The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel

Description

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 crucial present of the Australian novel.

Nicholas Birns teaches at New York University. He is author of The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literary Space (2019) and Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead (2015), among other books. He edited the US-based journal of Australian literature Antipodes from 2001 to 2018. He has published in journal such as Angelaki, Exemplaria, Partial Answers, Victorian Studies, and The Journal of New Zealand Literature, and has reviewed for Modernism/modernity, The New York Times Book Review, and MLQ. Louis Klee is a Junior Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge. He received the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL)'s A. D. Hope Prize and the Australian Book Review's Peter Porter Prize. He is also a Juncture Fellowship at the Sydney Review of Books.