In the last decade of the nineteenth century as Australia moved towards Federation, fiction writers began to depart from the generic conventions of romance and melodrama, and from the construction of the reader as essentially a British consumer looking for exotic and colourful tales of the colonies. Writers like Henry Lawson, Miles Franklin and Joseph Furphy were more interested in depicting what was “Australian”from an insider's point of view; the Australian landscape and ideas about the Australian “national character” moved to the foreground in fiction around the turn of the century.

This, at least, is how things appear to be. The truth is more complicated: in this as in all eras, the kind of fiction that had the best chances of survival, in both the short and the long term, was the kind encouraged by editors and publishers. As Susan Sheridan and others have argued, during this period women writers of "romance" fiction were edged out of the Australian picture by writers whose work addressed more overtly the issues around nationhood. Barbara Baynton, if anything an anti-romance writer, survived this particular cut but still had her work heavily edited, the better to fit prevailing ideas about what it ought to be. In turn-of-the-century Australia where editors and publishers were scarce, the few who did exist had disproportionate power over what sort of literature would be published, read and valued in its own society. An obvious example is the legendary A.G. Stephens of the Bulletin, an inspired andinterventionist editor, later a publisher, with strong views about what Australian literature was and ought to be.

FROM THE BEGINNING: ORAL TRADITIONS

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia have been telling stories since time immemorial. Although Indigenous oral cultures were once believed to be dying out, it is clear today, in Australia and elsewhere, that many aspects of these ancient cultures have survived in Indigenous communities, and are now thriving as a living, evolving part of contemporary life. Oral songs and narratives are traditionally an embodied and emplaced form of knowledge. Information is stored in people's minds in various narrative forms which, at the appropriate time, are transmitted from the mouths of the older generation to the ears of the young. Many narratives are connected to specific sites, and are transmitted in the course of people's movements through their country. Certain songs and stories are only transmitted in specific ceremonial contexts, while others circulate in the informal settings of everyday life. For oral traditions to survive, then, “the learning generation” must be in direct physical proximity to “the teaching generation”.People must also have access to significant sites in their country, and be free to perform their ceremonies, speak their languages, and carry out their everyday cultural activities.

For many readers, critics and writers, Australian literary biography and autobiography are rich and complex domains. In this chapter the texts themselves will be used as points of departure, and anchors of a series of cross-sections which will stress the importance and energy of this writing from the very beginnings of European settlement, although the focus will remain on contemporary examples. One of the pleasures of these books is their ongoing interrogation of ways of writing about the self and subjectivity; some of the best critiques of biographical and autobiographical writing occur in the primary texts themselves. Another pleasure, and further reason to modify a chronological approach, is that nineteenth-century Australian life-writing remains very much alive, and continues to emerge anew in the present. The past is not settled. Extensive bibliographical and critical work continues to challenge Australian literary history by revealing hitherto “invisible lives” in nineteenth-century materials, so bringing a much larger volume of autobiographical writing into bibliographical records. Furthermore, the recent work of critics who draw on the methods of feminist criticism, deconstruction and/or new historicism has produced rereadings of many nineteenth-century texts. So, for example, in the wake of Paul Carter's The Road to Botany Bay (1987), the writings of explorers like Sturt and Mitchell, or Watkin Tench's journals, previously categorised as “descriptive writing”, may now be read as autobiographical acts, allowing insight into the historical, cultural and social contexts which shape the autobiographic subject. Lucy Frost's A face in the glass. The journal and life of Annie Baxter Dawbin (1992) also uses a nineteenth-century journal as the basis of a biographical study of Annie Baxter, weaving together the autobiographical journal and a contemporary biographical account.

