ABSTRACT
More than contemporary Australian literature, contemporary Australian film is the product of an institutional structure with specific and explicit responsibilities for constructing 'national' texts. Given the importance of the development of an Australian 'canon' within the history of Australian literary studies, on the one hand, and the compromised position 'the canon' in general occupies within poststructuralist theory, on the other, the literary biography provides a particularly strategic avenue for the consolidation of an Australian literary tradition at the moment. The most important contextual development to note lies within the field of Australian cultural studies. There are signs of a recovery of an audience for Australian popular fiction. Crime fiction, in particular, including feminist crime fiction, has boomed to the extent that it offers a range of styles and modalities from Peter Corris and Jennifer Rowe at the intellectual end of town to Robert G. Barrett at the macho end.
