A History of Australian Literary Criticism

This book offers an investigation into the historical evolution of Australian literary criticism since the late 1890s. It looks into different traditions and different schools or paradigms in Australian critical thinking. It highlights the processes in which critical ideas came together to shape and reshape Australian literature in each historical period of time. And it especially focuses on the ways in which Australia accommodated and indigenized ideas and methodologies from overseas to create its own critical traditions. The book divides itself into four parts, namely, the Nationalist period, the New Critical period, the Theory period and the Post-Theory period and then scrutinizes each period through a critical analysis of a number of theorists and movements. Part One examines the rise of early Australian literary criticism in the work of A.G. Stephens, then digs into the nationalistic work of P.R. Stephensen, Vance Palmer, A.A. Phillips, Judith Wright, and the work of the Jindyworobak Movement participants, and the Communist social-realists for a study of a variety of nationalism’s manifestations in the early part of 20th century. Part Two traces the rise of New Criticism in mid-20th century Australian literary criticism and examines it as a fervent advocate of universalism through the work of such critics as G.A. Wilkes, Leonie Kramer, Vincent Buckley, A.D. Hope, and James McAuley. Part Three looks at the rise of Theory after the 1960s as manifested through the advent in Australia of such Euro-American ideas as structuralism, deconstruction, semiotics, poststructuralism, New Leftism, feminism, postcolonialism and cultural studies. Part Four presents a picture of the fall of Theory in Australian literary criticism after the 1990s when Theory came under either direct attack by more traditional theorists like Dorothy Green, or serious interrogation by the general public in the debates about Helen Demidenko and David Williamson’s Dead White Males and it points to some of the latest developments of Australian literary criticism in the present century. The book concludes by arguing that, despite its multiple internal debates, Australian literature has in the last century or so successfully forged a critical tradition through borrowing ideas from overseas and that its experience of indigenization has a lot to say to many other countries, China included.