THE SHAPING OF A THEATRE

As the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel said, “those who don't know the past are bound to repeat it”. A great body of Australian drama has been written in the last two centuries, but the repertoire of Australian plays is still relatively small, partly because the dramatic canon is rarely revived. Theatres have instead been encouraged by audiences and funding bodies constantly to renew themselves. This has led to a tendency to stage a catalogue of productions without any sense of the traditions to which the plays belonged, or the larger context in which they were written. Australian drama has kept re-inventing itself without forging a theatrical culture.

But before there is a repertoire there has to be a tradition. First of all, Australian theatre had to be invented. The task of chronicling a country, a psyche, an identity from an apparent tabula rasa was an intimidating one, as the poet Judith Wright points out. She also argues that the perception of living in an "upside-down hut" caused a sense of disconnection which stifled creative development through "death by apathy". That the language of drama was that of British and American theatre did not help the feeling of inferiority from which the phrase "cultural cringe" was coined. This inherent suspicion of inadequacy is brilliantly satirised in David Williamson's Don's Party: "[My prick] isn't small. I just think it is."

Contemporary Australia, with its escalating population, greater social and political complexity, widening economic structures and marked cultural diversity, has provided a fertile ground for novelists. The New Left radicalism of the late 1960s, followed by the politics of women's liberation, led to freer cultural attitudes, enabling literary experimentation and allowing much greater licence in what fiction could speak about. Rapid changes also occurred in the material and institutional structures of Australian literary culture, with increased public funding for writers and publishers and the consolidation of teaching and research in Australian literature. This conjunction of cultural and material factors contributed to a “massive increase in the production of Australian fiction” after the early 1970s. A new recognition that Australian society was not homogeneous, but made up of many groups with competing interests and political claims, each seeking a cultural space, influenced the fictional preferences of publishers and readers. This chapter is interested in the effects of such social and cultural changes on the field of contemporary Australian fiction. While it is structurally convenient to refer to dates and decades, the explanatory force of such chronologies is often inadequate and sometimes misleading, especially in relation to the complex social and institutional contexts of contemporary fiction. Modes of writing constantly escape the boundaries which such chronologies propose (realism in the 1940s and 1950s, modernism in the 1960s and 1970s, and so on), and there is much overlap and movement between apparently convenient period divisions.

In 1898, Henry Gyles Turner, a banker and litterateur, and Alexander Sutherland, a schoolteacher and journalist, both from Melbourne, published The Development of Australian Literature. This opened with the first of many attempts to provide “A General Sketch of Australian Literature”, which devoted forty-seven pages to poetry, about thirty to fiction and eighteen to “general literature”:mainly history, biography, and works of travel and exploration. The bulk of Turner and Sutherland's book, however, consisted of biographies of the three Australian writers whom they thought were of greatest significance: poets Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall and novelist Marcus Clarke.

Turner and Sutherland's privileging of poetry, inclusion of what we would now call "non-fiction" and exclusion of more popular genres like children's writing and drama established a view of the terrain of Australian literature which was to hold good for at least the first half of the twentieth century. Further introductory accounts were provided by Nettie Palmer in 1924, the American historian and critic C. Hartley Grattan in 1929, and H.M. Green in 1930. In 1961 Green finally followed this up by producing his monumental two-volume A History of Australian Literature Pure and Applied. As its title indicates, Green's account was by far the most comprehensive yet to appear, not only discussing the "pure" categories of poetry, fiction and drama, but a very wide range of "applied" works, from newspapers and magazines through to works of philosophy and anthropology. Indeed, for the period it covers - 1789-1950 - Green's is effectively a history of the Australian book and so has proved of continuing value as a work of reference.

