The Writer in Australia by John Barnes

The Writer in Australia

A Collection of Literary Documents 1856-1964

Edited with Commentaries by John Barnes

Oxford University Press, 1969, [First Edition], paperback

Very Good Condition, some edge and shelf wear, some rubbing and bumping to edges, corners and covers, small tears at spine, minor underlining to one or two pages, (see photographs)

“In making this collection of what I have called – for want of a better term – literary documents, I have tried to give a balanced impression of how writers and critics have seen the situation of the creative writer in Australia over the past one hundred years.  This is not intended to be a collection of the best literary criticism in Australia, now or in the past. I have, on the whole, preferred seminal essays and expressions of representative points of view to close studies of particular writers and their works, few of which are worth preserving from earlier periods.  Some of the items I have included have an illustrative function – the correspondence of Stephens and Furphy, and the letters from Esson to Palmer, for instance, portray Australian writers at work in different periods – and in doing so, they make their own comment on the position of the creative writer in Australia.”