Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature By Nathanael O'Reil ...

“been significant” and suggests a transnational postcolonialism as the way forward, advocating for a “more nuanced” analysis of the literature of settler colonies (which, he notes, has been undertheorized) and the amalgamation of “postcolonial and critical race theory” (146–150). It is my hope that the chapters in this volume make a significant contribution to the ongoing development and future direction of postcolonial Australian literary studies.

While I have chosen not to group the contents of this collection into clusters of chapters focusing on named themes, such as hybridity, resistance, and indigeneity, I have ordered the chapters in a way that I hope will allow the reader to ascertain the volume's main aims and to make interesting and fruitful connections between chapters. Thus, the collection begins with Bill Ashcroft's “Reading Post-Colonial Australia,” which presents a detailed and important argument for reading Australian literature as postcolonial literature. By examining “postcolonial medievalism” and regional literature, Nicholas Birns and Per Henningsgaard both push the scholarship of Australian literature in new and fascinating directions, shedding light on underexplored topics. Nicholas Dunlop and Lesley Hawkes explore issues of postcolonial space, mapping, and belonging through their analysis of works by Janette Turner Hospital, David Malouf, Xavier Herbert, Miles Franklin, and Alexis Wright. Martina Horakova examines the issue of non-Indigenous belonging, while Rebecca Weaver-Hightower addresses notions of white guilt over the displacement and harsh treatment of Indigenous peoples. Michael R. Griffiths theorizes settler colonialism, race relations, and indigeneity in his analysis of Kim Scott's Benang, while Tomoko Ichitani examines Indigenous subjectivity in novels by Alexis Wright and Melissa Lucashenko. Katie Ellis makes a significant contribution to the fields of disability studies, postcolonial studies, and Australian literature through her analysis of disability in Elizabeth Jolley's The Well. Sarah Zapata provides a European perspective on Peter Carey, one of Australia's most important contemporary novelists. Peter Mathews makes a subtly provocative argument about postcolonialism in his chapter on Rodney Hall's The Second Bridegroom, and Lyn McCredden provides a fascinating