The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel

This book provides a clear, lively, and accessible guide to the complex histories and vital present of the Australian novel.

Covering writers from Michelle de Kretser to Gerald Murnane, Alexis Wright to Helen Garner, The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel provides a contemporary view of Australian fiction, including unprecedented coverage of First Nations authors. This book is an excellent reference source on a subject of growing interest to researchers.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. The book begins with novels by literary visitors to Australia and concludes with those by refugees. In between, the reader encounters the Australian novel in its splendid contradictoriness, from nineteenth-century settler fiction by women writers through to literary images of the Anthropocene, from sexuality in the novels of Patrick White to Waanyi writer Alexis Wright's call for a sovereign First Nations literature. This book is an invitation to students, instructors, and researchers alike to expand and broaden their knowledge of the complex histories and crucial present of the Australian novel.