Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Paul Salzman

Twenty years after the publication of their ‘inclusive Australian literary history’, The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 1970–1988, Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman have returned with a ‘sequel’, After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989–2007. One leaden title succeeds another, although the tone of the second book is angrier. More of that later. As the authors note in their preface, The New Diversity was published by McPhee Gribble, an independent outfit that would largely be subsumed by Penguin in 1989, the year in which that book appeared. This observation prepares for the consistently impressive aspect of After the Celebration: its detailed, incisive, intelligently informed account of the changes in the circumstances of publishing, and especially fiction publishing, in Australia during the last two decades. One might take counsels of hope or despair from their analysis (particularly if one were a novelist), but still be grateful for it.

... (read more)

Dear Editor,

This is a note to congratulate you on the quality of the latest Calibre Prize essays, by Jane Goodall and Kevin Brophy, in the April edition of ABR. The two pieces maintain the incredibly high standards of the Prize, of which I was honoured to be an inaugural judge.

... (read more)

The study of early modern women’s writing is today a thriving field, largely formed by innovative politically and sexually engaged work at the crossroads of historical and theoretical scholarship and teaching. What is often somewhat offhandedly referred to as the work of feminist recovery or canonical revision, an ongoing investigation of the print and manuscript archive of early modern women’s writing, was and is a charged project of materialist intervention and disciplinary critique designed to disturb, rather than simply supplement, the foundations of literary value and its pedagogical reproduction. The study of early modern women’s writing has been especially shaped by its engagements with the insights, assumptions and blindspots of the feminist literary history of post-Enlightenment women’s writing, the provocations and innovations of new historicism and cultural materialism, and the volatile encounter of identity politics, the politics of difference and the history of sexuality.

... (read more)

Blessed are the compilers of dictionaries, writers of reference books and encyclopedia entries – how would we access knowledge without them? But if they work in the Australian university system, they are not blessed by the Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, which awards no research points whatsoever for such activities. Lindy Abraham’s esoteric-sounding dictionary of alchemical imagery is a fine example of the kind of scholarly labour that doesn’t fit well with bean-counting bureaucrats’ notions of ‘productive’ research. With her assistance, we gain access to a world-view that had its roots in Hellenistic Egypt in 300 BC but, during the Renaissance, re-emerged as a powerful intellectual force: a precursor to modern science, as well as a systematic form of philosophy.

... (read more)

From Paul Salzman

Dear Editor,

It is a shame that allegations of plagiarism in The Hand That Signed The Paper were trivialised into questions of literary echoes that would certainly not have worried any serious member of that curious entity, the literary community. As someone deeply troubled by the anti-Semitism manifested in the novel, I have been interested to know where the Ukrainian material that ‘Demidenko’ defended as family history may have come from. Perhaps we will never know, but now it seems that the plagiarism issue was really something of a red herring, distracting attention from what was most disturbing about the novel and its attendant prizes. I cannot see that ‘postmodemism’, under any definition, could be blamed for this situation, given that the Miles Franklin judgment is based, I believe, on a bankrupt and outmoded humanism that sees abstract moral truth in literary works without having any sophisticated regard for politics or history.

... (read more)

This is, above all else, a timely novel. In an afterword describing the Beijing massacre, Nicholas Jose explains that he wrote Avenue of Eternal Peace in 1987. The novel ends with the growing push for democracy, with crowds milling in Tiananmen Square, and with a sense that change might be possible, if precarious. The afterword details the end of such hopes. Jose’s novel therefore has a strange air of elatedness surrounding it. On the one hand it offers a very rare example of contemporary Australian fiction confronting China. The fact that the map of history it stems from has changed so dramatically adds an extra fillip to the reader’s vicarious experience of the ‘new’ China, and especially of Australia’s increasingly blasé encounter with China – up until the recent repression. Perhaps it now stands as a testament to what might have been.

... (read more)

In her interview with Candida Baker for Yacker 2, Jessica Anderson expresses her dissatisfaction with the covers of a number of her books, citing in particular the glum face on the paperback of The Impersonators and the representation of The Commandant as, in Baker’s words, ‘a Regency romance’. Anderson, who began as a commercial artist, stresses that ‘Design and presentation ... really matter. They’re the introduction to a book.’ It seems to me to be particularly unfortunate (although she may well have given it her blessing) that her new book sports a clichéd Ken Done cover. Perhaps Done’s bright colours might evoke the ‘warm zone’ of the title, although Anderson is referring to Brisbane, not Done’s mock-naïve view of Sydney. Unfortunately, the cover subliminally suggests that Anderson’s writing is sunnily comforting, easily assimilated.

... (read more)

Serge Liberman is that unfashionable thing, a committed writer. Not committed to a party-line, of course, but to a literature of engagement with humanity. A parable that seems to illustrate his view of the artist’s role is provided by a story entitled ‘The Poet Walks Along High Street’. The poet, Gabriel Singer, walks along a street pointed towards ‘Erehwon Creek’, peopled by allegorically named figures.

... (read more)

Peter Cowan’s new novel The Color of the Sky is an elliptical, even enigmatic, narrative. Although specifically labelled a ‘novel’, it is a novella in its concision pf narrative explanation; as well as in its length. The layers of event and reminiscence are multifarious enough to fill out a hefty tome but are compressed in such a way that they become almost cryptic messages requiring considerable deciphering on the part of the reader.

... (read more)

Paul Salzman has wit and judgement. He knows his chosen period is usually thought of as a lean one for prose fiction; he is anxious not to be typed as ‘the indefatigable in pursuit of the unreadable.’ He sees himself as the cartographer of a largely uncharted region: his main aim is to give us an idea of what is there.

A writer in this situation would like to be able to report on neglected masterpieces. Salzman is too sensible to make extravagant claims: the claims he does make are the more believable because they are modest. If he fails to find a seventeenth-century rival to Clarissa or Middlemarch, he nevertheless turns up some long and short fictions that deserve to be better known than they are. Mary Wrath’s Urania, ‘a feminist reading of the romance form’ which exposes ‘the less salubrious underside of the courtly code’, is one. It is apparently the earliest published work of fiction written in English by a woman. (It was suppressed soon after publication because it allegedly played ‘palpably and grossly’ with the reputations of certain influential people whom it portrayed under fictional names.)

... (read more)
Page 1 of 2