INTRODUCTION

More than once in recent times literary criticism has found itself in the unfamiliar circumstance of being front-page news in Australia. Controversies about the ethical and historical responsibility of literature and criticism, and a series of high-profile scandals about the identities of some celebrated authors, have brought into the public domain debates about literary theory that might otherwise have remained within the university. There have been echoes of American “culture wars” about political correctness and the destruction of the canon. We have become familiar with talk about a crisis in literary studies. In the pages of the higher journalism, the universities have been accused - in one sense correctly - of having abandoned literary values and tradition for theory, ideology or pop.

Literary criticism in the universities has undergone dramatic changes over last two decades. There has been a new confidence in the relevance of literary studies to broader issues of cultural and political importance, such as questions of ethnicity in the nation's history. But the changes in literary studies have also been driven by anxieties about the point of literary criticism in a postmodern or "post-media" world. Literary studies has typically become a kind of cultural studies. This has increased its scope and worldliness, but perhaps, too, its sense of significant cultural dynamics that exist beyond traditional notions of the literary.