1990

Olivia Shakespear and W.B.Yeats
John Harwood
Macmillan

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The reconstruction of any history is a gradual process and that of literary movements is no exception. The chronicling of Modernism has been a particularly baroque process. The key players were grandiose not only in mythologising themselves but in barracking for their chums as well. W.B.Yeats wrote himself into the Celtic dreamtime, Ezra Pound saw himself as Dante in a beret and T.S. Eliot smiled coyly while everyone …

1990

The Great World
David Malouf
Chatto and Windus

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Memories and the past have often been at the centre of David Malouf’s fiction- in his first novel Johnno, in the tellingly named An Imaginary Life, especially in the scrupulously recalled chambers of 12 Edmondstone Street and now in his most recent work, The Great World. The capacity to remember is more than nostalgic impulse for Malouf, it is the power to reconstitute and sustain glimpses from …

1990

Fly Away Peter
David Malouf

Poetic is the word most often used to describe David Malouf’s work. He started out as a poet and has published five volumes to date. He also taught in the English department at Sydney University – so it is hardly surprising to find a `literariness’ in his work which stylistically takes the form of a verbal compression that can make the apparent simplicity of his writing not so much difficult to penetrate, but unaccountably …

1990

Flinders University of South Australia
Centre for New Literatures in English
and the English Discipline

Notes for Teachers of English Studies

Fly Away Peter
by David Malouf
First published by Chatto and Windus, 1982.

The Novel

Fly Away Peter is set in Queensland just before 1914. It concerns two young men in contrasting circumstances. Ashley Crowther, after receiving an English public school and Cambridge education, has returned to manage the family estates that he has solely inherited. He leads …