Review of The Prose of Christopher Brennan, edited by A. R. Chisholm and J. J. Quinn

Abstract

Christopher Brennan, at the beginning of the university year 1921, became the first Professor of Comparative Literature in Australia. The culture of the new professor had prepared him for this task: equally versed in Greek, Latin, German and French (not to mention his mother tongue), Brennan was for the Sydney of his day the prototype of a certain literary cosmopolitanism. And yet Brennan, who spoke French and was remarkable for his commentaries on the Symbolists, had never been in France. He had read Mallarmé and his favourite poets between 1892 and 1894 in Berlin, where he pursued his classical studies and was at one time a student of Zeller