Michael Wilding (writer)

Gangan Verlag book launch at the Goethe-Institut Sydney (1991)

Michael Wilding is a British-born writer and academic who has spent most of his career at the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia. He is known for his work as a literary scholar, critic, and editor. Since 2002 he is Emeritus Professor in English and Australian Literature at the University of Sydney.

Early life and education[]

Michael Wilding was born in Worcester, England, and read English at Oxford University, where he graduated in 1963 with BA with first-class honours.^[1]

Academic career[]

Wilding took up an appointment as assistant lecturer at the University of Sydney in 1963, where he stayed for three years. He returned to England in 1967, where he attained his M.A., and took up a lectureship at the University of Birmingham.^[1]

In 1969 he took up a post as senior lecturer at Sydney, then becoming Reader in English from 1973 to 1992. He received the degree of D. Litt. from the University of Sydney in 1993. In 1993 he was appointed Professor of English and Australian Literature at Sydney, a position he held until his retirement in 2000, after which he was made professor emeritus.^[1]

His scholarly work focused especially on 17th- and early 18th-century English literature (notably the poet John Milton), and he also garnered esteem as a literary critic and scholar of Australian literature (including works on Marcus Clarke], William Lane, Christina Stead).^[1] His correspondence with Stead is in the National Library of Australia.^{[citation needed]}

Writing career[]

He became known for his creative writing work in the late 1960s, when he was one of the leading lights of the "new writing" movement, whose members were influential in revitalising Australian literature.^[1] His work was later described as "exciting and innovative" by Ross Fitzgerald in The Australian.^[2]

He has published many novels and short story collections, and has had his stories published widely in anthologies.^[1]

His most widely referenced work has been the short story magazine, Tabloid Story, which he co-founded with Frank Moorhouse and in 1972 and which ran for 33 issues, until 1974.^[1]

For many years he was Australian editor of , the UK quarterly edited by Jon Silkin and Lorna Tracy, introducing the work of Robert Adamson, Peter Carey and Vicki Viidikas to the UK.^{[citation needed]}

Wilding was a founding editor of the University of Queensland Press's Asian & Pacific Writing series and a co-founder of the publishers Wild & Woolley, (with ), and of , with the poet Robert Adamson).^[3]

Other activities[]

Wilding has been involved with the promotion of writers and writing, including as editor of short story collections, and as Chair of the New South Wales Writers' Centre.^[1]

Recognition[]

