Almost one hundred years after Barton’s book, Geoffrey Dutton edited for Penguin The Literature of Australia (1964) which sold 60,000 copies. That astonishing figure shows how strong was the desire (not least among undergraduates) to have a work of interpretation and information readily and cheaply at hand. Dutton’s contributors made H.M. Green’s long-meditated A History of Australian Literature (1961) look antiquated, though few could equal his breadth of knowledge. The Penguin literary history blended chapters on social and historical contexts with others on individual authors. When the firm decided that it was time for The Penguin New Literary History of Australia (edited by Laurie Hergenhan, with help from me, among others) in the bicentennial year, new reckonings had been made. Not least of their results was that no chapters were allocated for, say, Patrick White on his own. This led Harry Heseltine to quip that it was ‘hard to see the trees for the wood’.

Twenty years on from Hergenhan, many earnest hopes and tiresome vendettas have evaporated. No one now debates Australian literature’s worth in terms of radical-nationalist versus conservative-Eurocentric authors and values. The canon, straw man for so many antagonists of literature at large, has now been so thoroughly feminised, popularised and indigenised that some of those who once graced it seem to have been shamed into disappearance. Look in vain for Martin Boyd for starters. Yet the felt need for literary history as a complex kind of social history and thermometer of present times remains strong. (Disclaimer: this reviewer is editing The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, 2009.) Newest of the histories is the estimable A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900, edited by two American academics, Nicholas Birns and Rebecca McNeer, and published by Camden House in the United States, Boydell & Brewer in Britain.

The title page gave me an eerie recollection of the old, not the new, for the typeface closely recalls that of three literary histories cum guides to information sources published by the American firm Gale Research Company in 1979–80. The dodger on ‘New Book Information’ inserted into the review copy of the Companion also takes us elsewhere and backwards in time: ‘Examinations of the culture – artistic, material, musical – of English monasteries in the six centuries between the Conquest and the Dissolution.’ The Companion itself is an often stimulating guide, not to ‘bare ruined choirs’, but to an unruly twentieth-century literary history. Evidently, it belongs to a series called the Camden House Companions, but no other information was provided about them. The epigraph drolly quotes Matthew Arnold: ‘Are we to have a Primer of Canadian Literature, too, and a Primer of Australian?’

The editors have made bold structural decisions at the outset. There are five sections: ‘Identities’, ‘Writing across Time’, ‘International Reputations’, ‘Writers and Regions’, ‘Beyond the Canon’. Apparently new ways of demarcation are announced, although what is contained in each section will necessarily cover old interpretative ground. Literary histories also define themselves by championing interest groups supposedly once excluded. In ‘Identities’, there are two chapters on ‘Aboriginality’, others on ‘Multicultural Writing’, ‘Jewish Writers’, ‘Asian-Australian Literature’, ‘The Demidenko Affair and Australian Hoaxes’, Tanya Dalziell on ‘Australian Women’s Writing from 1970 to 2005 (which surely needed no protection from the mainstream) and a brilliant essay by Ruth Feingold (another American academic), ‘From Empire to Nation: The Shifting Sands of Australian National Identity’.

‘Writing Across Time’ fills, in part, the familiar role of chronological survey, with two chapters each on twentieth-century poetry and drama and a venturesome piece (chiefly to do with fiction), ‘Writing the Nation, 1900–1940’, by Richard Carr from Alaska. He contrasts the Bulletin/Lawson/Furphy tradition with another, centred on Miles Franklin and Henry Handel Richardson: ‘They tell an alternative Australian story, the story of leaving.’ As Franklin’s heroine Sybylla says: ‘Beauty is abroad. Under her spell the voices of the great World call me.’ The third part of the Companion also leads us away from Australia, insofar as it is devoted to six writers who have allegedly earned ‘International Reputations’. They are Christina Stead, Patrick White, David Malouf, Les Murray, Peter Carey and Gerald Murnane, the last of whom seems to have his place because of a few passionate local partisans rather than a wide following anywhere.

The disestablishment of a monolithically Australian literary history in the section ‘Writers and Regions’ is welcome, although the five chapters essentially focus on individuals rather than on a theoretical exploration of the force of place. From Lyn Jacobs we have ‘Tim Winton and West Australian Writing’, the surprising and fruitful juxtaposition of Ouyang Yu on Xavier Herbert, and Brigid Magner’s incisive commentary on the scantly recognised nation to our east, ‘Trans-Tasman Literary Expatriates’. Finally, the fifth part of the book takes us ‘Beyond the Canon’, misleadingly: the canon has long been open to all-comers. The chapters address science fiction; ‘Popular Australian Writing’, by Toni Johnson-Woods (one of the most enterprising and instructive in the book); film (why do literary histories genuflect to cultural studies in this way?); children’s literature; ‘Environmental Themes’ and ‘Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing’. The latter seems a slightly odd way to end a book that otherwise ventures no conclusion.

