After the Second World War, a related genre of narratives of captivity emerged. These follow the same pattern of youthful innocence and immersion in war, but there they diverge to a place where the individual is subject to deliberate abuse, loses all power but must keep going. The pattern shifts from the epic of battle to the journey of quest, where the hero is trapped in a slough of despondency. At its lightest, this genre comprises heroic tales of capture, resistance and escape. At its strongest, it includes memoirs of the Holocaust, and later the Gulags, where the life of the individual lacks even the desperate coherence found in soldiers’ accounts.

Murray-Smith had taken the motto for the new journal from Joseph Furphy’s description of his novel Such Is Life: ‘temper democratic; bias, offensively Australian’. Furphy had intended this as a declaration that his novel had nothing in common with what he regarded as effete and gentlemanly writers like Henry Kingsley ...

Laurie Clancy’s death this July is a great loss to Australia’s literary community, and a particular cause of sorrow to Overland. Although Laurie was b inclination attached to Overland, a chance combination of circumstances led to his inclusion in the Meanjin team for one of the annual cricket matches that enacted the rivalry between the […]

The PEN/Macquarie Anthology of Australian Literature has attracted ill-judged criticism from reviewers who would have preferred a treasury of great writing rather than the comprehensive picture that this collection gives us of 225 years of Australian writing. The new Cambridge History of Australian Literature, on the other hand, has been received much more calmly.