I thought you and your readers would like to see the first overseas of the review of the anthology, published by W.W. Norton under the title of The Literature of Australia: An Anthology, with a special foreword by Tom Keneally.

It’s from this week’s Time Out in London:

Read full review here.

In academic or research terms when people refer to the ‘literature’ they simply mean all the things that have been written regarding the subject. So this anthology is properly named, in that way, or alternatively, if you simply removed the word ‘literature’ from the title of this anthology and substituted the word ‘writing’ there would be no cause for discomfort, would there?
In fact if we stopped using the word literature altogether there would be no real harm done, except to some people’s blood pressure….would there?

I’m interested though by your view there’s been a negative response to the anthology, because that hasn’t been my impression at all. Indeed I would have said quite the opposite: by and large the reviews have been positive, and the project has enjoyed considerable goodwill from the literary community (I can’t speak for teachers but it’s heartening to hear it’s already proving useful).

That said, I have to confess that I actually liked Peter’s review. Not because I necessarily agree with what he’s saying, but because it’s so obviously designed to cause trouble. Whether that’s responsible or not, or good reviewing or not are separate questions but I very much doubt we’d be having the conversation we are now if he’d written a broadly positive review. I know he’s made me think about the collection rather harder than I had, and his review has elicited fascinating responses from both you and Kerryn (and others I’ve had off-site) all of which have served to remind us that Australian writing can matter, and to make us ask some questions about what it is, what it’s for, and how we should think and talk about it. Which is, as Ken points out above, exactly what a collection like this should do, and is all to the good as far as I’m concerned.

Mitzi, I’m so glad the anthology looks useful to you. Have a read of Olga Masters’ truly wonderful story ‘The Christmas Parcel’ if you don’t know it already. You could call it not-enough-food writing. It’s also about children in NSW, so since that should make it “relevant” (*spits*), you might be able to sneak it in under the radar, and the fact that Olga Masters was Roy Masters’ mother should count for something too.

PEN and Macquarie managed to do more than six years of work to attempt it, and as a result, teachers are already using it as a classroom resource. I speak as a teacher and a mini-minion who did some early research into the absence of our own local Doorstopper akin to the Norton. During the research I loved finding a 1960s anthology that contained a recipe for pumpkin scones, alongside excerpts from ‘The Getting of Wisdom’. I baked these pumpkin scones for the first PM Anth meeting and we digested them with relish along with the future of Aust.lit. So nyaah to those who put boundaries on literature. In fact, I’d like to see a whole section devoted to contemporary food writing next time round, but you can’t always get what you want. But I think in the Anthology, the we are getting what we need.

It’s up to the Little Magazines (that lovely but diminished tradition) and the niche publishers to give us our sexy belles lettres: and it’s up to the Doorstoppers to haul our literary heritage over the big hump of the turn of our century. Us English teachers can decry the pastichery and abysmal desecration of literature that was the postmodern pillaging of The Syllabus, but – it’s what we’re stuck with, until the next education revolution reverts back to those funny things like truth and beauty (the subjective stuff.) Until then, the parity between ‘Romulus My Father’ and whatever the hell a kid can find that “relates” to it as a text will have to do. Aust.lit is locked into being taught in the NSW system where relativity and de-privileging (of anything once ‘literary’ or more experimental than the generic mainstream) are the foremost approach. If Quality has suffered as a result of the leveling, well, oops! Academics and critics must face themselves in that mirror before readers should have to.

The wonderful thing about things like the Jerilderee letter and other bits of random unliterary nuggets (A Drover’s Wife’s shopping list may appear one day and I’d not be surprised) is that it makes the Anthology multi-disciplinary, in schools, particularly. Some teachers are made to teach up to four different subjects a day, especially when they are being nice to departments who provide frquent slices of cake and a relax between the forever uphill grind. Imagine having an Anthology that could inspire you and your lessons for English, Drama, History, Geography, Visual Art and beyond? Even the Classics -David Maouf’s wonderful translations exercise, for starters.

I think the belles lettres mavens need to allow for a little pragmatism.

I am so excited I have an opinion on this, I may repost it on my blog.

MgB

More importantly though, I think your point about audience is a good one: the anthology isn’t a cultural monument built in isolation, but a text created to be used, mostly by students and mostly overseas, and as such it needs to contextualize itself as it goes.

To most scholars of Australian lit it’ll be clear that Craven’s review is extremely misleading about the anthology’s contents and aims. The review includes a number of specific indications that Craven has, um, ignored the introductory essays, not to mention anything that happened before 1950. One would never guess, reading that review, that the anthology covers over 200 years of settlement, or that many of the lofty criticisms in the review have actually been addressed in the various (substantial and scholarly, in every case) introductory essays, which have not only not been engaged with but have not even been mentioned.

The most interesting question, as you rightly point out, is how we define ‘literature’. Both Ivor Indyk and Peter Craven are well known as traditionalists in this respect and in each case their response on this front was predictable. If Peter Craven had read the general editor Nick Jose’s introductory essay and engaged with it thoughtfully, his review might have been worth reading. Ivor, on the other hand, read the book very carefully and his review was state-of-the-art, whichever bits of it one might have agreed or disagreed with.

(The migrant writers he missed were of a very particular kind, though he muddied those waters by saying first up that ‘representation of migrant writers is poor’, which was what I was responding to at m’blog. Ivor’s review was actually quite positive except for that and one or two other points, BTW.)

The ‘What is literature’ question came up in the Book Show interview that Nicole Moore, Prof Rob Dixon and I did with Ramona Koval on July 31. We argued to Ramona that the documents in question had literary qualities, including the use of rhetoric to persuade and to move the reader, and that this was enough to make a place for them in an inclusive anothology like this one.

The Jerilderie Letter (selected by pre-1900 section editor Prof Elizabeth Webby, though you’d never know that from Craven’s review) is a good example of one of the things we were trying, as a team, to do with the anthology: two of my selections were Delia Falconer’s wonderful Kelly story ‘The Republic of Love’ and the first couple of pages of True History of the Kelly Gang, and both are rendered (even) richer by easy reference to the Kelly saga’s ur-document, with which neither schoolchildren nor international readers can be assumed to be familiar. Since the anthology was conceived with thoughts of secondary and tertiary education in mind as well as other things, much attention was paid by all of us to the way that the included pieces would speak to and illuminate each other.