Nicholas Birns is a professor at the New School, New York. He is a leading scholar of Australian literature and editor of Antipodes, the publication of the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies.

‘Readers will come away from this thoughtful and wide-ranging book with a more positive and reconfigured sense of the merits of our national literature. [Birns’] faith in the ability of Ozlit to provide a strongly felt, aesthetically various and intellectually sly alternative to the current status quo is catching.’

• AcknowledgementsPrefaceAustralian literature: from modern to contemporary1. Australian literature in a time of winners and losers2. Christina Stead: Australian in modernity3. ‘Medium-sized mortals’: Elizabeth Harrower and the crisis of late modernity4. The long and the short of it: the shape of contemporary Australian literatureThe affects of contemporary Australian literature5. The ludicrous pageant: challenging consensus through rancour6. Failing to be separate: race, land, concern7. Australia’s international styles: the idealisms of architecture and mobilityAustralian literature in the world market8. Australian abroad: Peter Carey’s inside course9. History made present: Hannah Kent and Eleanor CattonAfterword: sly changeWorks citedIndex