The English colonisation of Australia from 1788 coincided with a vast increase within the parent culture of both general literacy and the ready availability of reading matter. By the end of the nineteenth century, almost all of the white adult population of Australia could read and write, with the Australian colonies making up one of the major overseas markets for English publishers. By 1900, too, Australian readers were beginning to develop something of a taste for writing about Australia and about themselves. Though the local publishing industry was still printing very few books, the many newspapers and magazines, which had flourished since the 1860s in particular, regularly serialised novels by Australian authors, as well as printing poems, short stories and essays. Through the pages of the Sydney Bulletin, established in 1880 to rapidly become Australia's most popular magazine, writers like Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson became well known. When, in the mid-1890s, volumes of their poems and stories were issued by the fledgling publishing house of Angus & Robertson, they sold in their thousands. Certain works of the earlier novelists Marcus Clarke and Rolf Boldrewood, which had also been serialised locally before achieving book publication in Britain, remained popular thanks to their adaptation for the stage. But for much of the nineteenth century, and indeed afterwards, Australian readers were mainly interested in books by English authors and Australian authors were largely dependent on the English publishing industry. This chapter will trace some of the major changes in what people read and wrote in Australia from 1788 to 1901, with a particular focus on nonfiction, fiction, poetry and writing for children.

Contemporary Australian poetry has often been viewed in terms of factionalism (in which revolutionary forces opposed reactionary ones), followed by a period of pluralism. This model relies on secondary oppositions: internationalist/nationalist; experimental/traditional; urban/rural; modernist/ anti-modernist; anti-formalist/formalist; political/non-political. The opposing positions are occupied by the young poets who appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, known as the “Generation of '68” (or, more generally, the New Australian Poetry), and an “establishment” or “humanist”wing made up of older figures (such as A.D. Hope) and younger writers (such as Les Murray and Robert Gray).

This literary history is relatively convincing, and poets have employed it themselves, but it does not always reflect the actual state of affairs. Oppositional models can also mask anxieties, such as whether contemporary poetry could be said to have a history, whether Australian poets fully engage in contemporary practices, and what constitutes Australian poetry. The '68ers were often the most vocal, but not the only, poets to question matters of style, subject matter, influence, audience and a national poetry, in response to the changing status of writing, technologies and markets with(in) which poets worked.

INTRODUCTION

More than once in recent times literary criticism has found itself in the unfamiliar circumstance of being front-page news in Australia. Controversies about the ethical and historical responsibility of literature and criticism, and a series of high-profile scandals about the identities of some celebrated authors, have brought into the public domain debates about literary theory that might otherwise have remained within the university. There have been echoes of American “culture wars” about political correctness and the destruction of the canon. We have become familiar with talk about a crisis in literary studies. In the pages of the higher journalism, the universities have been accused - in one sense correctly - of having abandoned literary values and tradition for theory, ideology or pop.

Literary criticism in the universities has undergone dramatic changes over last two decades. There has been a new confidence in the relevance of literary studies to broader issues of cultural and political importance, such as questions of ethnicity in the nation's history. But the changes in literary studies have also been driven by anxieties about the point of literary criticism in a postmodern or "post-media" world. Literary studies has typically become a kind of cultural studies. This has increased its scope and worldliness, but perhaps, too, its sense of significant cultural dynamics that exist beyond traditional notions of the literary.

Contemporary criticism tends to dismiss the New Criticism as a type of asocial formalism. The New Critics, it is claimed, disconnected the literary text from its social and historical context and were solely concerned with the practice of close reading. As Terry Eagleton has put it, close reading did ‘more than insist on due attentiveness to the text. It inescapably suggests an attention to this rather than to something else: to the “words on the page” rather than the context which produced and surrounded them.’

However, nothing could be further from the spirit of the New Criticism as a movement than this description. The figures who promoted and established the New Criticism as a mode of literary analysis were anything but asocial formalists, at least not in the ways that Eagleton and others define this term. Indeed the central preoccupation, and even the principal motivation, of those who championed the New Criticism was a concern with the condition of culture and society within twentieth-century America, and it was in order to disseminate their criticism of that condition that they developed and promoted the New Criticism as a mode of study. Through that development the New Criticism established the basis for later modes of academic literary criticism, altering, as it did, the definition of literary studies within the academy. It was the New Criticism which shifted the dominant forms of academic study from philology, source-hunting, and literary biography to textual analysis, literary theory, and what is now understood as ‘literary analysis’.

