Literary Studies

When E.M. Forster published Aspects of the Novel in 1927, he was not writing as a critic, and the success of the book is due to precisely that. Forster gives us the intuitive judgements of a novelist – a series of rough observations full of verve. James Wood’s How Fiction Works is indebted to Forster’s study and turns on like questions (what constitutes a convincing character? How does narrative style shape a novel? What defines a telling detail?). But while he poses theoretical questions, Wood does not offer theoretical answers. And unlike Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel (1985), Wood is not interested in the way writers gloss their own creations.

Iris Murdoch’s first book of philosophy, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, was published in 1953 when she was thirty-four years old. A year later, Under the Net appeared, her first published novel. If not for the war and its aftermath – Murdoch worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration for two years – her first published works may have appeared earlier. And yet the years 1944 to 1953 provided fertile ground for the novelist. It was the period of her deep attachments with the great writers and philosophers (Raymond Queneau, Elias Canetti and Franz Steiner) who would seed many of the fictional characters in her future work. She wrote several novels before Under the Net – four or six, she was never quite clear. And for more than forty years she wrote prodigiously: twenty-six novels, five works of philosophy, several plays and a collection of poetry.

The Biographa literaria, to coin a phrase, began publication in 1978 and has now reached volume 272, Russian Prose Writers between the World Wars. It is a major work of reference that not only includes creative writers but also critics, publishers, journalists, historians and book collectors: ‘figures who in their time and in their way influenced the mind of a people.’ Most of the volumes deal with American and British literature, but others cover the literatures of Canada, a number of European countries, Latin America, Russia, Africa, Japan, and the literatures of classical Greece and Rome. Now Australia has been honoured with a place in this monumental work and the chance to have its literature on show around the world. The two Australian volumes published to date cover writers whose first important work was published up to the end of 1950. Two more volumes are planned to bring the story up to 2000.

The fourth issue in the new series of Heat, Burnt Ground, reproduces on the cover a segment of a beautiful watercolour by John Wolseley, wrought from his six-month stay in Sydney’s fire-flattened Royal National Park in early 2002. Along with many noteworthy contributions, a further eighteen colour pages of Wolseley’s lush sketches, entitled ‘Bushfire Journals’, make it an issue to treasure. Wolseley has written a diary to accompany his pictures, which tells us how ‘new shoots at the base of many of the burnt shrubs … spume out of their black bases like an army of bunsen burners’, and also illumines his unorthodox approach. With the help of a friend, he rubbed a vast roll of paper along the trees and over the ground: ‘a Banksia[’s] …sooty knobbly bark left a passage of black scales on the paper as if a huge reptile had moved over it.’ Wolseley’s narrative is more uneven than his sketches, but offers valuable insights into the way a painter digests and regurgitates his chosen material.

Blessed are the compilers of dictionaries, writers of reference books and encyclopedia entries – how would we access knowledge without them? But if they work in the Australian university system, they are not blessed by the Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, which awards no research points whatsoever for such activities. Lindy Abraham’s esoteric-sounding dictionary of alchemical imagery is a fine example of the kind of scholarly labour that doesn’t fit well with bean-counting bureaucrats’ notions of ‘productive’ research. With her assistance, we gain access to a world-view that had its roots in Hellenistic Egypt in 300 BC but, during the Renaissance, re-emerged as a powerful intellectual force: a precursor to modern science, as well as a systematic form of philosophy.

Clare Bradford is an Associate Professor in Literary and Communication Studies at Deakin University. She writes from within her discipline, and addresses other academics. Reading Race, despite its broad title, is principally a discussion of forms of racism that the author identifies in books published in colonial times, compared with contemporary examples.

In Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, much of the action occurs amongst the migrant clientele of the Hot Wax Club. The club is decorated with waxworks of England’s notable but unacknowledged migrant ancestors: Mary Seacole, Ignatius Sancho and Grace Jones, among others. As Leela Gandhi points out in her discussion of Rushdie’s novel, we are encouraged to read the Hot Wax clubbers as historians disinterring the nation’s past to reveal a secret history of immigration, a past which is used strategically to reshape understandings of contemporary Britain. The project of this book is similar. What happens when we examine representations of England and Englishness by writers who are travellers, émigrés and immigrants from its diaspora?