![]() ![]() Particular attention will be paid to the way Murnane’s characters interpret their environment and the ontological understandings they reach as a result of this interpretative process. This essay hopes to go some way to rectifying this state of affairs by drawing prospective readers’ attention to the unique treatment of the physical environment in Murnane’s classic Australian novel, The Plains. In spite of Murnane’s recent ascent to international prominence there remains very little critical discussion of his work outside of Australia and the two small enclaves of his admirers in Sweden and the United States. ![]() The rise in Murnane’s public profile was confirmed last year when the American republication of two of his novels was marked by an essay-length review in The New York Review of Books by Nobel laureate and fellow antipodean, J. Gerald Murnane has long been a writer’s writer in Australia, with a relatively modest readership, but all that has changed recently with a spate of awards and a Nobel Prize nomination. ![]() Lainsmen commonly consider all art to be the scant visible evidence of immense processes in a landscape that even the artist scarcely perceives, so that they confront the most obdurate or the most ingenuous work utterly receptive and willing to be led into bewildering vistas of vistas (Gerald Murnane, The Plains (Melbourne: Nostrilia, 1982), p. Reading landscape in Gerald Murnane’s The Plains ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |