This chapter examines the history of critical interpretations of the Australian novel from the mid- to late nineteenth century through the late twentieth century. In the colonial period, poetry and drama were often held in greater esteem than the novel as literary forms, but by the late nineteenth century the novel had become a gauge of the incipient nation’s evolution towards maturity or ‘civilisation’. Debates about contemporary realism and naturalism cut across these concerns. Attempts were made across the first half of the twentieth century to define the distinctive features of the Australian novel and its role in a national literary tradition, but often in terms of their absence rather than their presence. Much of the critical discussion of the Australian novel occurred outside the universities, in a public culture of books and reading. The field was redefined from the late 1950s to the 1970s through academic criticism, and then through the radical revisions of feminist, postcolonial and other poststructuralist approaches. The novel remained firmly at the centre of such debates.

This chapter examines the networks and institutions that fostered the production of explicitly ‘literary’ novels in Australia during the late twentieth century. It considers how economic changes to the publishing industry since 1980 affected the way that novels were produced and received. While literary novels were primarily produced by major trade publishers and university presses in the 1980s and early 1990s, they have increasingly been published by small presses. Literary novels arguably now have less influence within the larger literary field, but remain important within prestigious networks and institutions. The chapter then examines the careers of two authors – Gerald Murnane and David Malouf – who both began writing during the ‘conglomerate era’ and have continued to publish during the ‘age of Amazon’. While both authors have had national and international literary success, this success has relied on different institutions and networks. Malouf has had a broad success, in part because his works have been enthusiastically taken up in secondary and tertiary educational settings, whereas Murnane has relied on a more diffuse network of publishers and reviewers interested in experimental forms of writing.

This section introduces the structure and logic of The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel. It considers the role of the Australian novel in local, national and international contexts; its engagement as a cultural technology in the major historical events of Australia’s history; its transnational positioning; and changes over time in terms of writing, publishing, readership and genre structures. The history of publishing and of criticism of the Australian novel are described. The book’s structure from the colonial period until the present is outlined while readers are invited to read across essays for ongoing and changing thematic concerns.

This chapter focuses on how the word ‘environment’ became culturally prominent in the 1930s, and suggests that Australian novels from this period show the intrusion of the environment – as a signifier – in their basic imaginary structure. The word ‘environment’, and its attendant ideas, emerged as a refinement of the bush nationalism that preceded it, still funding a national settler identity, but now inflected with the sense of crisis that arose with the collapse of the world economy and the drift into cataclysmic global conflict. The distinctive usage of the environment that emerges in the 1930s was most explicitly expressed in the Jindyworobak valorisation of ‘Environmental Values’ and in the work of poets of that school. However, the importance of the word environment and its cluster of associations is also visible in the novelists from this time, including Xavier Herbert, Vance Palmer, Katharine Susannah Prichard, M. Barnard Eldershaw, Elyne Mitchell, J. K. Ewers, Patrick White, Peter Cowan and Randolph Stow. Drawing on the works of these writers, this chapter sketches a dialectic within mid-century Australia that figured the environment as, by turns, a vitalistic substance and a Darwinian struggle.

This study looks at fiction based in Australia, one of many places severely affected by anthropogenic global warming in the Global South. Texts chosen for this chapter (Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia (1939), Gabrielle Lord’s Salt (1990), Ellen Van Neerven’s Heat and Light (2014)) understand aspects of global warming as ‘simultaneously real, discursive, and social’, but also as spaces within the larger arc of climatic history that might incorporate sensitivity to non-human agency as felt in Oceania. This chapter incorporates flashes of fictocriticism to integrate the component of animacy that seeks out affective intensities that pass through and between human and non-human bodies. This genre permits writers to foreground personal meditations on the ongoing experiencing of climate catastrophe, and it discloses a space for dialogue between scholarly abstractions and personal ones. The unfolding cultural story that comes from these impulses is one of witness and embodiment that portends representations of climate as an intra-active being.