The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry

Provides comprehensive analyses of poetic engagements with multiple histories, forms, and contexts of Australian poetry.

The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry is the authoritative volume on Australian poetry. It provides multiple insights into its diverse forms, communities, and audiences, as well as the role of poetry in shaping understandings of Australia across time and within local, regional, and global contexts.The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry offers an authoritative and comprehensive engagement with poetries that range from some of the world's oldest to significant innovations of the twenty-first century. Bringing together insights from First Nations experts, internationally renowned scholars, distinguished practitioners, and future critical leaders, this volume analyses the role of poetry in the multiple cultural imaginaries of Australia within local, regional, and global contexts. Chapters consider the role of poetry as both shaping and critiquing settler-colonial, national, and identity formations; Aboriginal writing, song, and cultural leadership; children's poetry; the poetry of war and conflict; engagement with print, film, and the digital; major aesthetic movements; geographies of the city, region, Asia, the South, and Antarctica; diasporic movements; and environmentalism. The volume includes analyses of the archive, ballads and folk poetry, performance poetries, conceptual and concrete poetries, canon formation and diversification, and current perspectives on major authors.