AustLit

'Since the mid-1980s there has been a sharp rise in the number of literary publications by Indigenous Australians and in the readership and impact of those works. One contemporary Aboriginal Australian author who continues to make a contribution to both the Australian and the global canon is Kim Scott (1957-). Scott has won many awards, including Australia's highest, the prestigious Miles Franklin Award, for his novels Benang (2000) and That Deadman Dance(2011). Scott has also published in other literary genres, including poetry, the short story, children's literature, and he has written and worked professionally on Indigenous health issues. Despite Scott's national and international acclaim, there is currently no comprehensive critical companion that contextualizes his work for scholars, students, and general readers. A Companion to the Works of Kim Scott fills this void by providing a collection of twelve original essays focusing on Scott's novels, short stories, poetry, and his work with the Wirlomin Noongar language project and Indigenous health. The companion also includes an original interview with the author.' (Publication summary)

'Australian Aboriginal literature, once relegated to the margins of Australian literary studies, now receives both national and international attention. Not only has the number of published texts by contemporary Australian Aboriginals risen sharply, but scholars and publishers have also recently begun recovering earlier published and unpublished Indigenous works. Writing by Australian Aboriginals is making a decisive impression in fiction, autobiography, biography, poetry, film, drama, and music, and has recently been anthologized in Oceana and North America. Until now, however, there has been no comprehensive critical companion that contextualizes the Aboriginal canon for scholars, researchers, students, and general readers. This international collection of eleven original essays fills this gap by discussing crucial aspects of Australian Aboriginal literature and tracing the development of Aboriginal literacy from the oral tradition up until today, contextualizing the work of Aboriginal artists and writers and exploring aspects of Aboriginal life writing such as obstacles toward publishing, questions of editorial control (or the lack thereof), intergenerational and interracial collaborations combining oral history and life writing, and the pros and cons of translation into European languages. ' (Publication summary))

'J.M. Coetzee is perhaps the most critically acclaimed bestselling author of imaginative fiction writing in English today. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and is the first writer to have been awarded two Booker Prizes. The present volume makes critical views of this important writer accessible to the general reader as well as the scholar, discussing Coetzee's main works in chronological order and introducing the dominant themes in the academic discussion of his oeuvre. It also highlights the author's exceptionally nuanced approach to writing as both an exacting craft and a challenging moral-ethical undertaking. It discusses the author's complex relation to apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, the land of his birth, and evaluates his complicated responses to the literary canon. He emerges as both a modernist and a highly self-aware post modernist, a champion of the truths of a literary enterprise conducted unrelentingly in the mode of self-confession.' (Publisher's summary)

'Ever since it was first published in 1999, Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace has provoked controversy. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, it follows Prof. David Lurie as he encounters disgrace through his sexual exploitation of a student and then through the shocking gang-rape of his only daughter. The novel's uncompromising portrayal of the "new" South Africa outraged many, who found the book regressive, even racist. It also challenged readers worldwide to confront its hard questions. This first book of essays devoted to the novel ambitiously brings together criticism and pedagogy. The ten critical essays and eight essays on teaching Disgrace grapple with the ethical issues the novel so provocatively raises: rape, gender, race, animal rights. Disgrace is widely taught in colleges and universities and read in book clubs; the debates it has given rise to will take on fresh life with the release of the upcoming film starring John Malkovich. Unusually, the eighteen contributors to the collection are all faculty members or graduates of the same institution, the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands, and have worked together closely in crafting their essays over the past two years. The volume will be exceptionally useful to teachers of literature, philosophy, and South African culture, to book club leaders, and to all readers of Coetzee.' (Publisher's summary)