Paul Genoni is a Senior Lecturer with the Faculty of Media, Society and Culture at Curtin University of Technology. He has a PhD in Australian literature from the University of Western Australia and is author of Subverting the Empire: Explorers and Exploration in Australian Fiction (2004).Susan Sheridan is Adjunct Professor of Women’s Studies and English at Flinders University in Adelaide, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She has published extensively in feminist studies and Australian cultural history, her books including Christina Stead (1988), Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing, 1880s to 1930s (1995) and Who Was That Woman? The Australian Women’s Weekly in the Postwar Years (2002).

'This landmark contribution to Australian literary studies is the first collection of critical responses to the work of one of our most important novelists, Thea Astley. As well as essays from leading Australian and international critics, dating from 1967 to the present, it includes three essays by Astley herself, a major interview with her and the first Thea Astley lecture, given by Kate Grenville in 2005.' Professor Elizabeth WebbySydney University