Kramer’s Introduction begins with a reference to the then forthcoming ‘bicentenary of the establishment of the first settlement at Sydney Cove in 1788’ and ends with the sentiment that a ‘definition of Australian cultural identity and its reflection in literature which does not take account of the enrichment of Australian experience from a variety of sources (including, more recently, from Asia) is bound to be inadequate.’ The opening words of the Introduction to the new publication make a gesture towards the Olympics. The first essay, Adam Shoemaker’s ‘White on Black/Black on White’, begins: ‘The historical dates which constitute what is known as “chronological time” have often been used to imprison Australia’s indigenous people’. Elsewhere contributors tend to stress not so much Kramer’s ‘enrichment’ as the exclusion of minorities – indigenous Australians, migrants, women – from mainstream (often ‘bourgeois’) literary culture.

Kramer’s volume made almost no reference beyond traditional genres – fiction, poetry, drama – whereas the new survey casts its net far wider to embrace Aboriginal stories and legends, popular entertainment, film, television, political pamphlets, and the like. The earlier publication focused on individual writers. The new literary history is more synoptic – in part because of the existence of The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, according to the editors – and more concerned with large political and sociological patterns than with aesthetic values.

The index of each provides, once more, a convenient short-hand illustration of these differences. In Kramer’s history, Patrick White’s name appears on forty-six pages, with a nine-page section devoted entirely to his work. Bennett and Strauss (or rather their contributors) mention White on thirty-eight of the pages without, however, engaging with an examination of his achievement. The case of Christina Stead is similar. The new volume mentions her on nine pages; in Kramer’s publication, there are references on eighteen, including (again) a six-page section devoted to her work. As with White, less stress is laid on Stead’s individuality, indeed the oddity of some of her writing, than on the manner in which her work illuminated, or failed to illuminate, developments in social and political life.

Many will welcome the new history’s broader scope, its determination to remove writers and their work from excessively aesthetic or high-culture cocoons, its emphasis on the unfolding, often contradictory and contentious attempts at national self-definition. Others will deplore its tendency to flatten out individuality or even idiosyncrasies in its excessively sociological and political, predominantly left-leaning concerns.

So inevitably, there are losses and gains. I think that Kramer’s volume failed, on the whole, to pay sufficient heed to the political and social context out of which much Australian writing emerged. Our literature – I should say perhaps the works of European Australians - is still a recent enough phenomenon for some ‘early’ texts, The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn for instance, to remain directly relevant to contemporary political and social preoccupations. The price we have to pay for the greater emphasis on such contexts, at least with some of these essays, might however be deemed too high.

How high the price varies from contributor to contributor and is directly proportionate, of course, to the critic’s skill, experience, and tact. In the second section, dealing with the period 1851–1914, the outstanding contribution is Elizabeth Perkins’ lucid and informative essay on literary culture and canon formation in the period. Perkins, one of our most experienced scholars, recognises, as several contributors do not, that in a literary history such as this a critic’s individual preoccupations must be curbed in order to register conflicting attitudes and points of view. Richard Nile’s essay ‘Literary Democracy and the Politics of Reputation’ in the period 1914–39, despite its somewhat forbidding tide, is a judicious, admirably documented survey of literary activity in those decades. Bruce Bennett’s contribution on literary culture since 1965 is similarly distinguished.

One or two of the contributors seem not to have acknowledged the need for such restraint. Carole Ferrier’s piece on fiction between 1940 and 1965 contains a competent, though partisan argument. Many readers might suspect, however, that her focus is too narrow. Her suggestion, for instance, that Martin Boyd’s The Cardboard Crown is still worth reading because it shows the inevitable decay of bourgeois culture is too parti-pris to pass muster in a publication such as this. Similarly, Dennis Haskell’s otherwise highly professional essay on poetry since 1965 is marred by his momentary engagement with the kind of squabbling poets seem unable to resist.

So inevitably this literary history is a mixed bag – as was indeed its predecessor. At its best, as for instance in Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s ‘Poetry and Modernism’, it displays the admirable strengths of contemporary critical writing. At its worst, in several contributions by less experienced critics – on gender in the early period, on drama since 1965, and on the Anzac myth, in particular – it reveals how easily clichés can fall trippingly from the keyboard.

If several of those contributions were to be taken at their face value, the unwary reader could well take away the impression that the sole aim of the Cold War was to make life difficult for Australian writers. That somewhat skewed vision of the relationship between literature and historical events is illustrated by the bizarre chronology that forms a part of the appendix. I would need a lot of persuasion to accept that Richard Brome’s 1636 comedy The Antipodes – a traditional world-upside-down tale – had any relevance for the emergence of Australian literary culture, or that the most significant public events of 1997 from a literary-historical point of view were the death of Princess Di, the decision to close BHP’s Newcastle operations, and Robert Manne’s departure from Quadrant.

The trouble is, of course, that no two people are likely to agree on what the shape and emphases of a literary history should be. Compiling a volume such as this must have been a daunting task, necessitating compromises and even perhaps tolerance of less than satisfactory contributions. On the whole, it seems to me, the editors have fulfilled their task with considerable success. The most valuable aspect of this compilation is that it provides a vivid snapshot of the academic and critical preoccupations of the nineties in much the same way as Kramer’s volume reflected the priorities of its time.