Frances DevlinGlass

This updated edition of essays on Thea Astley’s fiction will appeal to readers beyond the academy. It plays with the question as to why Astley (1925–2004) has been the subject of so little literary scholarship, despite her many literary awards (including four Miles Franklin Awards – only Tim Winton has won as many).

Katherine Barnes’s book on Christopher Brennan (1870 – 1932) is unusual in the Australian academy in that the work does not much concern itself with postmodern theory, or the kinds of questions that might arise from Brennan’s oeuvre for a modern reader. It bypasses the more familiar kind of enquiry, such as the intriguing questions that Brennan might be seen to raise in relationship to psychoanalysis, and whether or not he might conceivably have been a first-wave feminist. It is something quite different: an enlivening scholarly engagement with Brennan’s sources, especially those available to him in Australia, in particular his esoteric sources.

It seems to be only a couple of years ago that my students declared gender and race to be the ‘hot’ topics in culture. Now, I confidently predict, they will relegate gender (still acknowledging its importance) and reformulate the second term by adding a third: race and its intersection with religion, in its broadest definition.