AustLit

'The article offers in formation on the historical and cultural relationships between Australia and other Pacific islands. Topics include relationship between image of the Mediterranean Sea and association with Australian cultural history, relationships and links between, Australian artists and the Mediterranean islands and geophysical boundedness.' (Publication abstract)

'This essay argues that the poetry of Australian poet Dorothy Porter, exemplified in her collection,Crete, operates along contrapuntal lines. The poet's daemonic energy celebrates the ancient island culture, expressed variously in outbursts of democratic irreverence or pagan sensuousness or hierophantic exuberance or queer subversiveness. However, this celebration is met by what reaches out beyond the celebration of aesthetic energy, towards a sifting, self-questioning ethics. This ethics questions the limits of the aesthetic and gives Porter'sCreteits richest, most disturbing depths. This double action of Porter's poetry puts aesthetics—its powers and its limits—into question. (Publication abstract)

'Shirley Hazzard'sGreene on Capriprovides an account of a Capri habitation that extended, not uninterrupted, but at frequent and regular intervals, from the postwar years until the end of the century through the lens of the longstanding friendship between herself, her husband (literary translator and biographer Francis Steegmuller), author Graham Greene, and a number of Greene's other friends. The focus of Hazzard's memoir is thus on a literary world characterised by a privileged cosmopolitanism and an autodidactic erudition that are now past; the memoir is marked by her sense of this loss as much as it is marked by the loss of her friend and her husband. Her own position, moreover, is marked unmistakably by her sense of the gendered nature of the literary world she inhabited. This essay examines the ways Hazzard's elegiac account of the passing of a particular kind of literary sensibility draws from both the traditions of representing Capri itself but also from a broader tradition of writing and thinking about islands and their place in a rootless, Anglophone cosmopolitanism. (Publication abstract)