I was somewhere in the middle of Howard Jacobson’s 2010 Man Booker Prize winner The Finkler Question and finding it uncompelling. (Sorry, Howard.) I needed a potboiler pick-me-up stat. What better than…
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Articles on Literature
Displaying 721 - 740 of 760 articles
I spent most of 2013 living overseas and from afar Australia’s beauty and its fault lines came into sharp focus. In my reading I found myself searching for insight, and three Australian stories stood out…
Put simply, typography is the art of making language visible: designing what words look like on a page or screen. Before desktop computing, typography was a specialised trade. Now, anyone with access to…
Do you remember how people used to walk about with ghetto blasters, so you could hardly escape the high-volume throb of some visceral drumbeat? Being alive now is like having your head permanently wedged…
Last weekend columnist and broadcaster Phillip Adams published a piece in The Australian lamenting what he called the “coca-colonial cringe”: Like you I measure my life with American movies, music and…
The Costa book awards shortlists have been announced and the one thing that dominates people’s first reactions has been the fact the fiction shortlist is made up entirely of women authors. Is the response…
A great football novel is like a perfectly executed bicycle-kick goal, like players such as Argentine legends Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi; they come along once in a generation. Against the accumulated…
The writer and critic Margaret Drabble recently made an observation that I think is representative of the diverse and prolific career of the British author Doris Lessing, who died last night at 94: She…
A print designer by trade, I resisted eBooks until a single publication won me over: an edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land designed for the iPad, jointly produced in 2011 by publisher Faber and Faber…
Earlier this week, as you may have read, the University of Melbourne announced it had acquired the archives of a former student, feminist scholar and writer Germaine Greer. The total cost of the archive…
In 2012 Fremantle Arts Centre Press published The House of Fiction, a memoir by Susan Swingler. Last night the ABC’s Australian Story followed up with a program on Swingler and her book. Why all this interest…
New Zealand author Eleanor Catton has become the youngest ever author to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize for English literature. The 28-year old author won for just her second novel, The Luminaries…
The announcement of Alice Munro as 2013’s winner of the Nobel Prize for literature marks the high point in the 82-year old writer’s long career, but also a significant recognition for the form with which…
Readers of literary fiction are better placed to comprehend the complexity of social relationships and understand the mental…
The sudden death on Friday of the Irish Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney has focused international minds and media on the power of poetry to affect our lives. This is especially true from an environmental…
Crime fiction has become a truly global genre. Books based in Reykjavik, Oslo, or Barcelona now vie with home-grown works set in more recognisable, down-at-heel locations like Manchester or Northampton…
When it was revealed this weekend that JK Rowling was the author of a recent critically acclaimed but obscure crime novel - The Cuckoo’s Calling by one Robert Galbraith - it made perfect sense to many…
It seems we won’t be checking up on Max and the “Wild Things” any time soon. A campaign on crowdfunding website Kickstarter to fund a sequel to the late Maurice Sendak’s bestselling picture storybook Where…
Next year, senior students in Victoria will be able to study a graphic novel, The Complete Maus, as part of the prescribed English curriculum. As a literary and artistic form, graphic novels combine the…
It’s impossible to see a film with the hype of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby without preconceptions. The build-up to this film has been overwhelming with trailers splashed across screens everywhere…
Top contributors
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Associate Professor in Literary Studies, Monash University
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Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame Australia
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Executive Dean (interim) Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra
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Lecturer, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney
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Professor, Chair of Australian Literature, The University of Western Australia
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Honorary Fellow of the School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne
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Visiting Fellow, Centre for Cultural and Creative Research, University of Canberra, University of Canberra
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Senior Lecturer, Literature and Gender Studies, Victoria University
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Lecturer in Digital Arts & Humanities, University College Cork
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Emeritus Professor of Australian Literature, University of Sydney
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Professor of English, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, ACU, Australian Catholic University
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Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, La Trobe University
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Professor, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne
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Associate Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, Monash University
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Visiting Professor, University of Technology Sydney
