This chapter will build on recent work by Elizabeth McMahon and Christos Tsiolkas to situate Australia’s first Nobel Prize winner as a queer modernist with his own distinct political valence. Written by the foremost Chinese scholar of Australian literature, Chen Hong, this chapter explores Whites epochal career. It covers White’s novelistic oeuvre from The Aunt’s Story (1948) through to his late queer masterpeice, The Twyborn Affair (1979).

Montesquieu deems slavery a form of despotism. His interest in how slavery has manifested itself in various cultures through history suffuses The Spirit of the Laws, and he devotes Book 15 of the work to the subject. Montesquieu’s treatment of slavery there is ambiguous, and scholars have reached differing assessments of his ultimate position on slavery. This chapter argues that Book 15 offers a biting satire of slavery in the face of the deeply entrenched prejudices and financial interests of his time. His satire conveys difficult truths in a manner that perhaps could prick European consciences more effectively than outrage and condemnations. Nevertheless, so subtle an approach to the prejudices and cruelties of his age brings with it the possibility of misunderstanding, and his views were cited on both sides of the subsequent debate over slavery.

Chapter 6 takes up the crucial question of foundational principles and Montesquieu’s relationship to the natural law tradition. Montesquieu rejects the traditional skeptical argument that history and cultural diversity indicate that humankind is ruled simply by “fancy.” His explanation of diversity is elaborated in terms common to the natural law tradition: laws defined as “necessary relations” derived from “the nature of things.” For the natural lawyers, “the nature of things” meant “man” defined as “a rational and sociable being”; the laws of morals and justice were a logical deduction from this definition. But the natural lawyers held that positive laws could not be deduced in this way. Montesquieu’s originality is to take as his starting point not a monolithic definition of man as a rational and social being but an account of the “nature” of the different forms of government or possibilities of human nature and to deduce, from the definition of each, the laws that ought to guide both rulers and subjects or citizens.

This chapter considers Helen Garners fiction, assessing the evolution of her work from the scandalous diary-like immediacy of the Monkey Grip (1977) through to her minimalist masterpiece The Children’s Bach (1984). Throughout, it considers the house as a core spatial configuration that changes across Garner’s work.

With Persian Letters (1721) Montesquieu opens the Enlightenment era. In this fiction, more similar to the essay than to the novel but good-humored and ironic, the France as seen by Persian visitors satirizes the practices of an ossified society and desacralizes established values, in particular those related to religion and authority. Its key word is diversity: Ethics and metaphysics alternate with derision to affirm notions as fundamental as the primacy of reason or the unalienable right to happiness and freedom for all. For such daring touches the book was banned in France, but its success was as meteoric as it was durable and extended to all of Europe. A posthumous edition in 1758, enriched and corrected, shows that Montesquieu maintained his boldest positions as well as justifying his approach. A genuinely critical kind of thought was born that combined philosophy and fiction, amusement with reflection, and forthwith defined the field of Enlightenment.

This chapter lays out the reasons that the verse novel has been unusually prominent in Australia, considering key examples such as Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994), a lesbian detective thriller, and the four other significant verse novels she composed, to the late 1980s trio of Laurie Duggan (The Ash Range), John A. Scott (St Clair) and Alan Wearne (The Nightmarkets). It then goes on to discuss Indigenous and Asian-Australian practitioners of the verse novel form such as Ali Cobby Eckermann and Ivy Alvarez.

Chapter 7 explores political virtue. The central feature of Montesquieu’s reflections on the Ancients was his claim that the Greeks and the Romans had been motivated by a form of civic patriotism that Europeans of his day appeared incapable of achieving. The size of most modern nations and the progress of modern commerce conspire to foreclose a return to communities moved by passionate commitment to the common good. The aim of this chapter is to consider the relationship between the obsolescence of political virtue and Montesquieu’s project of political liberty and political moderation. The chapter will consider his critical appraisal of both classical virtue and its leading modern replacement, Machiavellian virtù. It will also consider the ways in which ambiguities in Montesquieu’s presentation of virtuous republics led to polemical and often distorted uses of his views on civic virtue during both the American and French revolutions.

