Patrick White¿s classic 1965 drama The Season at Sarsaparilla is `a charade of suburbia¿¿a play of shadows, rather than substance. The neighbours that populate the play are held by their environment, waiting with determination, but little expectation, for the inevitable cycle of birth, copulation and death.

'Jim Sharman is one of Australia's visionary greats: low-brow, high-brow, pop yet classical, fearless and fun.' Baz Luhrmann Blood and Tinsel is a stunning self-portrait-lyrical, wry, smart and uncompromising-of one of the most daring Australian directors. Jim has perched ringside at the carnival of his own times and it's a hot ticket! 'The Sharman/Shaman/Showman firmament twinkles with galaxies as diverse as Rocky Horror, Hair, discovering Kubrick, Lou Reed, Weimar cabaret. He made Australian creativity hip and original and international when it really mattered.' Geoffrey Rush In Blood and Tinsel, Jim Sharman takes us on an epic personal journey from his colourful childhood in his father's boxing troupe to Tokyo, London, Berlin and Sydney via the international successes of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. Whether recounting conversations with Lou Reed, giving us the inside story about Rocky Horror or describing a fateful meeting with Patrick White, Jim Sharman casts a brilliant story of the people and events that have shaped the times. Blood and Tinsel ranges from the rough and ready world of outback Australia in the fifties, where boxers and panto dames shared the stage, to the cultural explosions in which Sharman played a part. Blood and Tinsel is a remarkable story about Australia. It is also a moving tribute to a family legendary in the entertainment stakes.

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.

Imagination and the Creative Impulse in the New Literatures in Englishbrings together the proceedings of a symposium organised by the editors at the University of Trento in 1990. At a time when the study of the post-colonial literatures is gaining more widespread recognition, scholars based mainly at universities in Italy and Germany were invited to address the manner in which writers are giving literary expression to the complexity of contemporary post-colonial and multicultural societies and to consider, from their differing perspectives on the new literatures, central questions of formal experimentation, linguistic innovation, social and political commitment, textual theory and cross-culturality. Focusing on such major writers such as Achebe, Soyinka and Walcott, as well as on lesser-known figures such as Jack Davis, Witi Ihimaera, Rohinton Mistry and Manohar Malgonkar, the contributors take up many themes characteristic of the new literatures: the challenge posed to traditional authority, the expression of national identity, the role of literature in the liberation struggle, modes of literary practice in multicultural societies; the relationship of the new literatures in English to that of the former metropolitan centre; and the complex intertextuality characterizing much of the literary production of post-colonial societies.

“Varney combines a theoretically astute sense of the hybridity of the dramatic event, with a dense but lucidly rendered sociological history of White’s plays as they progress through different productions, revivals, and receptions … This is an essential insight, and one which could be usefully extended to White’s novels, and perhaps to Australian modernism broadly.” - Jonathan Dunk, Australian Book Review One of the giants of Australian literature and the only Australian writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick White received less acclaim when he turned his hand to playwriting. In Patrick White’s Theatre, Denise Varney offers a new analysis of White’s eight published plays, discussing how they have been staged and received over a period of 60 years. From the sensational rejection of The Ham Funeral by the Adelaide Festival in 1962 to 21st-century revivals incorporating digital technology, these productions and their reception illustrate the major shifts that have taken place in Australian theatre over time. Varney unpacks White’s complex and unique theatrical imagination, the social issues that preoccupied him as a playwright, and his place in the wider Australian modernist and theatrical traditions.

This is the first book-length study which uses recent developments in literary and cultural theory to elucidate Patrick White's life and work. Taking advantage of recently published letters and biographical information, it rethinks White's place in our history and culture. It places White inpostwar Australia, arguing that he is best regarded as a writer whose rather conventional modernist writings negotiated the end of colonialist relations with Britain. It addresses connections between White's homoerotic sexuality and his writing head-on, suggesting that many of his texts, notablyVoss, attain some of their most powerful effects from being written in and about the closet. Professor During also views Patrick White as an autobiographical writer who drew on his life-history to construct an image of himself as a genius: a strategy which successfully set him at the head ofAustralian national literature. It is likely that future studies of White will be in debt to this pioneering work of criticism.

Exploring Suburbia is the first book-length study of suburbia in Australian literature; it addresses a long-neglected and underexamined area within Australian literature and analyzes novels by some of Australia's most important writers from a new perspective, in addition to examining novels previously neglected by critics. This book provides new insights and perspectives on fourteen Australian novels, several of which are canonical works that have been analyzed extensively by other scholars. This study will lead to a reassessment of the novels and authors under discussion and prompt further research into suburbia in Australian literature. It demonstrates that that the authors who have explored suburbia since 1961 have already moved Australian literature in a new direction, away from the traditional focus on the bush and the city, demonstrating that the literal and theoretical space between the city and the bush contains the most interesting and important engagements with contemporary Australian culture. Exploring Suburbia is an important addition for collections in literature. It will also be an excellent textbook for professors teaching courses on space and culture in literature. It will also, of course, be an essential read for courses in Australian and international literature.