Sneak preview : a secret alterity

Jean-Franҫois Vernay's panorama begins with a 'draft definition' Australian literature. This is proper, not because the definition is provisional, but because 'Australian literature' remains undefined. It does not have a settled shape and I do not mean to say 'yet', as if one day in the future it will have found itself. It is not a question of adolescence, but rather something inherent in Australian literature's appeal and interest that it continually challenges definitional grabs. To adapt Ranajit Guha's title, History at the Limit of World-History, Australian literature can be considered to be at of world and literature. The World Republic of Letters, example, Pascale Casanova's important survey, mentions Australia only in passing, as an item in Commonwealth lists. European idea of Australia came being, literature of the country was oral, visual, perfor- mative-Aboriginal-or else speculation. Even if we restrict literature to what is written and agree on a notion ofAustralia as the largely English-speaking society that was inaugurated in 1788, it is still the case that Australian literature exists at the limit of world literature. While many works can be identified as 'tied in some way ... to things Australian' (the flexible definition Vernay borrows from D.R. Burns), no single characterisation is generally accepted as adequately descriptive of Australian literature as a whole, as an entity. Indeed, the label 'Australian' is commonly resisted by Australian authors themselves. Robert Dessaix, for example, is quoted as saying at the 2010 Adelaide Writers' Week: 'Do any of us write as Australian writers? I know I don't. I write as moi.