This chapter contests the prevailing interpretation of the post-Mabo turn as a decisive new era in Australian cultural history. While the Mabo High Court decision of 1992 was an important milestone in struggles for Indigenous land rights, the insistence on this date as a literary periodization neglects the continuities in settler culture that still structure settler fiction in Australia. Alternatively, recent First Nations fiction suggests possibilities within and outside dominant paradigms of legality.

In considering the place and importance of definitions in ancient logic,1 the most appropriate point of departure is Aristotle’s commendation at Metaphysics 1.6, 987b1–3 of the historical Socrates (as opposed to the character portrayed in the Platonic dialogues) for being the first to focus attention on definitions in the course of his ethical inquiries, an unmistakable reference to early ‘definitional’ dialogues such as the Euthyphro, Laches, Charmides, and Meno.2 None of these works contains any occurrences of Aristotle’s term for definition, horismos, or its close relative, horos,3 but this does not automatically undermine Aristotle’s ascription. In the ethical inquiries represented in these dialogues Socrates typically begins by identifying someone who is reputed to possess expertise concerning one or another of the ethical virtues (viz. temperance, courage, justice, or piety), and then insists that anyone who really possessed such expertise should be able to say what is the object of her alleged expertise. Consequently, Socrates demands that his interlocutors produce defensible answers to questions of the form, ‘What is X?’, (ti esti X;) where appropriate substituends of ‘X’ are names of the individual virtues. For example, when the title character of the Euthyphro informs Socrates that he is prosecuting his own father for murder on a highly dubious factual basis, Socrates declares that to undertake this prosecution Euthyphro must have ‘precise’ (akribōs) knowledge of piety and impiety, and in that case he should be able to answer the questions ‘What is piety?’ and ‘What is impiety?’ (Euthyphro 4e–5d). Inasmuch as this form of question can plausibly be construed as a demand to be told what distinguishes X things from everything else, or in other words, to be given a definition of X, if we assume that Plato’s portrayal of Socrates in these texts is accurate, then they seem to support Aristotle’s historical contention that Socrates sought definitions of the virtues as part of his ethical research program.

First Nations Australian literature has often been the object of incomprehension and derogation by settler critics – something a deeper perspective of “presencing” can overcome. This chapter takes a decolonial perspective and highlights the self-assertion of First Nations writers against invidious characterization, such as that received by the poetic work of Oodgeroo Noonuccal in the 1960s. It demonstrates how nonIndigenous readers can approach texts by First Nations authors not as “tourists” but as “invited guests.”

Karlheinz Stockhausen was one of the most important representatives of so-called multiple serial music after 1950. In 1951, he was one of the first European composers to write a musical work, Kreuzspiel, in which all sound parameters are comprehensively shaped with the help of serial procedures. For Stockhausen, serial thinking was rooted in the twelve-tone music of Anton Webern. However, he understood serial thinking not only as a compositional principle, but as a complex mental attitude. On the basis of central stations of Stockhausen's musical oeuvre, the fundamentals, characteristics, and transformations of his serial way of creating are shown. Chronologically, an arc is spanned from the strictly serial works of the early 1950s (his point music) through the statistical, aleatoric, variable, moment, and intuitive music of the late 1950s and 1960s to the formula and multi-formula composition that was at the centre from the 1970s on. The arc closes with a look at the last two major work cycles, Licht(1977–2003) and Klang (2004–7).

Luigi Nono was one the first and foremost Italian composers to develop multiple serialism. Stimulated by the teachings and friendship of Bruno Maderna, in the years 1950–1 he started composing with an extended twelve-tone technique that involved complex rhythmic permutations. While developing a special interest in translating verbal formations (especially poetry) into musical structures, around 1954 Nono started a fruitful exchange with Karlheinz Stockhausen on the problems of integral serialism, which culminated in 1958–9 in controversy over the serial workings of Nono’s Il canto sospeso, also related to the function of the textual underlay. In 1957, Nono had taken up a public discussion of serial technique from the perspective of its historical foundation. Increasingly concerned with an organic approach to vocal-instrumental sound and with the significance of text in relation to it, Nono defined a personal multi-parametric technique which enabled him to find a consistent way of composing both complex sound fields and monodic processes, which ultimately led him to vocal-electroacoustic composition in the 1960s.