The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry

This volume investigates Australian poetry's centrality to debates around colonialism, nationalism, diversity, embodiment, local-global relations, and the environment.

Ann Vickery (Edited by)

9781009470230, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 June 2024

408 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 3 cm, 0.76 kg

An invaluable resource for staff and students in literary studies and Australian studies, this volume is the first major critical survey on Australian poetry. It investigates poetry's central role in engaging with issues of colonialism, nationalism, war and crisis, diaspora, gender and sexuality, and the environment. Individual chapters examine Aboriginal writing and the archive, poetry and activism, print culture, and practices of internationally renowned poets such as Lionel Fogarty, Gwen Harwood, John Kinsella, Les Murray, and Judith Wright. The Companion considers Australian leadership in the diversification of poetry in terms of performance, the verse novel, and digital poetries. It also considers Antipodean engagements with Romanticism and Modernism.

Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Chronology
Introduction Ann Vickery
I. Change and Renewal: 1. Models of poet and nation Philip Mead
2. War, crisis and identity in Australian poetry Dan Disney
3. Cultivating Australian poetry through periodicals John Hawke
II. Networks: 4. Above and below: sublime and gothic relations in nineteenth century Australian poetry Michael Farrell
5. Romanticism, sensibility, and colonial women poets Katie Hansord
6. Experiment and adaptation in Australia's modernist poetry Aidan Coleman
7. The postwar 'golden generation (1945–1965) Toby Davidson
8. Generation of '68 and a culture of revolution Corey Wakeling
III. Authors: 9. High delicate outline: the poetry of Judith Wright Nicholas Birns
10. Burning Sappho: Gwen Harwood's Incendiary verse Ann-Marie Priest
11. Les Murray: ancient and modern David McCooey
12. Lionel Fogarty's poetics of address and negative lyric Dashiell Moore
III. Embodied Poetics: 13. The strength of us as women': A Poetics of relationality and reckoning Natalie Harkin and Jeanine Leane
14. Country snarled/ in borders': spatial poetics in Asian Australian poetry Kim Cheng Boey
15. Australian poets in the countries of others' Louis Klee
16. Writing the Body Orchid Tierney
17. Not the poem: in media res John Kinsella
IV. Expanding Form: 18. Hybrid Forms: the verse novel, prose poetry, and poetic biographies Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington
19. Electronic, visual and sound poetries in Australia A. J. Carruthers.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]