Writing Now : Australian Settler Colonial Fiction and Middlebrow Culture in the Twenty-First Century

“Writing Now offers razor sharp historicisation of contemporary cultural sensibilities emerging in Australia’s middlebrow fiction. Lucidly written, meticulously researched and carefully argued, Ricker’s book provides essential guidance to students and scholars in the fields of Australian literature, settler studies and cultural sociology.”
– Tony Hughes-D’Aeth, Professor & Chair in Australian Literature, University of Western Australia

“An astute and sympathetic exploration of the contradictions and complexities of contemporary settler Australian fiction in its uncomfortable engagement with colonial power. Compellingly written, impressively researched and very persuasive, this is a book I’ve been waiting for.”
– Maggie Nolan, Associate Professor and Director of Austlit

Writing Now maps the distinctive literary and cultural dynamics of twenty-first-century Australian settler fiction. This book identifies a set of tropes that comprise an essential cultural vocabulary for settler colonial authors representing issues of race, history, and belonging in the twenty-first century. Through a close reading of seven novels, the author describes how the old tropes of colonial writing are transformed as writers engage with middlebrow literary institutions, counter-colonial discourses, and the genre codes of popular fiction. So, too, with models of settler authorship: examining a rich field of literary promotion, the author reveals how settler writers are positioned, and adopt positions, as cultural mediators of ethical frameworks for cross-cultural learning. The book highlights the pervasive influence of this framework and the complicated position of an Indigenous politics of representation in mainstream literary culture.