Writing Now
Australian Settler Colonial Fiction and Middlebrow Culture in the Twenty-First Century
Summary
– Tony Hughes-D’Aeth, Professor & Chair in Australian Literature, University of Western Australia
“An astute and sympathetic exploration of the contradictions and complexities of contemporary settler Australian fiction in its uncomfortable engagement with colonial power. Compellingly written, impressively researched and very persuasive, this is a book I’ve been waiting for.”
– Maggie Nolan, Associate Professor and Director of Austlit
Writing Now maps the distinctive literary and cultural dynamics of twenty-first-century Australian settler fiction. This book identifies a set of tropes that comprise an essential cultural vocabulary for settler colonial authors representing issues of race, history, and belonging in the twenty-first century. Through a close reading of seven novels, the author describes how the old tropes of colonial writing are transformed as writers engage with middlebrow literary institutions, counter-colonial discourses, and the genre codes of popular fiction. So, too, with models of settler authorship: examining a rich field of literary promotion, the author reveals how settler writers are positioned, and adopt positions, as cultural mediators of ethical frameworks for cross-cultural learning. The book highlights the pervasive influence of this framework and the complicated position of an Indigenous politics of representation in mainstream literary culture.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Halftitle Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: The Author Function of Twenty-First-Century Settler Fiction
- Part I: The Trope of Journey
- Chapter 2: Journey to the Stone Country: Alex Miller and the People’s Narrative
- Chapter 3: As the River Runs: Journey as Restaged Fantasy of Settler Colonial Performance
- Part II: The Trope of Genealogy
- Chapter 4: Mainstreaming Settler Colonial Myths of Origin in The Trout Opera
- Chapter 5: The Fraternity of Man: Thomas Keneally’s Reconciliation Myth of Origin in Two Old Men Dying
- Chapter 6: Gail Jones’ Our Shadows: Unearthing Alternative Genealogies for Settler Colonial Belonging
- Part III: The Trope of Mourning
- Chapter 7: From the “Heart Place”: Mourning and Renewal in Molly Murn’s Heart of the Grass Tree
- Chapter 8: Mapping an Ethics of Mourning in Lia Hills’ The Crying Place
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Acknowledgements
This book was developed from a doctoral research project completed at the University of Q ueensland.
I would like to express my gratitude to Anna Johnston and Margaret Henderson for their ongoing support and expertise that greatly assisted the development of my research. I also thank the academics whose astute feedback – and the generous spirit in which it was given – enriched my work. I am especially grateful to Tony Hughes-D’Aeth and Maggie Nolan for their book endorsements.
I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the drafts of this book, the series editor Anne Brewster and senior acquisitions editor Laurel Plapp for their timely feedback and professional advice. I acknowledge the following institutions for cultivating a dynamic, rich, and supportive research culture: the Australian Studies Research Node, the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and the International Australian Studies Association.
Finally, I thank my family whose ongoing support and understanding enabled the completion of this project.
I acknowledge that parts of Chapter 4, “Mainstreaming Settler Colonial Myths of Origin in The Trout Opera”, have been published in the following journal and thank the editor/publisher of this publication for granting permission to reprint parts of that essay in this book:
“Fish-out-of-Water: Mainstreaming Settler-Colonial Myths of Origin in Matthew Condon’s The Trout Opera”. JASAL, vol. 21, no. 2, 2021.
Introduction
In their introduction to The Routledge Companion to Twenty-first Century Literary Fiction, Daniel O’Gorman and Robert Eaglestone describe the task of “mapping a twenty-first century literary constellation” (5). Drawing on a growing body of scholarly work and critical nomenclature, they highlight literary features that distinguish twenty-first-century fiction, including: a demand for fiction that exhibits an “emotional truthfulness”, a multivalent and embodied temporality, and generic interplay between literary and popular fiction (2, 4, 6). In this book I examine a smaller “literary constellation” (5) of writing by settler colonial Australian authors that reveals how these features are inflected by the socio-cultural context, national literary history, and contemporary culture in which authors participate. In this body of writing, the authorial and generic features O’Gorman and Eaglestone highlight are distinguished by authors’ relations to the persistent structures and effect(s) of colonial power, a twenty-first-century politics of representation, and contemporary middlebrow reading and writing cultures. These make demands of writers as they reshape authorship and the novel for the twenty-first century.
