Sixteen of Australia's foremost poets are featured in this volume. They talk candidly about their lives and work: of the craft, the rigour, the pangs and pleasures of their calling; of winged moments caught, however fleetingly, on the page. These writers also speak of transformation and transcendence, the creative process, their individual modes and methods of writing and the act of writing itself. The interviews provide valuable insights on such topics as: gender and writing; landscape; the function of poetry and the poet's social role; influences embraced and withstood - literary, personal, local, regional, national, international. The writers and their poetry are discussed from both within and beyond Australian borders. This collection offers a broad range of Australian poets, most of whom are now in the middle to later years of their career. These poets have contributed significantly to the life and quality of poetry in Australia over recent decades, and continue to play pivotal roles in Australia's cultural domain today, as the country moves towards the threshold of a new century.

Women are rarely if ever mentioned in commentaries upon Australian Christianity and spirituality. Only exceptional women are recognized as authorities on religious matters. Why is this so? Does it matter? Don't people from the same religious tradition share similar experiences of the divine, regardless of their gender? Rewriting God asks whether women have been writing about the divine and whether their insights are different from those contained in malestream accounts of Australian Christianity and spirituality. An analysis of the writings of popular theologians and religious commentators over the last twenty years suggests that the most popular form of spirituality among Australian theologians is Desert Spirituality. An analysis of women's autobiographical writings, however, suggests that the desert is irrelevant to many women's spiritual experiences. This book, through a close investigation of the fictions of Thea Astley, Elizabeth Jolley and Barbara Hanrahan, attempts to posit alternative forms of women's spirituality and to signal ways in which this spirituality is already being expressed. From the evidence gathered here, it becomes obvious that traditional expressions of Australian Christianity and spirituality are gender-specific and that they have functioned to deny women's religious experiences and to silence their claims to equality in the sight and service of the divine. It becomes obvious, too, that women have been developing their own forms of religious expression and that these may be expected to supplant gradually withering images of Desert Spirituality. Whether this new imagery will strengthen Australian Christianity or whether it merely marks a decline in the authority of Christianity remains a moot point.

Written by established and emerging Indigenous intellectuals from a variety of positions, perspectives and places, these essays generate new ways of seeing and understanding Indigenous Australian history, culture, identity and knowledge in both national and global contexts. From museums to Mabo, anthropology to art, feminism to film, land rights to literature, the essays collected here offer provocative insights and compelling arguments around the historical and contemporary issues confronting Indigenous Australians today.

Unique in its field, exhaustive in scope, the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature offers a comprehensive account of Australian writing from European settlement in 1788 to the 1990s. It presents the most important achievements in the fields of fiction, poetry, and drama, and also covers non-fictional prose in journals, diaries, biographies, and autobiographies, and the impact of key historical events on Australian literature. Fully revised and updated, the second edition contains 500 new entries, bringing the total to 3050, reflects the greater influence and volume of women's and multicultural writing, and includes major new articles on crime fiction and the immigrant experience. Written in clear and accessible language, this major reference belongs on the shelf of every library and every lover of world literature.

" ... Documents the history and development of [Post-colonial literatures in English, together with English and American literature] and includes original research relating to the literatures of some 50 countries and territories. In more than 1,600 entries written by more than 600 internationally recognized scholars, it explores the effect of the colonial and post-colonial experience on literatures in English worldwide.

Draws on scholarship from leading figures in the field and spans Australian literary history from colonial origins, indigenous and migrant literatures, as well as representations of Asia and the Pacific and the role of literary culture in modern Australian society.

This impressive volume provides over 1,700 biographical entries on poets writing in English from 1910 to the present day, including T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Carol Ann Duffy. Authoritative and accessible, it is a must-have for students of English and creative writing, as well as for anyone with an interest in poetry.