Books by Stephen Muecke

Storytelling and intimacy conspire in the magic of the street theatre that is the contingent encounter. Here one's participation is already loaded; any engagement involves risks of thought or of feeling. The authors work with an aesthetic of the glimpse; fleeting encounters with wisdom and beauty.

As a genre that confounds the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, fictocriticism continues to gain currency. It solves a problem for researchers and writers who do not wish to be held to that somewhat artificial division, and who consider their research methods necessarily to include the stylistic experiments that show their research and thought processes. Research, knowledge of the world, that continues to be ';written up', ';after the fact' in the usual academic genres, has a tendency to re-inscribe the status quo. The world stays the way it is; change, surprise and experiment elude the writer. Stephen Muecke, one of the originators of fictocritical writing, presents a selection of his best essays in this innovative genre. In doing so he offers a rare and important theorization of the potential of speculative methods across disciplines including Literary Studies, Philosophy, Anthropology, Geography, and Science and Technology Studies.

There is a quarrel about whose antiquity is at the foundation of Australian culture, and why contemporary forms of Aboriginality are marginal to Australia's modernity. These are the starting points for the essays contained in Stephen Muecke's book.

This profusely illustrated book offers a comprehensive look at the social and cultural history of Aborigines from the origins to the present.