A tale inspired by the plight of the Australian Aborigines follows a clash between a powerful family, tribe leaders, and mobsters in a sparsely populated northern Queensland town, a conflict marked by the machinations of a religious zealot, a murderous politician, and an activist.

In recent years, Australian literature has experienced a revival of interest both domestically and internationally. The increasing prominence of work by writers like Christos Tsiolkas, heightened through television and film adaptation, as well as the award of major international prizes to writers like Richard Flanagan, and the development of new, high-profile prizes like the Stella Prize, have all reinvigorated interest in Australian literature both at home and abroad. This Companion emerges as a part of that reinvigoration, considering anew the history and development of Australian literature and its key themes, as well as tracing the transition of the field through those critical debates. It considers works of Australian literature on their own terms, as well as positioning them in their critical and historical context and their ethical and interactive position in the public and private spheres. With an emphasis on literature’s responsibilities, this book claims Australian literary studies as a field uniquely positioned to expose the ways in which literature engages with, produces and is produced by its context, provoking a critical re-evaluation of the concept of the relationship between national literatures, cultures, and histories, and the social function of literary texts.

Chapter on Aboriginal literature.

This unique book on neurocognitive interpretations of Australian literature covers a wide range of analyses by discussing Australian Literary Studies, Aboriginal literary texts, women writers, ethnic writing, bestsellers, neurodivergence fiction, emerging as well as high- profile writers, literary hoaxes and controversies, book culture, and LGBTIQA+ authors, to name a few. It eclectically brings together a wide gamut of cognitive concepts and literary genres at the intersection of Australian literary studies and cognitive literary studies in the first single-author volume of its kind. It takes Australian Literary Studies into the age of neuroawareness and provides new pathways in contemporary criticism.

'Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field' is the first book to use digital humanities strategies to integrate the scope and methods of book and publishing history with issues and debates in literary studies. By mining, visualising and modelling data from 'AustLit' - an online bibliography of Australian literature that leads the world in its comprehensiveness and scope - this study revises established conceptions of Australian literary history, presenting new ways of writing about literature and publishing and a new direction for digital humanities research. The case studies in this book offer insight into a wide range of features of the literary field, including trends and cycles in the gender of novelists, the formation of fictional genres and literary canons, and the relationship of Australian literature to other national literatures.

Australia has been seen as a land of both punishment and refuge. Australian literature has explored these controlling alternatives, and vividly rendered the landscape on which they transpire. Twentieth-century writers left Australia to see the world; now Australia’s distance no longer provides sanctuary. But today the global perspective has arrived with a vengeance. In Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead, Nicholas Birns tells the story of how novelists, poets and critics, from Patrick White to Hannah Kent, from Alexis Wright to Christos Tsiolkas, responded to this condition. With rancour, concern and idealism, modern Australian literature conveys a tragic sense of the past yet an abiding vision of the way forward. Birns paints a vivid picture of a rich Australian literary voice – one not lost to the churning of global markets, but in fact given new life by it. Contrary to the despairing of the critics, Australian literary identity continues to flourish. And as Birns finds, it is not one thing, but many. "In this remarkable, bold and fearless book, Nicholas Birns contests how literary cultures are read, how they are constituted and what they stand for … In examining the nature of the barriers between public and private utterance, and looking outside the absurdity of the rules of genre, Birns has produced a redemptive analysis that leaves hope for revivifying a world not yet dead." - John Kinsella