literary history
Andrew Riemer
Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss (eds)
The Oxford Literary History of Australia
OUP $49.95hb, 488pp
0 19 553737 8
THE INDEX TO THIS history lists four references -- one neutral, three critical -- to Leonie Kramer as the editor of the 1981 The Oxford History of Australian Literature and one each to the publication itself, to Adrian Mitchell, who was responsible for the survey of fiction, and to Vivian Smith as the author of the section on poetry -- there is no reference to Terry Sturm, who wrote on drama. None of the sixteen critics and scholars who contributed to the new survey engages in any significant manner with the aims and aspirations of that publication, even though it is acknowledged in the Introduction -- together with the work of H.M. Green, Cecil Hadgraft, Geoffrey Dutton, G.A. Wilkes, Ken Goodwin, Laurie Hergenhan, Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra -- as providing 'frameworks and a background of references'. The implication seems to be not so much that The Oxford History of Australian Literature reflects an unjustifiably conservative view of national literature -- a complaint that arose almost as soon as it was published -- but that its methods, ideals and emphases are irrelevant to the literary culture of the late nineties.
Kramer's Introduction begins with a reference to the then forthcoming 'bicentenary of the establishment of the first settlement at Sydney Cove in 1788' and ends with the sentiment that a 'definition of Australian cultural identity and its reflection in literature which does not take account of the enrichment of Australian experience from a variety of sources (including, more recently, from Asia) is bound to be inadequate.' The opening words of the Introduction to the new publication make a gesture toards the Olympics. The first essay, Adam Shoemaker's 'White on Black/Black on White', begins: 'The historical dates which constitute what is known as "chronological time" have often been used to imprison Australia's indigenous people'. Elsewhere contributors tend to stress not so much Kramer's 'enrichment' as the exclusion of minorities -- indigenous Australians, migrants, women -- from mainstream (often 'bourgeois') literary culture.
Kramer's volume made almost no reference beyond traditional genres -- fiction, poetry, drama -- whereas the new survey cast its net far wider to embrace Aboriginal stories and legends, popular entertainment, film, television, political pamphlets and the like. The earlier publication focused on individual writers. The new literary history is more synoptic -- in part because of The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature , according to the editors -- and more concerned with large political and sociological patterns than with aesthetic values.
The index of each provides, once more, a convenient short-hand illustration of these differences. In Kramer's history Patrick White's name appears on forty-six pages, with a nine page section devoted entirely to his work. Bennett and Strauss (or rather their contributors) mention White on thirty-eight of the pages without, however, engaging with an examination of his achievements. The case of Christina Stead is similar. The new volume mentions her on nine pages; in Kramer's publication there are references on eighteen, including (again) a six-page section devoted to her work. As with White, less stress is laid on Stead's individuality, indeed the oddity of some of her writing, than on the manner in which her work illuminated, or failed to illuminate, developments in social and political life.
Many will welcome the new history's broader scope, its determination to remove writers and their work from excessively aesthetic or high-culture cocoons, its emphasis on the unfolding, often contradictory and contentious attempts at national self-definition. Others will deplore its tendency to flatten out individuality or even idiosyncrasies in its exdessively sociological and political, predominantly left-leaning concerns.
So inevitably, there are losses and gains. I think that Kramer's volume failed, on the whole, to pay sufficient heed to the political and social context out of which much Australian writing emerged. Our literature -- I should say perhaps the works of European Australians -- is still a recent enough phenomenon for some 'early' texts, The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn for instance, to remain directly relevant to contemporary political and social preoccupations.The price we have to pay for the greater emphasis on such contexts, at least with some of these essays, might however be deemed too high.