His first novel Living Together was described by David Marr in the Bulletin as 'a very funny book and a perfect picture of the people, the time, the place'. Jan Meek, wrote in Vogue Australia, 'He is so exhilaratingly adept with narrative you cannot put the book down. . . Wilding's pen is sharp as a rapier.' The San Francisco Review of Books hailed The Short Story Embassy, declaring Wilding was 'The best of the talent emerging from down under.' It was followed by Scenic Drive which was acclaimed in the USA: Dianna Pizza, wrote in the L. A. Star: ‘Takes you on a trip that shouldn’t be missed … I laughed until I cried. It’s rare that I enjoy a book as much as I enjoyed Scenic Drive – it’s a memorable book, sexy and funny. Once you read it, you’ll want to turn all of your friends on to it.’ And Dick Higgins commented in Newsart: ‘Wilding is fast becoming a well-known figure to the U.S. underground … It’s first-rate fiction.’ After the pastoral political paradisal Pacific Highway Wilding published two documentary novels, The Paraguayan Experiment, the story of the New Australia settlement, and Raising Spirits, Making Gold and Swapping Wives: The True Adventures of Dr John Dee & Sir Edward Kelly, which Peter Porter selected as one of The Economist Books of the Year: 'The story of Queen Elizabeth I's necromancer, John Dee, as transcribed from original documents interspersed with Michael Wilding's own words. A piece of esoterica designed to startle and delight the modern reader.' Two autobiographical novels of the literary life followed - Wildest Dreams, an Australian Book of the Year, which Adrian Caesar wrote, ‘deserves to be thought of as a contemporary classic’ and Wild Amazement. Bob Ellis wrote in Overland, ‘What I think absorbs the reader in the deeply revelatory un-memoir Wild Amazement is . . . Michael’s clear, almost hyper-real remembrance, as if experienced on a guided tour of a radiant, countercultural Disneyland, of a way of life, and a gravely joyous bohemia now gone, of how it was, and what a time it was, it really was, in Sydney in the sixties and seventies, in the Newcastle and the Journos’ Club and the Push parties and the plans for a literary life.’ And in, Quadrant, Peter Corris wrote, ‘Anyone interested in how contemporary Australian writing came to be the way it is, with its strengths and follies, its cliques and patrons, and the challenges it faces, will benefit from reading Wilding’s sensitive, sometimes bitchy, often funny and always intelligent tracing of his life’s trajectory.’ The Italian translation of Wild Amazement appeared in 2009. Between these two books Wilding wrote a best-selling campus novel Academia Nuts. Laurie Taylor wrote in the Times Higher Educational Supplement: 'A witty campus novel? In 2004? It seemed as likely as a holiday romance set amid the tropical delights of Guantanamo Bay. . . . But it is very funny. So funny that I had to stop reading it in bed in case my roars of laughter were disturbing the neighbours: so funny that it deserves to be the final great campus novel. It is unlikely to be challenged. For what Wilding's aged unreconstructed dons are playing with such absurd brio is unmistakably the last waltz.' A sequel, Superfluous Men, appeared in 2009. National Treasure is a black comedy about the literary world. Christopher Bantick, wrote in the Weekend Australian that it was 'witty and genuinely funny. . . Wilding's zesty writing and sheer fun with his subject makes for a diverting read. But don't be conned. This is fiction with more truth than lies.' 'Thoroughly enjoyable, sometimes hilarious,’ wrote Brian Matthews in the Australian Book Review, adding, ‘but it is not lightweight: it is tough, well-calculated, smoothly witty satire.' And Kerryn Goldsworthy wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘By the end of the novel we’ve realised why Plant is called Plant and we’ve seen perhaps more than we wanted to of the secret life of the successful Australian writer. Like Academia Nuts it’s a fable about the relentless commercialization of what used to be the life of the mind, at once very depressing and very funny.’ National Treasure is the pilot for the series of Plant private-eye novels, beginning with The Prisoner of Mount Warning and continuing with The Magic of It and Asian Dawn. Peter Corris wrote: ‘If this was as much fun to write as it is to read, Michael Wilding must have enjoying writing The Prisoner of Mount Warning. A take on the secret world, mainstream and underground journalism, Writers’ Centres, the counter culture and much else, the book is a heady ride from Sydney to Byron Bay and the Gold Coast with Plant, resting writer, investigating something that might have happened but perhaps not. Wilding has created a world both funny and creepy for Plant and the reader.’

Wilding’s first short story collection was Aspects of the Dying Process. He was hailed as 'one of the best writers of short stories in Australia today' by the Australian Book Review. 'The short story writer as sociologist, the short story writer as photo-realist,’ wrote the Times Literary Supplement, adding ‘Wilding can accurately pace a story and make a woman ironical and elusive in just a few sentences.' It was followed by the collections West Midland Underground, The Phallic Forest which Jean Bedford described in National Times as 'elegantly written and evocative. . . an undercurrent of sensitivity and searching for truths,' and of which the title story was filmed by Kit Guyatt, Reading the Signs (which gave its name to the Central Television documentary on Wilding’s work) and This is for You. Under Saturn is a collection of four novellas, including the cult classic ‘Campus Novel’. There have been a number of selections from these volumes, including The Man of Slow Feeling, Book of the Reading and Great Climate, published in the USA as Her Most Bizarre Sexual Experience. This was described as 'Erotic, fiercely intelligent and mordantly funny,' by Janette Turner Hospital. Jim Crace wrote 'His stories subvert and transcend not only sexual and social conventions. . . but story-telling itself.' And J. P. Donleavy commented: '21st century writing for 21st-century people.' Of the selection Somewhere New, Don Graham wrote: 'What strikes one first, apart from the impressive merits of individual stories, is Wilding's keen sense of literary integrity. Without being self-important or pretentious, Wilding’s voice in these stories is always one to attend to: an ironic, witty, highly educated, and in its indirect way, passionate authorial persona who has believed in literature as a life of principle, has seen many of the bases of that belief assaulted by abstruse theory, trendy anti-realism, and sinecure-seeking cynicism, and yet still in the face of everything, is able to make the affirming act through the agency of fiction. . . . No one in English writes better fiction about the process of writing than Wilding.' 'Essential reading,' wrote Robert Yeo, in the Singapore Straits Times.

