AustLit

'We teach English at university. Our weekly engagements include navigating unnerving plot twists, falling in and out of love with iconic characters, and evaluating the complexities of language and genre.' (Introduction)

'Life writing such as autobiography, biography and memoir continues to be popular with readers while new genres, for instance, on-line or in other public, performative iterations, also shift and grow. Both historically and in the current moment, life writing emerges to address issues of individual experience in relation to public record. Very often, such works also seek to engage with issues of justice or redress, particularly in relation to expressions of trauma or conflict. What role do life narrative texts play in troubled times? This special issue presents scholarly and creative work that seek sot respond to this question in particular. The writing and research here explores troubling subjects such as political injustice, moral panics, and family and interpersonal relationships. These works ‘trouble’ prevalent ideas, for instance about minority or marginal cultures to offer new ways of seeing the cultural work that diverse life narrative texts can perform.'  (Publication abstract)

'But, what is an essay? In his introduction to the 2014 volume of The Best Australian Essays, Robert Manne tackles the question of definition (intriguingly, one nearly every editor in the series has also foregrounded) and hopes, given this is his ‘second innings’, that it is a problem he now has a clearer view of:

I had thought of an essay as any brief piece of non-fiction prose. I no longer do […] For me at least, an essay is a reasonably short piece of prose in which we hear a distinctive voice attempting to recollect or illuminate or explain one or another aspect of the world. It follows from this that no essay could be jointly authored. It also follows, that, with an essay, we trust that the distinctive voice we hear is truthful or authentic, even when perhaps it is not. (ix)

That Manne drops ‘non-fiction’ from his definition seems significant. As does his emphasis on a distinctive voice, authentic and truthful, even when perhaps it is not.'

(Introduction)