ABSTRACT
Harry Heseltine’s entry “Criticism” in the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (see Wilde et al., below) points out that the beginnings are inextricably linked with the development of journals in Australia from 182.1 onwards. He gives a full and careful account of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century material in chronological order. Peter Pierce’s “Forms of Literary History”, in the Penguin New Literary History (see Hergenhan et al., below), is less clear, jumping around a number of themes, acting chronologically only within each theme. Starting from the work of Frederick Simnett, in 1856, he identifies criticism devoted to “cataloguing absences”, that adopting the organic metaphors of the land and growth, that revealing political splits between nationalists and universalists, that which is essentially melodramatic, and the general tendency of Australian critics to work in dualistic or antagonistic modes. His clearest stand is, however, on the seminal nature of H.M. Green’s 1930 Outline of Australian Literature, which insisted on the close relationship between Australian national characteristics and Australian literature.