Writing Now investigates how settler colonial writing undergoes transformation in the twenty-first century and asks whether it is possible to trace a sensibility, an aesthetic, and/or mode of authorship that characterises the field.1 I examine the literary and cultural dynamics that shape a selection of novels as structures for engagement with contemporary cultural issues in Australia. The novels I analyse are: Alex Miller’s Journey to Stone Country (2002), Matthew Condon’s The Trout Opera (2007), Stephen Scourfield’s As the River Runs (2013), Lia Hill’s The Crying Place (2017), Thomas Keneally’s Two Old Men Dying (2018), Molly Murn’s Heart of the Grass Tree (2019), and Gail Jones’ Our Shadows (2020). Through a close reading, I describe how these authors adapt three well-documented tropes of colonial writing, namely, journey, genealogy, and mourning, to reconfigure dominant concepts of history, subjectivity, and belonging. Responding to revisionist histories of (post)colonial race relations, their writing diversifies (and, in cases, demystifies) hegemonic narratives of regional and national descent. These authors recalibrate colonial tropes by integrating the codes of commercial and literary fiction. In doing so, they engage with the cultural dynamics of a middle field of Australian writing.
The dynamic relationship between commercial and cultural interests is a fundamental feature of middlebrow literature, a formation that mediates between market-oriented behaviour and an attraction toward elite culture (Driscoll 17). In this field, the symbolic power of literature is linked to its commercial success. Embedded in mainstream networks of literary production, promotion, and dissemination, middlebrow literature exhibits more economic and cultural influence than elite and mass-market fiction. In its deployment of cultural and historical knowledge it also has considerable capacity to facilitate accessible and empathetic reading practices that underpin reconciliation and other social justice campaigns (Driscoll 5; Clarke and Nolan 131–32; Chabot 171). The public life of middlebrow writing is a key focus of middlebrow theory. In this work, the term middlebrow denotes a dynamic cultural formation wherein the production and consumption of literature is organised by multiple registers of middleclass desire; a register of emotional and earnest engagement, an ethos of self-education, a moral discourse of social improvement, a reverence for serious literary work/authors, and a demand for cultured intermediaries and commercial literary media (Driscoll 6; Sullivan and Blanch 2; Ruben xi; Radway 284). Similarly, I use the term middlebrow to describe a dominant cultural and commercial framework that underpins the production and consumption of Australian literature in the twenty-first century.
Twenty-first-century settler authors engage with the cultural preferences of this framework, so too their publishers and readers. The writers I examine have achieved varying degrees of commercial success within regional and national book markets, and they have had their literary ambitions validated through their promotion by mainstream literary and publishing networks. Their public reception is/has been mediated by promotional strategies that invite a type of readerly engagement grounded in an ethos of self-development. In cases, the authors occupy/have occupied influential positions in Australian institutions such as the Literature Board of the Australian Council and the National Book Council. Despite their public presence, their novels are not often on university text lists. With the exception of Miller’s book, they have received limited and, in some cases, no critical attention. Instead, their cultural influence is underpinned by what Beth Driscoll describes as the “intensely reader-oriented” field of middlebrow literary culture that is “dedicated to the pleasure and the usefulness of reading” and promotes texts as sources of accessible cultural knowledge (28). Through their engagement with middlebrow institutions, the novels are positioned as structures for reader-oriented processes of self-cultivation.
The novels were selected on the basis that they were written by settler colonial authors and that they engage explicitly with contemporary race relations and imperialist modes of power. As such, they offer insight into the shifting terrain of settler writing. Rather than historical fiction about Australia’s colonial frontier, these authors foreground contemporary configurations of colonial and capitalist power and counter-colonial discourses that have shaped academic and public discourse in the twenty and twenty-first century. They embody temporal and generic adaptations. They reveal how the tropes first adopted by highbrow literary figures such as Patrick White and Randolph Stow – then adapted in postmodern novels like Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide (1994) in the late twentieth century – now shape an essential cultural vocabulary through which authors and publishers of the twenty-first century organise their engagement with issues of race, history, and belonging. By examining the books of emerging novelists Molly Murn and Lia Hills and established authors such as Thomas Keneally and Gail Jones, I highlight the pervasive influence of this repertoire. I also hope to keep in check what can be our desire as readers and literary critics to want to assign sophisticated writing a greater capacity for dismantling dominant ideologies. Authors such as Miller and Jones adapt old tropes in complex ways to develop ethical responses to Indigenous issues. Like Stephen Scourfield’s outback novel, their writing reveals the enduring influence of colonialist discourse in Australian literature. By examining their novels and aspects of twenty-first-century writing, reading, and publishing culture, I trace the structural dynamics, generic transformations, institutional changes, and processes of commodification that are reshaping settler colonial writing and authors for the twenty-first century.
