Tim Winton, Cloudstreet and the Field of Australian Literature

Let me begin by saying what I'm not going to do in this paper: I'm not going to do what used to be called a “close reading” of Tim Winton's Cloudstreet. I'm not going to wheel out a theoretical approach through which to interpret the text, as if the reading I could produce by that means were somehow more authoritative than any other. Instead, what I will do is situate Winton's career and this particular novel in what can be called the field of Australian literature. In using this term field, I mean to indicate the whole system involved in the production and reception of Australian literature. This is now a very broad spectrum of institutions, personnel, practices and values that is surprisingly complex and diverse. It is now so extensive that it isn't even confined to Australia. And academic literary criticism — in the sense of theoretically-driven textual analysis — is only one part of that field. Many would say that it's not even the most important part.