Review of Marcus Clarke's Bohemia by Andrew McCann

Abstract

It is rare for a nineteenth-century Australian writer to be the subject of such a distinguished and theoretically sophisticated monograph as McCann's. To demonstrate that Australian literature is valuable now, it is far easier to let the rest of the world off the hook for neglecting it earlier than to attribute, more plausibly, the neglect of earlier Australian literature to the lack of an efficient market in world literature, a lack which kept the works of writers such as Marcus Clarke behind a colonial curtain.