Michael Wilding’s literary studies range from the seventeenth century to the present day. They include Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution, and a reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost; two volumes on the political novel - Political Fictions and Social Visions; a study of Marcus Clarke, a selection of Marcus Clarke's writings and a reissue of Clarke’s stories; and Studies in Classic Australian Fiction. He edited William Lane’s The Workingman’s Paradise and The Oxford Book of Australian Short Stories. He was made a Doctor of Letters by the University of Sydney for his writings on literature in its social and political context

Co-edited books include Australians Abroad (with Charles Higham), The Radical Reader (with Stephen Knight), Air Mail from Down Under (with Rudi Krausmann), the three volumes of Best Stories Under the Sun (with David Myers), Cyril Hopkins’ Marcus Clarke (with Laurie Hergenhan and Ken Stewart) and Heart Matters (with Peter Corris).

His papers and manuscripts are held in the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. Central Independent Television UK made a documentary on his writing in 1987, Reading the Signs.^{[citation needed]}

In 2015 he received the Colin Roderick award and the Prime Minister's Literary award for non-fiction for his Wild Bleak Bohemia: Marcus Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall: a Documentary.^{[citation needed]}

Critical assessments[]

A critical study of his work, Michael Wilding and the Fiction of Instant Experience by Don Graham, was published in 2013.^[4]

A festschrift in his honour, Running Wild: Essays, Fictions and Memoirs Presented to Michael Wilding, edited by David Brooks and Brian Kiernan, was published in 2004. It includes a number of essays on his fiction by Brian Kiernan, Laurie Hergenhan, Bruce Clunies Ross, Adrian Caesar and Robert Yeo.^{[citation needed]}

Bibliography[]

Fiction[]

• Aspects of the Dying Process, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1972
• Living Together, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1974 (Serbo-Croatian translation by David Albahari, Decje Novine, Beograd, 1985)
• The West Midland Underground, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1975
• The Short Story Embassy, Wild & Woolley, Sydney, 1975
• Scenic Drive, Wild & Woolley, Sydney, 1976
• The Phallic Forest, Wild & Woolley, Sydney; John McIndoe, Dunedin, 1978
• Noc Na Orgiji [Night at the Orgy], stories selected and translated by David Albahari, Kultura, Beograd, 1982
• Pacific Highway, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1982
• Reading the Signs, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1984
• The Man of Slow Feeling: Selected Short Stories, Penguin, Melbourne, 1986
• Under Saturn, Black Swan, Sydney, 1988
• Great Climate, Faber & Faber, London, 1990
• Her Most Bizarre Sexual Experience, W. W. Norton, New York, 1991
• This is for You, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1994
• Book of the Reading, Paper Bark Press, Sydney, 1994
• Somewhere New: New & Selected Stories, Central Queensland University Press, Rockhampton; McBride's Books, Colwall, UK, 1996 (Punjabi translation by Tejpal Singh, Kition Nawan, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 2001)
• Wildest Dreams, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1998
• A Whisper from the Forest, selected stories in Japanese translation by Sokushin Ezawa, Seizansha, Tokyo, 1999
• Academia Nuts, Wild & Woolley, Sydney, 2002, 2nd edition 2003
• Wild Amazement, Central Queensland University Press, Rockhampton; Shoestring Press, Nottingham, UK, 2006 (Italian translation by Aldo Magagnino, Con Folle Stupore, Edizioni Controluce, 2008)
• National Treasure, Central Queensland University Press, Rockhampton, 2007
• Superfluous Men, Arcadia, Melbourne, 2009
• The Prisoner of Mount Warning, Press On / Arcadia, Melbourne, 2010
• The Magic Of It, Press On / Arcadia, Melbourne, 2011
• Asian Dawn, Press On / Arcadia, Melbourne, 2013
• In the Valley of the Weed, Arcadia, Melbourne, 2017
• Little Demon, Arcadia, Melbourne, 2018
• The Travel Writer, Arcadia, Melbourne, 2018
• The Midlands, and Leaving Them, Shoestring Press, Nottingham, 2021

