The Cambridge History Of The Australian Novel

"The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel is an authoritative volume on the Australian novel by more than forty experts in the field of Australian literary studies, drawn from within Australia and abroad. Essays cover a wide range of types of novel writing and publishing from the earliest colonial period through to the present day. The international dimensions of publishing Australian fiction are also considered as are the changing contours of criticism of the novel in Australia. Topics examine colonial fiction, women's writing, Indigenous novels, popular genre fiction, historical fiction, political novels, and challenging novels on identity and belonging from recent decades, not least the major rise of Indigenous novel writing. Essays focus on specific periods of major change in Australian history or range broadly across themes and issues that have influenced fiction across many years and in many parts of the country"--

Draws on scholarship from leading figures in the field and spans Australian literary history from colonial origins, indigenous and migrant literatures, as well as representations of Asia and the Pacific and the role of literary culture in modern Australian society.

An indispensable reference for the study of Australian literature.

The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel is an authoritative volume on the Australian novel by more than forty experts in the field of Australian literary studies, drawn from within Australia and abroad. Essays cover a wide range of types of novel writing and publishing from the earliest colonial period through to the present day. The international dimensions of publishing Australian fiction are also considered as are the changing contours of criticism of the novel in Australia. Chapters examine colonial fiction, women's writing, Indigenous novels, popular genre fiction, historical fiction, political novels, and challenging novels on identity and belonging from recent decades, not least the major rise of Indigenous novel writing. Essays focus on specific periods of major change in Australian history or range broadly across themes and issues that have influenced fiction across many years and in many parts of the country.

Offers a comprehensive view of Australian history from its pre-European origins to the present day. Over two volumes, this major work of reference tells the nation's social, political and cultural story.

The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel provides a clear, lively, and accessible account of the novel in Australia. The chapters of this book survey significant issues and developments in the Australian novel, offer historical and conceptual frameworks, and provide vivid and original examples of what reading an Australian novel looks like in practice. The book begins with novels by literary visitors to Australia and concludes with those by refugees. In between, the reader encounters the Australian novel in its splendid contradictoriness, from nineteenth-century settler fiction by women writers through to literary images of the Anthropocene, from sexuality in the novels of Patrick White to Waanyi writer Alexis Wright's call for a sovereign First Nations literature. This book is an invitation to students, instructors, and researchers alike to expand and broaden their knowledge of the complex histories and vital present of the Australian novel.

This book introduces in a lively and succinct way the major writers, literary movements, styles and genres that, at the beginning of a new century, are seen as constituting the field of 'Australian literature'. The book consciously takes a perspective that sees literary works not as aesthetic objects created in isolation by unique individuals, but as cultural products influenced and constrained by the social, political and economic circumstances of their times, as well as by geographical and environmental factors. It covers indigenous texts, colonial writing and reading, poetry, fiction and theatre throughout two centuries, biography and autobiography, and literary criticism in Australia. Other features of the companion are a chronology listing significant historical and literary events, and suggestions for further reading.