In the Introduction, I first historicise the speaking position that settler authors adopt as they write and explain changes in the field of Australian literature that prompt a reconsideration of their writing. I then draw on settler colonial and middlebrow literary theory to develop an analytical framework to interpret authors’ engagement with Australian literary history and twenty-first-century literary institutions. Finally, I provide an overview of the book’s chapters.
Settler Colonial Literature in the Twenty-First Century
Settler colonial writers experience complex relationships with past and present configurations of colonial power. The authors whose work I examine are often descendants of the historically dominant Anglo-Celtic population involved in Australian colonisation. Regardless of their family background, they are beneficiaries of racialised forms of violence, land expropriation, capitalist development and resource management, and the ongoing political disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty. I too embody this subject position as a male descendent of European immigrants: that is, I have a complicit relation with colonial power. My book builds on criticism that examines how settler authors (re)shape their literary inheritance to imagine narratives of history, identity, and belonging in the millennium. In the twenty-first century, this focus on settler colonial writing may seem counter-intuitive given urgent efforts to decolonise cultural institutions. It has the additional risk of reproducing the cultural authority it challenges by conferring moral and intellectual authority to the non-Indigenous critic (in this case me) who describes the colonialist imagery reproduced by the writer’s style. Yet these writers have a presence and, in cases, considerable influence in regional and national literary culture. Their public role is sustained by their routine appearances in the itineraries of literary festivals and the short- and long-lists of literary awards, and their participation in radio interviews, podcasts, and author talks. They are commissioned for book reviews, and they write at a time of significant change in Australian literary institutions. These writers inherit a tradition of non-Indigenous writing that, until the late twentieth century, dominated the field of Australian literature.
In the twenty-first century, settler colonial fiction is promoted alongside an award-winning counter-canon by First Nations writers. This counter-canon includes Kim Scott’s Benang (1999) and That Deadman Dance (2010); Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006), The Swan Book (2013) and Praiseworthy (2023); Claire G. Coleman Terra Nullius (2017); Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip (2018) and Edenglassie (2023); Tony Birch’s The White Girl (2019); and Tara June Winch’s The Yield (2019). This collection of writing is underpinned by assertions of Indigenous sovereignty that challenge the cultural and epistemological authority of the white nation and author (Leane, “Historyless” 159; Rodoreda 5). For non-Indigenous writers representing Indigenous issues and (post)colonial race relations this has induced a process of self-reckoning. As Indigenous critic Jeanine Leane explains:
Black writing has interrupted the unquestioned privilege of whites to represent non-whites in Australia. This has unsettled the settler by rupturing the previous trajectory of writing and representation. In doing so, it has challenged the conceptualisation of the past, present and future with which white Australians were familiar – a construction of time and space in which Aboriginality was contained safely within the margins of settler texts. (“Other” 43)
Contemporary settler authors write in a time when the effects of colonisation and Indigenous assertions of self-representation feature in mainstream debates and public discourse (Baker and Worby 22; Slater, “Anxieties” 8).
Details
- Pages
- Publication Year
- 2025
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781803744445
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781803744452
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781803744438
- DOI
- 10.3726/b21712
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2025 (September)
- Keywords
- Australian settler colonial Australian literature Twenty-first-century literature Tropes Authorship Literary media Middlebrow Literary Culture Cultural mediator Indigenous issues Reconciliation Recognition Politics of representation Settler belonging
- Published
- Oxford, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York, 2025. VIII, 252 pp.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG
Biographical notes
Karl Ricker (Author)
Karl Ricker is an English and Literature teacher. His PhD completed at the University of Queensland describes the literary and cultural dynamics of settler colonial literature in the twenty-first century. His teaching and research interests include twenty-first-century fiction, Australian literature and history, and contemporary literary culture.
