The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, edited by Peter Pierce; Cambridge University Press, 2009, 622 pages, $140. Cyril Hopkins’ Marcus Clarke,  edited by Laurie Hergenhan, Ken Stewart and Michael Wilding; Australian Scholarly Publishing in association with the State Library of Victoria, 2009, 339 pages, $39.95. These two books on Australian literature appear at a time when the teaching of the subject at universities has reached crisis point. There are now only two professors of Australian Literature, compared with eighteen in Creative Writing, and numerous others in Cultural and Media Studies. The latter fashionable areas have swallowed up the former. From…