously unavailable way. They reveal the intriguing struggle of a high-minded young man to pursue a serious vocation as a poet amidst the unpromising contours of colonial New South Wales society. Despite bearing the taint of a convict family background, Harpur took his vocation with utmost seriousness and had much to endure before he would find recognition as a poet, mainly in colonial newspapers where his poems made over 900 appearances.

This edition captures the process in detail, as well as the production in 1883 of his Poems in book form. Even though editorially mangled, Poems confirmed his reputation and led to his presence in dozens of anthologies down to the present day.

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 60.00

War is traditionally considered a male experience. By extension, the genre of war literature is a male-dominated field, and the tale of the battlefield remains the privileged (and only canonised) war story.

In Australia, although women have written extensively about their wartime experiences, their voices have been distinctively silenced. Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend calls for a re-definition of war literature to include the numerous voices of women writers, and further recommends a re-reading of Australian national literatures, with women’s war writing foregrounded, to break the hold of a male-dominated literary tradition and pass on a vital, but unexplored, women’s tradition.

Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend examines the rich body of World Wars I and II and Vietnam War literature by Australian women, providing the critical attention and treatment that they deserve. Donna Coates records the reaction of Australian women writers to these conflicts, illuminating the complex role of gender in the interpretation of war and in the cultural history of twentieth-century Australia.

By visiting an astonishing number of unfamiliar, non-canonical texts, Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend profoundly alters our understanding of how Australian women writers have interpreted war, especially in a nation where the experience of colonising a frontier has spawned enduring myths of identity and statehood.

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 60.00

Winner of the Alvie Egan Award 2023

Eleanor Dark (1901–85) is one of Australia’s most innovative 20th-century writers. Her extensive oeuvre includes ten novels published from the early 1930s to the late 1950s, and represents a significant engagement with global modernity from a unique position within settler culture. Yet Dark’s contribution to 20th-century literature has been undervalued in the fields of both Australian literary studies and world literature. Although two biographies have been written about her life, there has been no book-length critical study of her writing published since 1976.

Middlebrow Modernism counters this neglect by providing the first full-length critical survey of Eleanor Dark’s writing to be published in over four decades. Focusing on the fiction that Dark produced during the interwar years and reading this in the context of her larger body of work, this book positions Dark’s writing as important to the study of Australian literature and global modernism.

Melinda Cooper argues that Dark’s fiction exhibits a distinctive aesthetic of middlebrow modernism, which blends attributes of literary modernism with popular fiction. It seeks to mediate and reconcile apparent binaries: modernism and mass culture; liberal humanism and experimental aesthetics; settler society and international modernity. The term middlebrow modernism also captures the way Dark negotiated cosmopolitan commitments with more place-based attachments to nation and local community within the mid-20th century. 

Middlebrow Modernism posits that Dark’s fiction and the broader phenomenon of Australian modernism offer essential case studies for larger debates operating within global modernist and world literature studies, providing perspectives these fields might otherwise miss.

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 30.00

The Romantic period is the most appealing but also the most confusing period of English literature for the student. Crucially, this book distinguishes between 'the Romantic' as modern critics use the term and 'the romantic' as it was used during the period itself.

The Two Romanticisms, and Other Essays is a collection of critical essays on Romanticism and select Romantic texts, designed to help teachers and students to make sense of the period as a whole and of the poems and novels that appear most frequently on school and university curricula. Each chapter offers a self-contained reading of a different canonical work while engaging with broader themes.

Through close readings of Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth, William Christie explores the complexities of the Romantic period and offers fresh insights into pivotal Romantic texts.

'Will Christie’s The Two Romanticisms is the ideal companion for exploring Romanticism and romanticism in England.
R. S. White (Author of John Keats: A Literary Life)

'The combination of breadth of interest and intense attention to detail makes this book a fascinating excursion into territory which continues to intrigue and even baffle but also to stimulate and inspire.'
Graham Tulloch FAHA, Professor of English, Flinders University

'It stands apart from other publications in the field in the depth and rigour of its scholarship, its welcome readability, and its relevance to contemporary university and senior secondary school curricula.'
Jacqueline Manuel, The University of լ�е���

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 60.00

Shortlisted for the AUHE Prize in Literary Scholarship 2022 Winner of the Walter McRae Russell Award 2023

Since its publication in 1903, Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life has become established as an Australian classic. But which version of the novel is the authoritative text, and what does its history reveal about Australian cultural life?

