Australian literature is the written or literary work produced in the area or by the people of the Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding colonies. During its early western history, Australia was a collection of British colonies, therefore, its literary tradition begins with and is linked to the broader tradition of English literature. However, the narrative art of Australian writers (including modern Indigenous Australians as well as Anglo-Celtic and multicultural migrant Australians) has, since 1788, introduced the character of a new continent into literature - exploring such themes as Aboriginality, mateship, egalitarianism, democracy, migrant and national identity, distance from other Western nations and proximity to Asia, the complexities of urban living and the "beauty and the terror" of life in the Australian bush.
Notable Australian writers have included the novelists Marcus Clarke, Miles Franklin, Patrick White, Thomas Keneally, Morris West and Colleen McCullough, the bush poets Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, historians Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey, the playwright David Williamson and leading expatriate writers Barry Humphries, Robert Hughes, Clive James and Germaine Greer.
Read more about Australian Literature: Overview, Aboriginal Writers and Themes, Early and Classic Works, Children's Literature, A Generation of Expatriate Authors, Other Contemporary Works and Authors, Histories, Writing and Identity, Poetry, Plays, Crime, Literary Journals, Awards
Famous quotes containing the words australian and/or literature:
“Beyond the horizon, or even the knowledge, of the cities along the coast, a great, creative impulse is at work—the only thing, after all, that gives this continent meaning and a guarantee of the future. Every Australian ought to climb up here, once in a way, and glimpse the various, manifold life of which he is a part.”
—Vance Palmer (1885–1959)
“There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.... the essay must be pure—pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)