The novelty of any literary history will not come chiefly from acts of editorial but from the freshness, daring and research of the contributors. This, of course, is to assume that the days of solely-authored literary histories are done with, however much one pines for Australian equivalents of Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), or Margaret Atwood’s Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972). So with what individual riches do Birns and McNeer’s team present us?

Feingold’s ‘From Empire to Nation’ begins by exploring the return of an old literary historical notion: that literature ‘may be itself part of a consciously developed nationalist projects, its works written, canonised, and taught in order to concretise a particular idea of nation’. Except, one wants to exclaim, so few of those works are taught in Australian schools and universities. The work of nation-building, John Howard’s storm troopers asserted, is not being done. Feingold considers how reluctantly Australia has embraced its chances of independence, and – at the end of her probing essay – wonders what ‘fundamental shift’ will lead a twenty-first century Australian nation to recognise itself ‘as a republic, as a multicultural polity, as an integral part of Asia or Oceania’.

This chapter is followed by Wenche Omundsen’s clear-headed analysis not only of multicultural writing but of its assailants, notably Robert Dessaix, who counselled that ‘many so-called multicultural writers would do better to take up ceramics, market-gardening, photography, or perhaps even return to their countries of origin’. Susan Jacobowitz, considering (from New York) Australian Jewish writers, is nominating a category for which previous literary histories have not felt the need. Deborah Madsen (from Geneva – this ventilation of international perspectives on Australian literature is one of the most impressive parts of the Companion) has more to work with in ‘Asian–Australian Literature’, as her lists show, but she sensibly narrows the field to ‘literature written by Australians of Asian descent’. Not considered, therefore, is the febrile gamut of Australians’ perceptions of Asia in the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Surveying literary hoaxes, Marguerite Nolan prefers to call venality and dishonesty ‘limit cases in relation to the problematic notion of identity’, a formulation worthy of Helen Demidenko. By the way, ‘it has been suggested’ is hardly adequate to describe the imposture of Colin Johnson and Roberta Sykes, who ‘are actually descendants of African-Americans’. This tiptoeing is almost obligatory bad faith, so it is refreshing to come next to Tanya Dalziell’s reflections on Australian women’s writing since 1970 (previous caveat apart) for a fine, concise discussion which draws the veil on ‘Identities’.

Twentieth-century poetry is covered by two very good chapters from Nicholas Birns (editor of the American–Australian Studies journal, Antipodes) and David McCooey. Birns begins with Kenneth Slessor. Judith Wright, A.D. Hope, James McAuley and Harold Stewart follow (that pair not fatuously seen, as Sidney Nolan did, as inferior poets to their creation ‘Ern Malley’). There are less predictable inclusions: Alister Kershaw, John Manifold, Kenneth Mackenzie, John Blight, Vivian Smith. The two complementary chapters on drama are handled by Maryrose Casey, who begins by asserting that ‘the history of Australian drama between 1900 and 1970 is often presented as a series of isolated renaissances’. More pessimistically, Donald Horne called them ‘false dawns’.

The six authors with ‘International Reputations’ miss some who really had/have them, including Morris West, Thomas Keneally and Geraldine Brooks. The chosen six, however, are all hard cases for critical assessment. Brigid Rooney gives a judicious introduction to Stead, but John Beston seems mired in an earlier time than the other contributors. He dismisses ‘the vogue of The Twyborn Affair’ (one of White’s great books) as ‘helped by the fact that, as a novel treating transvestism and homosexuality, it was taken up by a Sydney which was just becoming as relentlessly permissive as it had previously been relentlessly conservative’. Beston also has White born in both England and Australia, which would be a good Twyborn joke, but more probably is indicative of the appalling standard of proof-reading in the Companion.

There is much else to commend: Werner Senn on Les Murray; Paul Genoni’s valiant defence of Murnane. Nicole Moore can’t seem to make up her mind, or to persuade us, about how good Dorothy Hewett’s work was. Jaroslav Kusnir, from Slovakia, struggles with the odd hand that he has been dealt – Michael Wilding, Murray Bail, Rodney Hall and Frank Moorhouse – but manages to link them through ‘their familiarity with contemporary tendencies in the development of literature and literary criticism’. Russell Blackford’s ‘Australian Science Fiction’ is an engaging survey that avoids precise definition of the subject’s boundaries. Alice Mills’s able survey of children’s literature still finds it immature, if by that is understood ‘a proper humanising and appropriate integration of the verbal and visual traditions of Australia’s Indigenous population’. Is the same demand made of Australian literature for adults?

A Companion to Australian Literature since 1900 is not priced for the general reader, but will be used in libraries with profit and enjoyment until the next shift in literary historical stocktaking.