Documentaries

• The Paraguayan Experiment, Penguin, Melbourne & Harmondsworth, 1985 (Bengali translation by Geeta Sen, Papyrus, Calcutta, 1995; Japanese translation by Sokushin Ezawa, Asahi Shimbun Publications, Tokyo, 2016)
• Raising Spirits, Making Gold, and Swapping Wives: The True Adventures of Dr John Dee and Sir Edward Kelly, Shoestring Press, Nottingham, UK; Abbott Bentley, Sydney, 1999
• Wild Bleak Bohemia: Marcus Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall: A Documentary, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2014

Non-fiction[]

• Milton's Paradise Lost, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1969
• Cultural Policy in Great Britain (with Michael Green), Unesco, Paris, 1970
• Marcus Clarke, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1977
• Political Fictions, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980; Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1984
• Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987
• The Radical Tradition: Lawson, Furphy, Stead, Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, Townsville, 1993
• Social Visions, Sydney Studies in Society & Culture, Sydney, 1993
• Studies in Classic Australian Fiction, Sydney Studies in Society & Culture, Sydney; Shoestring Press, Nottingham U. K., 1997
• Among Leavisites, privately printed, Sydney, 1999
• Wild & Woolley: A Publishing Memoir, Giramondo, Sydney, 2011
• Growing Wild (recollections), Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2016
• Wild About Books: Essays on Books and Writing, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2019
• Marcus Clarke, Novelist, Journalist and Bohemian, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2021

Edited[]

• Three Tales by Henry James, Hicks Smith, Sydney, 1967
• Australians Abroad (with Charles Higham), F.W.Cheshire, Melbourne, 1967
• Marvell: Modern Judgements, Macmillan, London, 1969; Aurora, Nashville, 1970
• Julius Caesar and Marcus Brutus by John Sheffield, Cornmarket, London, 1970
• We Took Their Orders And Are Dead (with David Malouf, Shirley Cass and Ros Cheney), Ure Smith, Sydney, 1971
• Marcus Clarke, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1976; 2nd edition, 1988
• The Radical Reader (with Stephen Knight), Wild & Woolley, Sydney, 1977
• The Tabloid Story Pocket Book, Wild & Woolley, Sydney, 1978
• The Workingman's Paradise by William Lane, Sydney University Press, 1980; 2nd edition, 2004
• Stories by Marcus Clarke, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1983
• Air Mail from Down Under, (Australian Short Stories in German translation) (with Rudi Krausmann), Gangaroo, 1990
• The Oxford Book of Australian Short Stories, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, Oxford and New York, 1994, paperback, 1995
• History, Literature and Society: essays in honour of Soumyen Mukherjee, (with Mabel Lee), Sydney Studies in Society & Culture, Sydney; Manohar, New Delhi, 1997
• Best Stories Under the Sun, (with David Myers), Central Queensland University Press, Rockhampton, 2004
• Best Stories Under the Sun: 2: Travellers' Tales, (with David Myers), Central Queensland University Press, Rockhampton, 2005
• Confessions and Memoirs: Best Stories Under the Sun 3, (with David Myers), Central Queensland University Press, Rockhampton, 2006
• Cyril Hopkins’ Marcus Clarke (with Laurie Hergenhan and Ken Stewart), Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2009
• Heart Matters (with Peter Corris), Viking, Melbourne, 2010^[5]
• Price Iz Bezvremene Zemlje. Antologija savremene australikjske proze (with Natasa Kampmark), Agora, Novi Sad, 2012

Articles[]

• "The Great Purge of our Libraries", Quadrant, 1 July 2011.
• "Libraries under threat", Sydney Review of Books, 7 March 2014.
• "University libraries should preserve their printed books", The Australian, 24 August 2017.

References[]