From Furphy’s handwritten manuscript through numerous editions, a controversial abridgement for the British market (condemned by A.D. Hope as a “mutilation”), and periods of obscurity and rediscovery, the text has been reshaped and repackaged by many hands. Furphy’s first editors at the Bulletin diluted his socialist message and “corrected” his Australian slang to create a more marketable book. Later, literary players including Vance and Nettie Palmer, Miles Franklin, Kate Baker and Angus & Robertson all took an interest in how Furphy’s work should be published.

In a fascinating piece of literary detective work, Osborne traces the book’s journey and shows how economic and cultural forces helped to shape the novel we read today.

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 60.00

Gail Jones is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary novelists. Her books have won or been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Miles Franklin Award, the Stella Prize, and numerous state literary awards. They are taught in high schools and universities across the country.

This collection of essays offers reflections on Jones’ fiction by leading Australian and international literary critics. For readers who loved Sixty Lights, Five Bells, Sorry and Jones’ other novels, and for students of Jones’ work, this book will be an illuminating companion. With chapters on her use of language, her thematic preoccupations, and her place in local and global literary culture, it is a timely guide to the work of an exceptional Australian writer.

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 60.00

Winner of the AUHE Prize in Literary Scholarship 2022

“Varney combines a theoretically astute sense of the hybridity of the dramatic event, with a dense but lucidly rendered sociological history of White’s plays as they progress through different productions, revivals, and receptions … This is an essential insight, and one which could be usefully extended to White’s novels, and perhaps to Australian modernism broadly.” - Jonathan Dunk, Australian Book Review

One of the giants of Australian literature and the only Australian writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick White received less acclaim when he turned his hand to playwriting.

In Patrick White's Theatre, Denise Varney offers a new analysis of White's eight published plays, discussing how they have been staged and received over a period of 60 years. From the sensational rejection of The Ham Funeral by the Adelaide Festival in 1962 to 21st-century revivals incorporating digital technology, these productions and their reception illustrate the major shifts that have taken place in Australian theatre over time. Varney unpacks White's complex and unique theatrical imagination, the social issues that preoccupied him as a playwright, and his place in the wider Australian modernist and theatrical traditions.

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 60.00

Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (1796–1880) arrived in լ�е��� in 1838 and became almost immediately notorious for her poem “The Aboriginal Mother,” written in response to the infamous Myall Creek massacre. She published more poetry in colonial newspapers during her lifetime, but for the century following her death her work was largely neglected. In recent years, however, critical interest in Dunlop has increased, in Australia and internationally and in a range of fields, including literary studies; settler, postcolonial and imperial studies; and Indigenous studies.

This stimulating collection of essays by leading scholars considers Dunlop's work from a range of perspectives and includes a new selection of her poetry.

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 40.00

Animal Dreams collects David Brooks’ thought-provoking essays about how humans think, dream and write about other species. Brooks examines how animals have featured in Australian and international literature and culture, from ‘The Man from Snowy River’ to Rainer Maria Rilke and The Turin Horse, to live-animal exports, veganism, and the culling of native and non-native species. In his piercing, elegant, widely celebrated style, he considers how private and public conversations about animals reflect older and deeper attitudes to our own and other species, and what questions we must ask to move these conversations forward, in what he calls ‘the immense work of undoing’.

For readers interested in animal welfare, conservation, and the relationship between humans and other species, Animal Dreams will be an essential, richly rewarding companion.

Praise for David Brooks

‘one of Australia’s most skilled, unusual and versatile writers’

– Peter Pierce, The լ�е��� Morning Herald.

‘No one writes about animals like David Brooks.’

– Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (author of The Assault on Truth, When Elephants Weep and Lost Companions)

Praise for Animal Dreams

‘Beautifully written and emotionally and intellectually enthralling. The best book I have ever read on relations between humans and animals and the ‘redress’ we owe them. It makes you angry, it makes you weep; it makes you determined to rethink and to act.’

– Helen Tiffin, FAHA (co-author of The Empire Writes Back and Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutang)

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 40.00

Memory and Foresight in the Celtic World delves deep into the experience of Celtic communities and individuals in the late medieval period through to the modern age. Its thirteen essays range widely, from Scottish soldiers in France in the fifteenth century to Gaelic-speaking communities in rural New South Wales in the twentieth, and expatriate Irish dancers in the twenty-first. Connecting them are the recurring themes of memory and foresight: how have Celtic communities maintained connections to the past while keeping an eye on the future?

Chapters explore language loss and preservation in Celtic countries and among Celtic migrant communities, and the influence of Celtic culture on writers such as Dylan Thomas and James Joyce. In Australia, how have Irish, Welsh and Scottish migrants engaged with the politics and culture of their home countries, and how has the idea of a Celtic identity changed over time?

