Much of this book was conceived while I was a rector-funded visiting fellow at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS), UNSW Canberra. My thanks to Nicole Moore for inviting me and for her friendship and hospitality; to the HASS Head of School, David Lovell, for his support; and to Marilyn Anderson-Smith, Beibei Chen, Heather Nielsen, Shirley Ramsay, Stefan Solomon and Christina Spittel for their collegiality. “Locals” in Canberra who provided a supportive atmosphere for this project included Belle Alderman, Michael Austin, Sean Burges, Tim Bonyhady, Andrew Clarke and Lee Wallace. Other Australian scholars who have helped with this project are Lachlan Brown, David Carter, Louise D’Arcens, Toby Davidson, Robert Dixon, Delia Falconer, Michael Griffiths, Melissa Hardie, Ivor Indyk, Antoni Jach, Brian Kiernan, Vrasidas Karalis, Lyn McCredden, Fiona Morrison, Brigitta Olubas, Brigid Rooney, Vanessa Smith and Michael Wilding. Non-Australians who provided help are Andrew Arato, Juan E. De Castro, Catherine Gale, Mark Larrimore, Cecile Rossant, Sarah Shieff, Nick Smart, Henry Shapiro, and my parents and other friends and family. I am grateful to Peter Carey and John Kinsella for their kind and understanding advice and to Australian writers in general for being patient with critical scrutiny. I hope this is the book Vivian Smith envisioned when he and I discussed the outlines of this project at Circular Quay in January 2010.
Essays of mine adjacent to this book though not part of it shed light on some figures undertreated here. David Malouf is given a full overview in my essay for the 2014 special issue of the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL) on his work, while there is more on Tim Winton in my essay in Tim Winton: Critical Essays, edited by Lyn McCredden and Nathanael O’Reilly (University of Western Australia Press, 2014). Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap and Elliot Perlman’s Three Dollars, as well as their precedents in D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo, are examined in my 2009 JASAL article “Something to Keep You Steady”. Patrick White’s relationship to late modernity is examined in “The Solid Mandala and Patrick White’s Late Modernity” in Transnational Literature, November 2011. Other work of mine on Gerald Murnane’s recent fiction is to be found in my reviews of A History of Books in Antipodes and Southerly, both published in 2013. More on Stead’s For Love Alone is to be found in my article in the first issue of the Chinese Journal of Australian Cultural Studies, edited by Wang Guanglin of Songjiang University in Shanghai. Shirley Hazzard’s United Nations short stories, mentioned with respect to Frank Moorhouse in Chapter 7, are examined in my essay in Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays, edited by Brigitta Olubas and published by Sydney University Press in 2014. The prehistory of Alexis Wright’s representation of Indigeneity in The Swan Book, as discussed in Chapter 6, is sounded in two essays in Telling Stories: Australian Life and Literature 1935–2012, edited by Tanya Dalziell and Paul Genoni (Monash University Press, 2013), which give background on Aboriginal themes in white writing before the specific onset of “concern” in the post-Mabo era. Further treatment of Wright on my part appears in Lynda Ng’s casebook on Carpentaria, forthcoming in 2016 from Giramondo Publishing, as well as my piece on Australian colonial governmentality, forthcoming in 2016 in Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature, edited by Michael Griffiths (Ashgate Publishing Group). I am grateful to Philip Mead and Ian Henderson for originally soliciting some of these ideas.
Robert Dixon, as editor of this series, provided detailed and much-needed assistance, drawing on his vast knowledge of Australian literary studies. Robert is not only one of the great contemporary scholar–teachers of Australian literature; he also has a deep concern for the field worldwide. Despite the internet, to work in Australian literary studies outside Australia is still to be at a decided logistical and informational disadvantage, and Robert’s diligent and attentive assistance to me helped to remedy this gap. I really appreciate the dedication and professionalism of Sydney University Press, including Susan Murray’s expert direction of the project, Agata Mrva-Montoya’s timely and enthusiastic interventions, and Denise O’Dea’s thorough and percipient copy-editing.
My larger debts to the community of Australian literary scholarship and its pioneering American exponents are recorded in the first chapter. The death of Herbert C. Jaffa, news of which I received while beginning work on Chapter 1, marked the loss of an American who faithfully and selflessly loved Australia and its literature.
In Canberra, I lived near Anzac Parade, and thought continually of the Australian veterans of both world wars, who helped to ensure that we face no more dire problems than those of late modernity and neoliberalism.
This book was partly written on territory historically associated with the Ngunnawal people. I acknowledge them and their custodianship and unceded sovereignty of the land.