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Eleanor Dark (1901-85) is one of Australia's most innovative 20th-century writers. Her extensive oeuvre includes ten novels published from the early 1930s to the late 1950s, and represents a significant engagement with global modernity from a unique position within settler culture. Yet Dark's contribution to 20th-century literature has been undervalued in the fields of both Australian literary studies and world literature. Although two biographies have been written about her life, there has been no book-length critical study of her writing published since 1976.Middlebrow Modernism counters this neglect by providing the first full-length critical survey of Eleanor Dark's writing to be published in over four decades. Focusing on the fiction that Dark produced during the interwar years and reading this in the context of her larger body of work, this book positions Dark's writing as important to the study of Australian literature and global modernism.Melinda Cooper argues that Dark's fiction exhibits a distinctive aesthetic of middlebrow modernism, which blends attributes of literary modernism with popular fiction. It seeks to mediate and reconcile apparent binaries: modernism and mass culture; liberal humanism and experimental aesthetics; settler society and international modernity. The term middlebrow modernism also captures the way Dark negotiated cosmopolitan commitments with more place-based attachments to nation and local community within the mid-20th century. Middlebrow Modernism posits that Dark's fiction and the broader phenomenon of Australian modernism offer essential case studies for larger debates operating within global modernist and world literature studies, providing perspectives these fields might otherwise miss.

One of the giants of Australian literature and the only Australian writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick White received less acclaim when he turned his hand to playwriting.In Patrick White's Theatre, Denise Varney offers a new analysis of White's eight published plays, discussing how they have been staged and received over a period of 60 years. From the sensational rejection of The Ham Funeral by the Adelaide Festival in 1962 to 21st-century revivals incorporating digital technology, these productions and their reception illustrate the major shifts that have taken place in Australian theatre over time. Varney unpacks White's complex and unique theatrical imagination, the social issues that preoccupied him as a playwright, and his place in the wider Australian modernist and theatrical traditions.

Combining literary criticism with book history, Carter and Osborne explore how Australian authors and their books fared in the US market from the 1840s through to the 1940s, most notably in the 1880s and 1890s and then between the two World Wars.

In The Fiction of Tim Winton, Lyn McCredden explores the work of a major Australian author who bridges the literary-popular divide.Tim Winton has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award a record four times and has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His novels and short stories are widely studied in schools and universities, and have been lauded by critics both in Australia and internationally. Unusually for an Australian literary author, he is also one of the country's most enduringly popular writers: Cloudstreet was voted 'Australia's favourite book' in a poll conducted by the ABC, his books regularly appear on bestseller lists, and his stories have been adapted for the stage, television, cinema and opera.In this wide-ranging study of Winton's work and career, McCredden considers how Winton has sustained a strong mainstream following while exploring complex themes and moving between genres. Attending to both secular and sacred frames of reference, she considers his treatment of class, gender, place, landscape and belonging, and shows how a compassion for human falling and redemption permeates his work. She demonstrates how his engagement with these recurring ideas has deepened and changed over time, and how he has moved between - and challenged - the categories of the 'popular' and the 'literary'.

Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays is the first collection of scholarly essays on the work of the acclaimed Australian-born, New York-based author. In the course of the last half century, Hazzard''s writing has crossed and re-crossed the terrain of love, war, beauty, politics and ethics.Hazzard''s oeuvre effortlessly reflects and represents the author''s life and times, encapsulating the prominent feelings, anxieties and questions of the second half of the 20th century. It is these qualities, along with Hazzard''s lyrical style that place her among the most noteworthy Australian writers of the 20th century.Hazzard''s work has been duly praised and admired by many including the critic Bryan Appleyard who describes her as ''the greatest living writer on goodness and love''. In 2011, novelist Richard Ford observed: ''If there has to be one best writer working in English today it''s Shirley Hazzard.''

Alex Miller: the ruin of time is the first sole-authored critical survey of the respected Australian novelist's eleven novels.

Australia has been seen as a land of both punishment and refuge. Australian literature has explored these controlling alternatives, and vividly rendered the landscape on which they transpire. In Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead, Nicholas Birns tells the story of how novelists, poets and critics responded to this condition.

Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (1796-1880) arrived in Sydney in 1838 and became almost immediately notorious for her poem "The Aboriginal Mother," written in response to the infamous Myall Creek massacre. She published more poetry in colonial newspapers during her lifetime, but for the century following her death her work was largely neglected. In recent years, however, critical interest in Dunlop has increased, in Australia and internationally and in a range of fields, including literary studies; settler, postcolonial and imperial studies; and Indigenous studies.This stimulating collection of essays by leading scholars considers Dunlop's work from a range of perspectives and includes a new selection of her poetry.

ElizabethHarrower: Critical Essays is the first collection of critical writing onHarrower's fiction. Featuring essays by leading researchers in Australianliterature, this volume offers new insights into a writer at the crossroads ofmodernism and postmodernism, and invites readers to read Harrower's work in anew light.

Over the course of the 19th century a remarkable array of character types appeared - and disappeared - in Australian literature. Some had a powerful influence on the colonies' developing sense of identity; others were more ephemeral. But all had a role to play in shaping and reflecting the social and economic circumstances of life in the colonies.

Gail Jones: Word, Image, Ethics is an accessible guide to the writings of the award-winning Australian author Gail Jones.

'Fallen Among Reformers' focuses on Stella Miles Franklin's New Woman protest literature written during her time in Chicago with the National Women's Trade Union League (1906-1915).

Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One coincides with a renewed interest in his work. It includes an important new essay by Murnane himself, alongside chapters by established and emerging literary critics from Australia and internationally. Together they provide a stimulating reassessment of Murnane's diverse body of work.

This is the first critical study to focus on Stead's time in America and its influence on her writing.

Richard Flanagan: Critical Essays is the first collection of critical writing on Flanagan's fiction. Featuring 12 essays from leading scholars, this volume offers new insights on how his native Tasmania has influenced Flanagan as a writer, and the impact that he has had on Australian and world literature.