Literary Studies

Fictions about academic life have always been about sex, but these days the sexiest thing to write about is theory. Fortunately for the writer who wants to write about both sex and theory, the equation between sexual and textual intercourses has excellent credentials in the poststructuralist canon. Followers of Barthes and Derrida have taken to the pleasures of the theoretical text with an eagerness aptly defined by the sexual metaphors they overindulge in. Others, less enamoured by theoretical discourses, have found that these provide an excellent target for parody and satire, and thus manage at once to partake in the playful intercourse and retain a critical, mocking distance. What tends to be forgotten, amidst all this textual cavorting, is that literary theory is a reasonably rigid intellectual discipline: playful though it may be, it is easy to get it all wrong!

I first met Rosa Praed under the blue dome of the British Museum Reading Room some twenty years ago. She was introduced as Mrs Campbell Praed, an aspiring novelist advised by George Meredith – himself a novelist and poet, and the subject of my doctoral research – in his capacity as publisher’s reader for the well-known house of Chapman & Hall. The fact of her being an Australian writer seeking to break into the London publishing scene in the 1880s was notable; but she was marginal to my concerns at that time.

Long gone are the days when the discipline of classics was almost exclusively focused on the golden ages of fifth-century Greek and first-century bce Roman literature and their antecedents. During the past decades, under the leadership of the indomitable Peter Brown and others, the period of later antiquity has become a burgeoning field of research. Yet it cannot be said that the study of specifically Christian thought and literature has been fully integrated into this development. Too often it has remained the domain of departments of theology and religion and of their associated vehicles of publication. In his thought-provoking and stunningly erudite new cultural history of time, the distinguished Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill not only diagnoses this state of affairs but also seeks to remedy it. 

On 1985, the American poet and essayist Susan Howe deftly jettisoned any pretensions to objectivity in the field of literary analysis with her ground-breaking critical work My Emily Dickinson. The possessive pronoun in Howe’s title says it all: when a writer’s work goes out to its readers, it reignites in any number of imaginative and emotional contexts. What rich and varied screens we project onto everything we read.

At a time when critics are becoming increasingly interested in Australia’s war literature, Robin Gerster turns to it for an understanding of how national legends are created and perpetuated.

The Labyrinth begins with a woman walking through her childhood home – a decommissioned asylum. In middle age she moves to a run-down house by a wild and dangerous sea, where she notes her vivid and prophetic dreams. The house is convenient because she needs to be close to her son, an imprisoned artist. She befriends a stonemason who offers to carve her a gargoyle (which she refuses). Together they design and build her version of a labyrinth, a prayer or meditation path most famously realised in the great medieval cathedral of Chartres, although Lohrey’s antipodean labyrinth is not a homage to the Chartres labyrinth, or an imitation.

The American poet Robert Lowell (1917–77), I don’t suppose, intended to eclipse his contemporaries, competitors, rivals, wives, any more than in one of his poems the new esplanade along the Charles River intended to stamp down ‘grass and growth’, as he rather vaguely puts it, with ‘square stone shoes’, but it’s what he did. Now, in the almost half a century since his passing, and the end of ‘the age of Lowell’, as one critic christened it back in the 1960s, his largely unintended oppression has unbent; as in the Grimms fairy tale called ‘The Frog King’, one hears the succession of hoops giving way.

Penguin’s publication of Helen Daniel’s critical book on the fiction of David Ireland is their first venture into Australian criticism, and one which I hope will be the beginning of a series on Australian writers.

David Ireland is an obvious choice for the launching of such a venture. As Daniel points out, he does not have the international reputation or readership of White or Keneally; she seems to suggest that this is because he is a far more ‘adventurous’ and ‘elusive’ writer. He has always been a controversial author in Australia, winner of many major awards, placed on some school/university reading lists, while barred as ‘obscene’ by other institutions.

James Joyce’s Ulysses was published 100 years ago by American Sylvia Beach, who ran a Parisian bookstore called Shakespeare and Company. The early history of the work was marked by controversy and censorship. The centenary is being marked by numerous publications in celebration of the work by writers, academic Joyceans, and even the odd Irish ambassador. John McCourt’s Consuming Joyce: 100 years of Ulysses in Ireland traces the reception of Ulysses in Ireland. As much a book about Ireland as it is about Ulysses, it follows the critical, institutional, and popular reception/consumption of the work through the different phases of Irish history.