A classic, a cynic might say, is a work which is much admired but seldom read. But the reappearance of H. M. Green’s A History of Australian Literature, long admired but also long out of print, is likely to change that definition. To read this work again is to realise just how good it is, how apposite to many of our current concerns. Its title suggests why this is so, A History of Australian Literature, Pure and Applied. This is a history which is systematic as well as serious, aware not only of the problematic nature of the terms "history”, “Australian” and “literature” but also of the interplay between texts and contexts and of the multiple nature of these contexts – geographical (in a sense Foucault would understand, concerned with space as a psychic as well as a physical fact), historical, ideological.