The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel

This book provides a clear, lively, and accessible guide to the complex histories and vital present of the Australian novel.

Nicholas Birns (Author), Louis Klee (Author)

9781316514481, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 March 2023

300 pages
23.6 x 15.7 x 2.8 cm, 0.7 kg

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 demonstrate 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 crucial present of the Australian novel.

Introduction: preoccupations of the Australian novel Louis Klee and Nicholas Birns
Part I. Contexts: 1. Presencing: writing in the decolonial space Jeanine Leane
2. Literary visitors and the Australian novel Brendan Casey
3. Settler colonial fictions: beyond nationalism and universalism Paul Giles
4. White writing, indigenous Australia, and the chronotopes of the settler novel Michael Griffiths
5. Mabo, Mob, and the novel Evelyn Araluen
6. Publishing the Australian novel Emmett Stinson
Part II. Authorships: 7. 'Rich and Strange': Christina stead and the transnational novel Fiona Morrison
8. Sexuality in Patrick White's fiction Chen Hong
9. Constellational form in Gerald Murnane Louis Klee
10. Helen Garner's house of fiction Brigid Rooney
11. Alexis Wright's novel activism Lynda Ng
12. Kim Scott and the doctoral novel Joseph Steinberg
Part III. Futures: 13. The contemporary western Sydney novel Lachlan Brown
14. First nations transnationalism Declan Fry
15. Beyond the cosmopolitan: small dangerous fragments Michelle Cahill
16. Craft and truth: the Australian verse novel Nicholas Birns
17. Queering Mateship: David Malouf and Christos Tsiolkas Lesley Hawkes and Mark Piccini
18. Australian fiction in the anthropocene Tony Hughes D'aeth
19. What is the (Australian) refugee novel? Keyvan Allahyari
Further reading compiled by Joseph Steinberg
Index.

Subject Areas: Indigenous peoples [JFSL9], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary theory [DSA]