A highly entertaining and thoroughly researched walking guide to many of Sydney's famous literary landmarks, including galleries, pubs, theatres, libraries, newspaper offices, parks and museums. It tours the homes and bohemian haunts of legendary Australian writers, such as Patrick White, Les Murray, Germaine Greer, Thomas Keneally etc.

'I don't think I've seen a more impressive collection of Australian writers in a single book.' Stephen Romei, The Australian One of the central moral issues of our time is the question of asylum seekers, arguably the most controversial subject in Australia today. In this landmark anthology, twenty-seven of Australia's finest writers have focused their intelligence and creativity on the theme of the dispossessed, bringing a whole new perspective of depth and truthfulness to what has become a fraught, distorted war of words. This anthology confirms that the experience of seeking asylum – the journeys of escape from death, starvation, poverty or terror to an imagined paradise – is part of the Australian mindset and deeply embedded in our culture and personal histories. A Country Too Far is a tour de force of stunning fiction, memoir, poetry and essays. Edited by award-winning writers Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally, and featuring contributors including Anna Funder, Christos Tsiolkas, Elliot Perlman, Gail Jones, Raimond Gaita, Les Murray, Rodney Hall and Geraldine Brooks, this rich anthology is by turns thoughtful, fierce, evocative, lyrical and moving, and always extraordinarily powerful. A Country Too Far makes an indispensable contribution to the national debate. 'There is a passion about the book, and a moral, emotional and artistic synergy that makes for deeply satisfying reading. It is as if the contributors have themselves felt dispossessed, not of their land, but of the idea of their own country, and have seized the opportunity to reclaim it . . . A fine book like A Country Too Far, one that inspires both compassion and anger, can change the way people think and act, and encourage them to expect more from themselves and their nation.' Sydney Morning Herald 'A Country Too Far represents the varied and vibrant voice of writers speaking out as Australia contravenes its obligations to refugees. Its stories, poems, memoirs and essays collect their work into an eloquent refusal of silence in the face of, as John Tranter writes: 'this/ fetch of disparate peoples/ assigned to come possessionless into massive/ light '.' Weekend Australian 'Brilliant testimony from some of our finest writers.' Anne Deveson 'The strength of the book is its range of genres and depth of perspective . . . a book to pass on to others who don't necessarily share its perspective or those who do but need sustenance. But it's also a book for holding onto and dipping into again . . . A Country Too Far is part of a literary tradition in which authors attempt to face the social context in which they live . . . to resist political word games with other words.' The Guardian 'With asylum seekers high on Australia's moral, social and political agenda, you'll want to make room on your reading list for A Country Too Far . . . [these] 27 Australian poets, authors and journalists . . . have thoughtfully and beautifully expressed their ideas and views on the complexities of the refugee issue.' InStyle 'A stunning anthology and searing moral work that beautifully gives voice to the voiceless without preaching at any point . . . In a political era where there appears to be no bottom to the barrel of immigration policy, A Country Too Far is timely, important and wise.' readings.com.au 'Don't buy a copy of this book. Buy two. Send one to a federal politician.' Newcastle Herald 'A Country Too Far, co-edited by Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally, is a timely attempt to set the record straight about asylum seekers in Australia, to counter the negative media propaganda and to protest at the government's treatment of them. Featuring some of Australia's finest writers, it is an immensely readable, humane collection of fiction, memoir, poetry and essays.' Lucy Popescu, huffingtonpost.co.uk 'Profoundly important. It deftly and eloquently touches on so many of the key tensions and issues in this debate . . . We can only hope that this collection is widely read and that it stirs within us a desire to reclaim the compassion that we once had and demand from our leaders a more humane policy.' Sydney Review of Books 'So disturbing and awakening, it is capable of changing even the most firmly cemented opinions.' New Standpoints

This book examines literary representations of Sydney and its waterway in the context of Australian modernism and modernity in the interwar period. Then as now, Sydney Harbour is both an ecological wonder and ladened with economic, cultural, historical and aesthetic significance for the city by its shores. In Australia’s earliest canon of urban fiction, writers including Christina Stead, Dymphna Cusack, Eleanor Dark, Kylie Tennant and M. Barnard Eldershaw explore the myth and the reality of the city ‘built on water’. Mapping Sydney via its watery and littoral places, these writers trace impacts of empire, commercial capitalism, global trade and technology on the city, while drawing on estuarine logics of flow and blockage, circulation and sedimentation to innovate modes of writing temporally, geographically and aesthetically specific to Sydney’s provincial modernity. Contributing to the growing field of oceanic or aqueous studies, Sydney and its Waterway and Australian Modernism shows the capacity of water and human-water relations to make both generative and disruptive contributions to urban topography and narrative topology

This book is a research guide to the literatures of Australia and New Zealand. It contains references to many different types of resources, paying special attention to the unique challenges inherent in conducting research on the literatures of these two distinct but closely connected countries.

