Review of In A Critical Condition by John Docker; and The Music of Love: Critical Essays on Literature and Life by Dorothy Green

Abstract

Penguin's publication of Docker's book indicates their sense of his potential for becoming a force in Australian literary studies (as well as their well established preference for arguments put in polemical style): their publication of the collection of essays by Dorothy Green, The Music of Love, is a recognition of an achieved stature, the record of a life's committed intellectual labour. There is a further connection between the two books: Dorothy Green has long stood outside and in opposition to the kind of establishment Docker's book describes. Her commitment to the social function of literature is explicitly political, and the essays in this book continually move between text and context, between the words on the page and the economic and historical conditions which participated in their production and which infer onto them their significance.