This chapter examines the transnational Australian novel from a different perspective, focusing on First Nations writing. Whereas most visions of the global privilege literary institutions whose power stems from existing political and global inequalities, First Nations writing fosters a transnationalism of resistance, solidarity, and fungibility. It considers Alexis Wrights novels in translation, and writers engaged in collaborative projects.

From early Australian writers such as Henry Savery and Barron Field through to modernist luminaries such as D. H. Lawrence and contemporary refugee writers such as Behrouz Boochani, authors who have had only a temporary, contingent, or ephemeral relationship to Australia have been a major feature of Australian literary history. This chapter surveys these writers, showing how they pose perennial problems for the institutionalization of Australian literary studies.

In Western Sydney, writers such as Luke Carman, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, and Felicity Castagna have produced novels written from the working-class and multicultural perspectives that are a far cry from mainstream visions of Sydney. Ahmed’s The Tribe (2014) is a multigenerational saga of a Lebanese Australian family that examines ideas of belonging and alienation, inclusion, and exclusion, which touch, but also exceed, identities of ethnicity and religion. Castagna’s novel No More Boats (2017), explores how an Italian migrant to Australia in the 1960s becomes, in the 2000s, a fervent conservative opponent of further migration to Australia by people from Asia and the Middle East. This chapter shows Western Sydney as the place where twenty-first century Australian literature is most vitally happening.

In a passage from his New Essays on Human Understanding (4.5.3–11) Leibniz distinguishes between three kinds of truth: propositional, moral, and metaphysical. Propositional truth belongs to true affirmations and negations, and consists in ‘correspondence of the propositions which are in the intellect with the things they are about’. Moral truth or truthfulness consists in ‘talking about things in accordance with the belief of our spirit’. Finally, metaphysical truth ‘is the real existence of things, in conformity with the ideas which we have about them’ and ‘is typically interpreted by metaphysicians as an attribute of being’. In ancient Greek we can find a similar tripartition of the meanings of the noun alētheia and the adjective alēthēs, which at least from the classical age (fifth–fourth century BCE) prevailed over the other terms adopted in the rich Homeric vocabulary for truth. Therefore, in ancient Greek there are three possible meanings of alētheia: (1) truth as opposed to falsehood (pseudos), (2) truthfulness as opposed to lying, and (3) reality as opposed to appearance. The first meaning is what I will call ‘logical truth’ (obviously not in the sense of ‘logical tautology’) and is an attribute of declarative sentences and of the beliefs that they express. The second meaning, moral truth, applies in particular to people, but also to oracles or dreams; in the case of people it is the ethical virtue of those who are sincere in their discourses (en tois logois),2 namely, of those who say what they believe without hiding anything, and is opposed to the moral vice of lying, which belongs to those ‘who hide something in themselves and declare something else’.3 Finally, there is reality as opposed to appearance, which Leibniz calls ‘metaphysical truth’ and which I prefer to call, faute de mieux, ‘ontological truth’; I distinguish this both from Leibniz’s definition and from the definition of it as an attribute of being given by the metaphysicians of Leibniz’s time and later by Heidegger, which Leibniz considered to be ‘a useless and almost senseless attribute’. By ‘ontological truth’ I will thus mean the attributive use of the adjective ‘true’, as applied ‘to each object, if one wants to express that it really is what it should be according to the name given to it’.4

This chapter explores “constellational form” in Gerald Murnane. It argues that the key continuity in Murnane’s work lies in his associative way of writing, and analyzes the motivations and philosophical convictions underlying this form. It traces these formal continuities across Murnanes work, from his early novel Tamarisk Row (1974) through to his post-hiatus fictions up to Border Districts (2017). It also considers Murnanes “idealism” and probes how this underpins his unique understanding of the ontology of characterological beings and the relationship between implied author and reader.

The “woman question” is at the heart of Montesquieu’s epistolary novel, The Persian Letters, and other early works like the erotic-philosophic tale, The Temple of Gnidus. In these works of the imagination, women are important both as characters and as potential audience. Although women do not seem as central to either Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline or The Spirit of Laws, they do appear at key moments in the unfolding argument of both works. The chapter examines the place of women within Montesquieu’s oeuvre, with special emphasis on the links between women and the politics of liberty in The Spirit of Laws. Not only does the condition of women serve as a paradigmatic case for the status of liberty altogether, women actually become the agents of the liberalizing reforms that Montesquieu cautiously forwards.