Drawing on anthropology, architecture, history, linguistics, literature and philosophy, Memory and Foresight in the Celtic World offers diverse, thought-provoking insights into Celtic culture and identity.

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 60.00

Shortlisted for the Walter McRae Russel Award 2021

Gail Jones: Word, Image, Ethics is an accessible guide to the writings of Gail Jones, the award-winning Australian author, essayist and academic.

Drawing together ideas from literature, art, philosophy and photography, the volume presents a compelling analysis of Jones’ literary commitment to the political and the personal, and reflects on how and why we interpret literary texts.

An essential contribution to the intersecting fields of Australian studies and international literature, Gail Jones: Word, Image, Ethics offers innovative insights into the writing of one of Australia’s most accomplished authors.

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 60.00

‘Fallen Among Reformers’ focuses on Stella Miles Franklin’s New Woman protest literature written during her time in Chicago with the National Women’s Trade Union League (1906-1915). This time away from literary pursuits enriched Franklin’s literary productivity and provided a feminist social justice ethics, which shaped her writing.

Close readings of Franklin’s (mostly unpublished) short stories, plays, and novels contextualises them in the personal politics of her everyday life and historicises them in the socio-economic and literary realities of early twentieth-century Australia and United States: themes embedded in broader cultural patterns of socialism, pacifism, and feminism.

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 60.00

Gerald Murnane is one of Australia’s most important contemporary authors, but for years was neglected by critics. In 2018 the New York Times described him as “the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of” and tipped him as a future Nobel Prize winner.

Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One coincides with a renewed interest in his work. It includes an important new essay by Murnane himself, alongside chapters by established and emerging literary critics from Australia and internationally. Together they provide a stimulating reassessment of Murnane’s diverse body of work.

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 60.00

Winner of the Walter McRae Russel Award 2021

Although Christina Stead is best known for the mid-century masterpiece set in Washington D.C. and Baltimore, The Man Who Loved Children, it was not her only work about the America. Five of Christina Stead’s mid-career novels deal with the United States, capturing and critiquing American life with characteristic sharpness and originality.

In this examination of Stead’s American work, Fiona Morrison explores Stead’s profound engagement with American politics and culture and their influence on her “restlessly experimental” style. Through the turbulent political and artistic debates of the 1930s, the Second World War, and the emergence of McCarthyism, the “matter” of America provoked Stead to continue to create new ways of writing about politics, gender and modernity.

"This superb study of Stead’s fiction not only significantly advances scholarship on Stead but is a significant analysis of mid-twentieth-century fiction in its own right ... Brilliantly researched, written and argued, Morrison’s book offers a testimony to the capacities of literary scholarship to map the tectonic movement of ideas that shaped the modern world system." Tony Hughes-d'Aeth and panel, Walter McRae Russel Award

This is the first critical study to focus on Stead’s time in America and its influence on her writing. Morrison argues compellingly that Stead’s American novels “reveal the work of the greatest political woman writer of the mid twentieth century”, and that Stead’s account of American ideology and national identity remains extraordinarily prescient, even today.

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: DVD
Price: 24.95

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 45.00

Serialised in 1909–10, The Poison of Polygamy is a rare gem of Australian literature.

The first novel of the Chinese Australian experience, it is a roller-coaster tale of blackmail, murder, betrayal and even thylacine attack, partly based on real people, places and events. Revealing the human face of migration between imperial China and colonial Australia, it recounts the story of a man from southern China who tries his luck on the Victorian goldfields, the wife he leaves behind, and their eventual fraught reunion.

In this bilingual parallel edition, Australia’s and possibly the West’s earliest Chinese-language novel is presented in English translation for the first time. Illuminating introductions explore the work’s historical, cultural and linguistic context, and establish its unique significance in Australia’s literary and social history.

“A shiny little nugget has been disinterred from the tailings of our literary past … The Poison of Polygamy is an exciting addition to our literary history that deserves to be widely discussed and analysed in both China and Australia.” David Walker, Emeritus Professor, Deakin University and author of Anxious Nation

“The discovery of The Poison of Polygamy and its publication in this highly informative bilingual edition is a double happiness. It gives readers a highly entertaining new novel, replete with drama, emotion and intrigue. At the same time it documents Chinese Australian life in a key period of history.” Nicholas Jose, author of Avenue of Eternal Peace

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 40.00

Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia is the first book to explore the notion of literary community or literary sociability in relation to Australian literature. It brings together twenty-four scholars from a range of disciplines – literature, history, cultural and women's studies, creative writing and digital humanities – to address some of the key questions about Australian literary communities: how they form, how they change and develop, and how they operate within wider social and cultural contexts, both within Australia and internationally.