Shakespearean Spaces in Australian Literary Adaptations for Children and Young Adults offers a comprehensive examination of Shakespearean adaptations written by Australian authors for children and Young Adults. The 20-year period crossing the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries came to represent a diverse and productive era of adapting Shakespeare in Australian literature. As an analysis of Australian and international marketplaces, physical and imaginative spaces and the body as a site of meaning, this book reveals how the texts are ideologically bound to and disseminate Shakespearean cultural capital in contemporary ways. Combining current research in children’s literature and Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital deepens the critical awareness of the status of Australian literature while illuminating a corpus of literature underrepresented by the pre-existing concentration on adaptations from other parts of the world. Of particular interest is how these adaptations merge Shakespearean worlds with the spaces inhabited by young people, such as the classroom, the stage, the imagination and the gendered body. The readership of this book would be academics, researchers and students of children’s literature studies and Shakespeare studies, particularly those interested in Shakespearean cultural theory, transnational adaptation and literary appropriation. High school educators and pre-service teachers would also find this book valuable as they look to broaden and strengthen their use of adaptations to engage students in Shakespeare studies.

‘Locating Australian Literary Memory’ explores the cultural meanings suffusing local literary commemorations. It is orientated around eleven authors – Adam Lindsay Gordon, Joseph Furphy, Henry Handel Richardson, Henry Lawson, A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Nan Chauncy, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Eleanor Dark, P. L. Travers, Kylie Tennant and David Unaipon – who have all been celebrated through a range of forms including statues, huts, trees, writers’ houses and assorted objects. Brigid Magner illuminates the social memory residing in these monuments and artefacts, which were largely created as bulwarks against forgetting. Acknowledging the value of literary memorials and the voluntary labour that enables them, she traverses the many contradictions, ironies and eccentricities of authorial commemoration in Australia, arguing for an expanded repertoire of practices to recognise those who have been hitherto excluded.

This book traces the beginnings of literary (narrative) journalism in Australia. It contributes to evolving international definitions of the form, while providing a glimpse into Australia’s early press history and development as a nation. The book comprises two parts. The first examines the forerunners of literary journalism before and during the establishment of a free press, including the letters, diaries and journals of the early colonists, as well as sketches published in the first magazines and newspapers. The book asks if these were “reporting” when there was no thriving press until well into the 19th century -- many were written by women and convicts whose voices otherwise went unheard. The second part examines the first expressions of literary journalism in forms more recognisable today, covering topics as varied as homelessness in Melbourne, the Queensland trade in Pacific Islander labour, and Australia’s involvement in overseas wars, particularly the Boer War. The resulting cultural history reveals important milestones in the development of Australia’s press and literature, while demonstrating the concerns unveiled in colonial literary journalism still resonate in Australia in the 21st century.

This book offers a comprehensive and original reading of Australian poetry, from the colonial period to the present, through the dual lenses of Romanticism and negativity. Paul Kane argues that the absence of Romanticism functions as a crucial presence in the poetry of all the major Australian poets. This absence or negativity is both thematic and structural, and Kane's scrupulous analyses uncover important relations between Romanticism and negativity. Chapters on nine individual poets explore and substantiate the theoretical claims informed by the work of contemporary critics of Romanticism and by various philosophers of negativity. These chapters can serve as a series of self-contained readings of Australian poets for the use of students, scholars, and informed general readers. Australian Poetry is unique in its sustained argument and theoretical sophistication.

"Beginning with Felicity Castagna's warning about the dangers of cultural labelling, this collection of essays takes resistance against conformity and uncritical consensus as one of its central themes. From Aleesha Paz's call to recognise the revolutionary act of public knitting, to Sheila Ngoc Pham on the importance of education in crossing social and ethnic boundaries, to May Ngo's cosmopolitan take on the significance of the shopping mall, the collection offers complex and humane insights into the dynamic relationships between class, culture, family, and love. Eda Gunaydin's 'Second City', from which this collection takes its title, is both a political autobiography and an elegy for a Parramatta lost to gentrification and redevelopment. Zohra Aly and Raaza Jamshed confront the prejudices which oppose Muslim identity in the suburbs, the one in the building of a mosque, the other in the naming of her child. Rawah Arja's comic essay depicts the complexity of the Lebanese-Australian family, Amanda Tink explores reading Alan Marshall as a child and as an adult, while Martyn Reyes combines the experience of a hike in the Dharawal National Park and an earlier trek in Bangkong Kahoy Valley in the Philippines. Finally, Yumna Kassab's essay on Jorge Luis Borges reminds us that Western Sydney writing can be represented by no single form, opinion, style, poetics, or state of mind." - Publisher website.