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.

The wider issues raised by last year’s Bill Henson affair […]

Political Tourists: Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1940s, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Rasmussen; Melbourne University Press, 2008, $49.95.

The phenomenon of Soviet fellow travellers is well known—true believers from the West who travelled to the Soviet Union between the 1920s and the 1950s, many deliriously wanting to believe it was a burgeoning paradise. They were duchessed into believing their dreams were true. The exhaustive exposé on this topic is Paul Hollander’s book Political Pilgrims.

The End of Ideology and the Rise of Religion by William D. Rubinstein; The Social Affairs Unit, 2009, £10.

Professor William Rubinstein lived in Australia from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. A polymath, he has written on wealth in Australia and Britain, on genocide studies, on Shakespeare and, with his wife Hilary, on the history of the Jews in Australia. His departure was a great loss to Australian intellectual life. Rubinstein’s new publication is a 30,000-word monograph on a number of wide-ranging developments over recent decades. The monograph is subtitled “How Marxism and Other Secular Universalistic Ideologies Have Given Way to Religious Fundamentalism”. In parallel with the fading of Marxism, Rubinstein documents the decline of religion in the West, though he notes some exceptions. While we are secularising, other parts of the world are resacralising, with religion as the driving force, the most dramatic example being the rise of Islamist religious fundamentalism.

Journey Without Arrival: The Life and Writing of Vincent Buckley by John McLaren. Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009, $39.95. The Melbourne poet, critic and academic Vincent Buckley, who died in 1988, was a frequent contributor to Quadrant over the decades, with ten poems, fifteen articles (including one called “The Strange Personality of Christ”) and three book reviews. 

This book by the well-known Hungarian author Tibor Meray has […]

ETHNIC NATIONALISM, the desire for one’s race to be pure […]

The legend of Henry Lawson which arose after his death […]