"In a provocative contribution to the series, Graham Huggan presents fresh readings of an outstanding, sometimes deeply unsettling national literature whose writers and readers just as unmistakably belong to the wider world. Australian literature, the book argues, is not a unique province of Australian readers and critics, nor is its exclusive task to provide an internal commentary on changing national concerns. Rather, the book adopts a transnational approach, motivated by postcolonial interests, in which contemporary ideas taken from postcolonial criticism and critical race theory are productively combined and imaginatively transformed.

Rejecting the fashionable view that Australia is not, and never will be, postcolonial, Huggan argues on the contrary that Australian literature, like other settler literatures, requires close attention lo postcolonial methods and concerns. A postcolonial approach to Australian literature, he suggests, is more than just a case for a more inclusive nationalism; it also involves a general acknowledgement of the nation's changed relationship to an increasingly globalized world."

"Australian Literature also contributes to debates about the continuing history of racism in Australia - a history in which the national literature has played a formative role. Australian literature, the book argues, has been both product and producer of racial tensions and anxieties that are nowhere more visible than in the discourses it has created about race, both within the national context and beyond."--Jacket.