William Empson's first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity, begun while he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, was published in 1930, when he was twenty-four. It established him at once and permanently as one of the two most brilliant practitioners of what he called verbal analysis, more commonly known as close reading. Only R. P. Blackmur had equal (if differently angled) gifts, and the two men were often grouped together as the critics who, as Stanley Edgar Hyman said, ‘did the work’ of intricate literary exploration, where others had preached or proposed it.

‘Close reading’ is a familiar phrase now, but we need to pause over it for a moment, since its implications have shifted rather drastically over the years, as those of catchphrases often do. I. A. Richards, Empson's teacher at Cambridge, later said his former pupil's ‘minute examinations … raised the standards of ambition and achievement in a difficult and very hazardous art’. The art was reading, and Richards himself had discovered (and reported in Practical Criticism (1929)) how inattentive and prejudiced even apparently serious reading could be. Close reading was rigorous reading, the opposite of loose or distant or offhand appreciation or criticism, and its appetite for detail produced many surprises. It was meant to complement historical knowledge, indeed might be said itself to offer historical knowledge, since the behaviour of words is an aspect of social life. Close reading then became a major instrument of the New Criticism, and the technique gradually came to suggest, in the minds of its detractors and sometimes even in the minds of its proponents, a concentration on the text to the exclusion of all context, as if words in literature had a separate, exclusive, self-contained life.

The prominence accorded to I. A. Richardsin the present volume is owing in large part to his having pioneered and encouraged the scrupulous, verbally oriented teaching and reading of literature which has been standard practice in English and American secondary schools and colleges since the 1930s. Among academic critics the theoretical aspects of the Richards legacy have been passed along – with some alteration – through the writings of the American New Critics and such related figures as Kenneth Burke, R. P. Blackmur, and Richards's student William Empson. It is only if one emphasises his influence on the anonymous practice of classroom teaching, however, that one realises his full historical importance; and in so doing one brings to the fore his remarkably broad range of interests, which include linguistics, psychology, philosophy, and the theory of education.

Ironically enough from his own point of view, it was just when the influence of his early work on the theory of literary interpretation came most to be felt and admired, in the 1930s and 1940s, that Richards himself turned away from literary issues and diffused his attention across the much broader field of language and communication in general; and while his later work found new readers among such unified field theorists as the Encyclopedists of Unified Science, the General Semanticists, the United World Federalists, and the promoters of Basic English, Richards's original readers among the literary critics, who were devoted to what John Crowe Ransom liked to call the ‘special ontology of the poem’, tended to lose interest.

F. R. Leavis was one of the most potent single influences on English studies in the earlier and middle part of the twentieth century. He is best known for his radical revaluation of the accepted canon of English literature, and his impact lies in the revaluative activity itself as much as in the particular set of judgements it involved. His principal concern was with English literature as the expression of a distinctive culture. His radical revaluations, along with his sense of what it means to belong to a particular tradition, rest upon a comprehensive conception of literature and language. Furthermore, his career spanned the rise, and the subsequent renewed questioning, of English as an independent academic discipline. He maintained a passionate and intellectually grounded belief in the distinctiveness, and the cultural centrality, of English as a critical discipline, a belief which cannot be adequately described as liberal humanist, even if he would not have repudiated either term. The main purpose of the present essay will be to explicate his central belief as it is manifest with in his critical judgements. Accordingly, there follow in turn: a career survey covering the main Leavisian themes and occasions; a summary account of his conception of literature and language; an examination of his idea of social tradition of which the literary tradition is an integral part; a principled look at his rereading of literary tradition in respect of poetry and the novel; a brief look at some of the critics associated with Leavis including fellow contributors to Scrutiny: and finally a comment on the limitations and continuing significance of Leavis's thought about literature and criticism as he has himself become more distinctly an historical figure.

