This chapter traces the development of Judith Wright’s poetics, outlining her early focus on specific places and their legacies rather than on ideas of nation. It offers close readings of poems like “South of My Days,” “Bullocky,” and “Bora Ring.” The chapter then identifies mid-career attention to interpersonal relations before considering Wright’s growing awareness of settler-colonial privilege, Aboriginal sovereignty, different orders of temporality, and a continued expression of love for the land. The chapter reflects on the impact of Wright’s friendship with Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and analyses “Two Dreamtimes.” It also examines Wright’s decision in 1990 to forego writing poetry in order to embrace environmental activism.

The Miles Franklin Literary Award has traditionally been Australia’s most prestigious prize. In the past generation, though, it had been challenged by newer awards with different rubrics, such as the Prime Minister’s Award and the Melbourne Prize; prizes of a fundamentally different nature, such as the Patrick White Literary Award given to underrated senior writers; and international awards such as the Booker and the Nobel for which Australians have become increasingly viable candidates. In response, the Miles Franklin broadened its formerly nationalist criteria and became more open to Indigenous, female and younger writers. This chapter discusses the significance of the award in the global publishing market of the twenty-first century, focusing both on how it spotlighted important writers and also made those quirky literary judgements which make literary prizes interesting.

“The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel provides a clear, lively, and accessible account of the novel in Australia. The chapters of this book survey significant issues and developments in the Australian novel, offer historical and conceptual frameworks, and demonstrate what reading an Australian novel looks like in practice.”

This chapter lays out the reasons that the verse novel has been unusually prominent in Australia, considering key examples such as Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994), a lesbian detective thriller, and the four other significant verse novels she composed, to the late 1980s trio of Laurie Duggan (The Ash Range), John A. Scott (St Clair) and Alan Wearne (The Nightmarkets). It then goes on to discuss Indigenous and Asian-Australian practitioners of the verse novel form such as Ali Cobby Eckermann and Ivy Alvarez.

The coincidence between the events on 9/11 in Santiago in 1973 and New York in 2001, earlier observed by Ariel Dorfman, lends itself to an analysis of the spiral of Bolaño’s oeuvre from the trauma of the 1970s Chilean dictatorship to the neo-globalizing moment that overlapped with the world dissemination of Bolaño’s work. Bolaño is nostalgic for the Allende era in Chile when meaningful social change seemed possible. Yet he is conscious that it was the authoritarian force and neoliberal economics of the Pinochet regime that was truly prophetic of the future. The nostalgic and the counterfactual, the elegiac and recursive, intertwine as Bolaño looks back on his generation’s odyssey and sees analogies for its trauma in the femicides of 2666. A nodal point of this intertwining is the tenth anniversary of the coup on September 11, 1983, where a group of “masochistic Chileans” meet in Paris in The Savage Detectives, poised between a past they never knew and a future they can scarcely envision. Bolaño knows he has to face the necropolitics of the then-present and not the nostalgia of the deferred past; yet the dream of the Allende era is never entirely renounced in his oeuvre.

A total novel

The novels published by Mario Vargas Llosa in the 1970s marked a significant turn in his writing. Unlike those of the 1960s, arguably the most complex examples of high modernist literature in the Latin American canon, the novels of the 1970s – Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (Pantaleón y las visitadoras, 1973) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (La tía Julia y el escribidor, 1977) – are characterised by their deft use of humour, their storylines filled with narrative incident and pastiche, and their overall accessibility to general readers. These novels, despite their commercial success, had raised questions among a significant minority of critics, including some of the most influential, about a possible decadence of the Peruvian novelist or a commercialisation of his literature.

The publication of The War of the End of the World (La guerra del fin del mundo) in 1981 signalled for many a return to the ambitious novelising of Vargas Llosa's first period. For instance, Peruvian critic Antonio Cornejo Polar found that ‘with The War of the End of the World, Vargas Llosa again shows his ability to propose extremely vast and complex narrative projects and to develop them with unusual efficacy and ingenuity’. The Uruguayan Angel Rama, another great Latin American literary critic of the period, was even more enthusiastic, proclaiming the novel ‘amasterpiece’, and predicting that in ‘one hundred years … it will be mentioned as one of the key novels of this second half of the twentieth century. Rama even declared Vargas Llosa to be ‘our greatest living classic [writer]’. The doubts that, at least for some, had been generated by the turn in Vargas Llosa’s writing had been answered by the publication of a work that equalled the highest achievements of his earlier period.

On both voyages Anthony Trollope made to Australia, in 1871 and 1875, he passed through the Suez Canal. Suez was not originally British in inspiration, and was not, in origin, the arterial capstone of empire it later became. This is visible in Trollope’s short story, “George Walker at Suez” (1861), where an Englishman’s unglamorous participation in the canal construction hardly bespeaks the later pivotal role that Suez played in visions of empire. In this story, the squalor of Suez is contrasted with the comforts of Friday Street in London. Yet Suez was to be the channel by which British comforts were able to reproduce themselves many times over in lands beneath the equator.

On his trips to “the Antipodes” (a term covering both Australia and New Zealand and signifying their being nearly at the opposite end of the world from Britain), Trollope had to make long-term plans: wrapping up novels before he left, conducting whirls of socializing on the advent of his departure, making complicated logistical arrangements. Yet before Suez the voyages would have been so long as to be virtually implausible. After Suez they became so routine as to be prosaic, as Trollope observed after his second journey in 1875.

This Chapter Covers Australian poetry of the modernist era, involving the figure of Kenneth Slessor, who is arguably not only the most talented poet Australia has ever produced but also one whose work has raised questions about the identity and thrust of Australian poetry that have resounded throughout the era.

Australian poetry in the era of Kenneth Slessor’s generation did not enjoy an “efficient market” with respect to a world audience. To have an “efficient market” in finance means that stock prices reflect all available information, and that therefore everybody knows all the factors that lead to a stock’s valuation. But, in Slessor’s era, if a poet of distinction arose in Australia, he or she was not immediately recognized by the world as a poet of distinction. Thus the low esteem placed on Australian poetry in metropolitan centers did not reflect all information available at that time. This situation was well described by described in 1980 by Chris Wallace- Crabbe, himself an accomplished poet, as one of “unilateral free trade” (Wallace-Crabbe, xxx). Australia received foreign poetries but did not export its own. Though this condition has not been totally rectified, Australian poetry in the twenty-first century suffers from far less of a comparative disadvantage.

That an efficient market did not exist proceeded from various factors — Australia’s perceived remoteness and isolation, the fact that Australia was not a “hotspot” of political crisis, and Australia’s perceived rejection of modernism. In addition, the world was not ready for the idea of multiple centers of literary production. It was far simpler to believe that anything worthwhile would be written in London or New York, sparing the need to monitor developments in Sydney and Melbourne. That Kenneth Slessor or Judith Wright is not better known outside Australia is because of these historical circumstances.

There are fundamental critical assumptions entailed in seeing Slessor as the center of modernist Australian poetry. First of all, a Slessor-centric perspective excludes those poets born before 1900 (the general approach of this volume); a look at the birth dates of the central figures of Anglo- American modernist poetry — Eliot, Yeats, Stevens, Pound, Crane — would show how limiting this approach would be outside Australia, and that it is only justified within Australia by assumptions of cultural belatedness, an aspect of “the cultural cringe.”