The first goal of the chapter is to establish that Montesquieu was as much a moral philosopher as a political theorist, as is revealed in numerous discourses, dissertations and dialogues only recently translated into English. His purpose in writing The Spirit of the Laws, he remarked in his “Preface,” was to provide reasons for loving one’s “duties” while encouraging readers to “practice the general virtue that includes love of all.” In a discarded fragment of his “Preface” he even termed his work “a treatise on morality.” A second goal of the chapter is to establish that Montesquieu was critical of the political virtue he attributed to the republics of antiquity and to explain that the grounds for his rejection of Lycurgus’ Sparta have not previously been sufficiently explained. And, finally, the chapter analyses why Montesquieu strongly preferred the principle of honor motivating monarchical subjects, as compared to the political virtue of the ancients, which he likened to the hardships monks endure. Most revealing is his remark in a text Robespierre unfortunately failed to heed that “even virtue is in need of limits.”

This chapter situates Montesquieu’s economic writing within broader political and economic developments that favored the emergence, in France and all over Europe, of political economy. For Montesquieu, the rise of international trade; the increasing dominance of mobile forms of wealth; and transformed expectations for material well-being in modern societies undermined traditional social structures and the forms of political authority that went with them. In this context, Montesquieu’s political thought can be read as a kind of political economy insofar as it employed a moral psychology of other-directedness and self-interest that was better adapted to an emerging commercial society than traditional models of duty and virtue. But Montesquieu, unlike the more straightforwardly economic writers of his time, did not organize his inquiry around questions of plenty so much as he sought, through his comparative method, to explore the diverse ways in which statecraft in the age of commerce could contribute to his ideal of moderate government.

The Greeks invented the philosophical discipline known as ‘logic’, whose core is the study and classification of valid forms of inference. Since its inception Greek logical inquiry was motivated by the need to establish the standards of correctness for philosophical reasoning and argument. Throughout antiquity this inquiry also focused on the identification, diagnosis, and classification of forms of argument that are invalid, unsound, or otherwise problematic. Within these, special attention was devoted to those forms of argument that, despite their deficiency, somehow appear to be valid, and thus can easily induce us in error, or can be exploited ‘sophistically’ to mislead others. To be able to defend oneself, by detecting the fallacies in someone else’s reasoning, was a valuable skill in a context in which philosophical discourse developed in a dialectical setting, and one’s opponents could use, whether consciously or inadvertently, fallacious arguments to (apparently) refute one’s side of the argument and to win the debate. In addition, the study of fallacies was deemed important to avoid errors in one’s own reasoning, which was construed by Plato as a sort of inner, silent dialogue which one entertains with oneself.1

This chapter charts how the rise of book history and publishing studies has reshaped the Australian literary field. In the 1990s, it was widely believed that Australia-based publishers were in danger of being absorbed into transnational corporate behemoths. The twenty-first century, by contrast, has witnessed a resurgence in Australian literary publishing. Firms such as Text and Giramondo were able to distribute their books internationally, while also fashioning local models of literary discernment. Although not economically lucrative in an absolute sense, the branding of a literary style of Australian book has reinvigorated the visibility of the Australian novel in the twenty-first century.

Aristotle is history’s first great logician and Chrysippus is the second. We know more of Aristotle’s work than Chrysippus’ (whose works have been almost entirely lost), but we have enough at hand to identify the principal achievements of each. Aristotle’s logical particles of the syllogistic were ‘all’, ‘no’, ‘some’, and ‘non-’. Chrysippus’ were ‘if-then’, ‘it is not the case’, and ‘or’. This inclines the modern reader to see in Aristotle’s term-logic a precursor of predicate logic, and in Chrysippus’ logic the precursor of propositional logic. Because space is limited, I shall take the ancient logic of this chapter to be Aristotelian and Chrysippean logics.

“The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel provides a clear, lively, and accessible account of the novel in Australia. The chapters of this book survey significant issues and developments in the Australian novel, offer historical and conceptual frameworks, and demonstrate what reading an Australian novel looks like in practice.”

This chapter considers Christina Stead as a transnational writer, who travelled across continents and through political contexts. It argues that her work is bound together by a “marine aesthetics” and surveys how this plays out in the key phases of writing life: an early period in London and Paris, a middle period in America, and late period, in Europe, England, and Australia. Stead is a political writer of the twentieth century, but also a formal realist whose works continue to challenge the novel genre today.