The Burning Library: Our Great Novelists Lost and Found

Second Hand

Excellent Condition

A perfect introduction to Australian literature, The Burning Library explores the lives and work of some of our greatest novelists.

Alarmed by the increasingly marginal status of Australian literature in the academy, Williamson has set out to reintroduce us to those key writers whose works we may have forgotten or missed altogether. His focus is on fiction that gives pleasure, and he is ardent in defence of books that for whatever reason sit uneasily in the present moment.

The Burning Library is a dynamic act of reclamation inspired by Miles Franklin's claim that a nation that fails to acknowledge its literary treasures is `neither preserved nor developed, but only defaced'.

Writers discussed in this collection include M. Barnard Eldershaw, Xavier Herbert, Christina Stead, Dal Stivens, Patrick White, Jessica Anderson, Sumner Locke Elliott, Amy Witting, Olga Masters, David Ireland, Elizabeth Harrower, Thomas Keneally, Randolph Stow, and Gerald Murnane.