In concluding his History of Criticism (1900–4), Saintsbury remarked that ‘the personnel of Criticism’ had been ‘enlarged, improved, strengthened in a most remarkable degree’ during the preceding fifty years. Citing Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold as the most distinguished practitioners of ‘this New Criticism’, he looked forward to its dissemination and to the ‘possible institution of a new Priesthood of Literature, disinterested, teaching the world really to read, enabling it to understand and enjoy’ (III, pp. 606–7). As Saintsbury all but says, that priesthood could only be the professoriate. During the next fifty years, ‘criticism, once the province of nonacademic journalists and men of letters, became (with exceptions) virtually the monopoly of university departments’ (Graff, Professing Literature, p. 14).

At the beginning of the century, the distinction between men of letters and professors was not so sharp as to prevent movement from one occupation to the other. Later, universities served as occasional havens for writers and poets who also happened to be critics. In these cases, the academy was simply a site for the production of criticism that might incidentally reflect the circumstances of its creation. There was a more integral relation between the site and the activity in the criticism of those who spent their entire careers in universities, but within this encompassing category, discriminations are necessary. Some were also poets whose critical interests were related to their creative practice (Richards, Empson, Blackmur, and Winters, for example). Scholar-critics (A. C. Bradley, C. S. Lewis) constitute another category, and scholar-theorists (René Wellek, R. S. Crane, W. K. Wimsatt) a third. And a few made signal contributions as editors – such as Leavis and Ransom, who, in Scrutiny and The Kenyon Review, brought together the practical criticism that is the most noteworthy innovation of academic criticism in the first half of the century.

Today most literary criticism takes place in institutions of higher education, and most literary critics, by virtue of their academic qualifications and institutional employment, are considered (and consider themselves) to be members of a profession. Indeed the widespread use by publishers of the term ‘academic writing’ is an acknowledgement that most of what is called literary criticism is now written for professional and pedagogic purposes. It is rare for the professional critic to address a general (that is a non-academic) audience. A hundred years ago, however, matters were rather different. The professional procedures with which we are now so familiar were then being put into place for the first time, and reaction to them was mixed. In The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde has Algernon Moncrieff deflate Jack Worthing's intellectual pretensions with the comment: ‘literary criticism is not your forte my dear fellow. Don't try it. You should leave that to people who haven't been at a University.’ Wilde was referring to the newly professionalised academic literary critic, a species from which he constantly and strenuously tried to distance himself. Moreover, he was not unique in his antagonism to professionalisation. For the next thirty years or so a number of critics, located for the most part outside institutional structures, also attempted to resist the discourses of the new academic professionalism. They did so in a variety of ways: they adopted different styles and objectives, wrote on different topics, but principally they addressed their work to a different audience.

If nothing else, the Harlem Renaissance was productive of controversy. During the relatively brief period of its active life, from the early 1920s to the early 1930s, it provoked a number of notorious literary battles. Contention ranged from specific works like Claude McKay's Home to Harlem and Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven to the movement as a whole, which was characterised by its proponents as a new beginning in African-American life and by its critics as race betrayal or, in George Schuyler's words, mere hokum. Thus the Renaissance, even more than most self-conscious literary movements, generated and depended upon literary criticism. Such criticism was even more crucial for the Harlem movement because the battle to judge and define its productions was a racial and political as well as a literary one. To a very great extent this remains true: disagreements about the Renaissance usually do not concern the particulars of individual works but rather the significance of the movement as a whole. Thus Houston Baker's polemical defence, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, is not about Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, but rather about Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke, polemical and critical writers whose importance lay in the way they interpreted and presented to the nation the achievements of African America.

The most significant literary criticism of the Harlem Renaissance, therefore, has to do not with individual works but with the movement as a whole, not with matters of literary form and execution but rather with the role of literary art in the larger political and social world.