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 40.00

Patrick White within the Western Literary Tradition is a collection of essays demonstrating the strong influence of European, British, and American cultures on White's work. Representing the author's interest spanning over thirty-five years, the essays expose White's evocation of dimensions other than material reality, his preoccupation with epiphanies and mythmaking, and his constant forging of a poetic style. The book also contains a series of analytical studies of the themes and characters in White's major novels (The Aunt's Story, The Tree of Man and Voss).

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 40.00

Reading Across the Pacific is a study of literary and cultural engagement between the United States and Australia from a contemporary interdisciplinary perspective. The book examines the relations of the two countries, shifting the emphasis from the broad cultural patterns that are often compared, to the specific networks, interactions, and crossings that have characterised Australian literature in the United States and American literature in Australia.

In the 21st century, both American and Australian literatures are experiencing new challenges to the very different paradigms of literary history and criticism each inherited from the 20th century. In response to these challenges, scholars of both literatures are seizing the opportunity to reassess and reconfigure the conceptual geography of national literary spaces as they are reformed by vectors that evade or exceed them, including the transnational, the local and the global. The essays in Reading Across the Pacific are divided into five sections: 'National literatures and transnationalism', 'Poetry and poetics', 'Literature and popular culture', 'The Cold War', and 'Publishing history and transpacific print cultures'.

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 24.95

A world first! The first remixed and remixable anthology of literature.

This anthology of short stories is not some textual tome, frozen in time and space. It is alive, evolving organically in a constant state of flux. Why? Because each story is available under a Creative Commons licence, giving you rights to share and reuse the book as you see fit.

So how do you use a remixable anthology? Simple.

Step 1 - Read. Thumb your way through the pages at will. Find the stories you love, the ones you hate, the ones that could be better.

Step 2 - Re/create. Each story is yours to share and to remix. Use only one paragraph or character or just make subtle changes. Change the genre, alter its formal or stylistic characteristics, or revise its message. Use as little or as much as you like - as long as it works.

Step 3 - Share. Be part of a growing community of literature remixing. Post your remixes to the , and start sharing. The entire anthology can be remixed - the original stories, the remixes, and even the fonts.

Through the Clock's Workings is Read&Write!

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 29.95

‘It’s hard to tell, hard to say, I don't know if the bush babies found me or I found the little creatures.’

May Gibbs’ stories reveal magic in the Australian bush, woven through the voices of her unique and curious characters and through her imagery and humour. It is a magic that continues to captivate generations of Australians.

In this fascinatingly detailed and well researched biography, Maureen Walsh steps into May Gibbs’ magic circle and gives us an insight into one of Australia's most treasured children’s authors.

Commencing with May's birth in middle class London, Maureen details the family's struggles upon their arrival in an unfamiliar land. While their initial encounters of the harsh Australian outback were daunting, a move to Perth brings happier times and leads to May's affinity with the bush. May Gibbs' lively spirit is brought to life with interviews, notes from May's sketchbooks and quotes from her letters and autobiographical notes.

This book is a commitment to the story of May Gibbs and, with the help of those who care for our Australian stories and bush magic, is keeping the memory of May and her characters alive.

Vendor: լ�е���
Type: Paperback
Price: 60.00

**{::}Shortlisted for the Walter McRae Russell Award 2019{::}
*

Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s–1940s explores how Australian writers and their works were present in the United States before the mid-20th century to a much greater degree than previously acknowledged. Drawing on fresh archival research and combining the approaches of literary criticism, print culture studies and book history, David Carter and Roger Osborne demonstrate that Australian writing was transnational long before the contemporary period. In mapping Australian literature’s connections to British and US markets, their research challenges established understandings of national, imperial and world literatures.

Carter and Osborne examine how Australian authors, editors and publishers engaged productively with their American counterparts, and how American readers and reviewers responded to Australian works. They consider the role played by British publishers and agents in taking Australian writing to America, and creating new opportunities for novelists to move between markets.

Some of these writers, such as Christina Stead and Patrick White, remain household names; others who once enjoyed international fame, such as Dale Collins and Alice Grant Rosman, have been largely forgotten. The story of their books in America reveals how culture, commerce and copyright law interacted to create both opportunities and obstacles for Australian writers.