Rodney Hall and the Global Imagination

Peter D. Mathews is Professor of English Literature at the University of Macau.

• Part 1 Foundations of Poetic Wisdom; 1. Into the Labyrinth; 2. The Postcolonial Lens; 3. The Lesson of Gummbula; 4. Manifold, Graves, Vico; Part II Philosophical Resistance; 5. Against Cartesian Reason; 6. Words and Cages; 7. The World's First Luxury Slave-Cruise; Part III Captivity and Contingency; 8. Self-Captivity and Its Discontents; 9. Magical Realism, or Reality in Fancy Dress; 10. The Created World; 11. Causality and Contingency; Part IV Fragmentation and Identity; 12. Subjective Fragmentation; 13. The Spiral Logic of Re-experience; 14. Saying No; Part V Myth, Masks, and Mirrors; 15. Strange in Its Departures; 16. Revolutionary Moments; 17. The Owner of My Face; 18. The Conceit of Identity; Part VI The Muse and the Refrain; 19. The Poetic Muse; 20. My Polyphonic Hall of Mirrors; 21. Flutes and the Goddess; 22. The Refrain; Part VII The Sacred and the Spiral; 23. Nobody Is Singing; 24. Inhuman Time; Appendix: Works by Rodney Hall; Bibliography; Index

“One of Australia’s most acclaimed and challenging novelists, Rodney Hall, started out as a poet. Peter D. Mathews reveals Hall’s poetic wisdom, both in poetry itself and in a fiction-writing career that has intrigued many decades of readers. Tracking intellectual influences as varied as Giambattista Vico and John Manifold, Mathews brilliantly delineates how Hall’s critique of Australian society and his commitment to literary innovation go hand in hand. He positions the contemporary novel as ranging across philosophy, psychology, even historiography, all the while remaining in the distinctly imaginative vein that Hall has explored so successfully.” – Nicholas Birns, New York University“Readers need a guide to the large, thrilling and labyrinthine world of Rodney Hall’s poetry and fiction extending over more than sixty years and focusing on issues central to Australia’s past and its current concerns. Peter D. Mathews provides this in a strikingly lucid way, taking us through the complexities as a sane and eloquent companion. This is a book which opens up important areas of debate.” – Martin Duwell, Australian Poetry Review