logo for Harvard University Press
Approaching Australia
Papers from the Harvard Australian Studies Symposium
Harold Bolitho
Harvard University Press, 1998
These papers, each by a notable Australian scholar, offer several approaches to the Australian experience, past, present, and future. The authors hail from different disciplines, but what they have in common is their familiarity with the United States and their experience in interpreting their homeland to an American audience. As they discuss poetry and politics, nationalism and feminism, Aboriginal society and urbanization, they also explore a common theme: the emergence of a distinctive Australian entity, and the contribution to it of the United States.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Imagining Australia
Literature and Culture in the New New World
Judith Ryan
Harvard University Press

Beginning in the last third of the twentieth century, Australian literary and cultural studies underwent a profound transformation to become an important testing ground of new ideas and theories. How do Australian cultural products project a sense of the nation today? How do Australian writers, artists, and film directors imagine the Australian heritage and configure its place in a larger world that extends beyond Australia's shores?

Ranging from the country's colonial beginnings to its more globally oriented present, the nineteen essays by distinguished scholars working on the cutting edge of the field present a multi-faceted view of the vast land down under. A central theme is the relation of cultural products to nature and history. Issues explored include problems of race and gender, colonialism and postcolonialism, individual and national identity, subjective experience and international connections. Among others, the essays treat major authors such as Peter Carey, David Malouf, and Judith Wright.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter