Literary criticism in Australia

This chapter examines three major strands of literary criticism in Australia: scholarly criticism, popular criticism, and vernacular criticism. Scholarly criticism refers to peer-reviewed critical work produced by credentialed scholars within the bureaucratic structures of contemporary universities. Popular criticism is aimed at the general public and produced in print or online periodicals; its most prevalent form is the book review. Vernacular criticism refers to non-specialised modes of everyday criticism that occurs on social reading sites like Goodreads, in book clubs, in classrooms, and so forth. While these practices all have different contexts, many of them are undertaken by the same practitioners, and there is often significant overlap between scholarly and popular criticism, in particular. While it is often claimed that Australian literary criticism is in decline, available data suggest something more ambivalent: the production of scholarly criticism has increased but popular criticism may have experienced a slight decline.