Melinda Harvey

I grew up in Sydney and completed a Bachelor of Arts (Hons I) in English Literature at the University of Sydney.

After time travelling in Europe and working for an architectural publishing company in London I returned to the University of Sydney to write my PhD thesis – on women’s stream of consciousness narratives, focusing on Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, and their representation of the modernist city’s sites and scenes.

Lectureships in Sydney, Berlin and Canberra followed, then I moved to Melbourne to teach into RMIT’s Bachelor of Creative Writing program for 2 years. I joined Monash in January 2011.

Women Writer-Critics

I am interested in women writers who work(ed) at the intersections between creative and critical writing such as Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Jean Stafford, Susan Sontag, Renata Adler and Chris Kraus.

Contemporary Book Reviewing in Australia

My career combines academic teaching and research with work as a book critic. I review new books for a number of Australian newspapers and literary magazines including The Australian, SMH, The Age, ABR and the Sydney Review of Books. With Julieanne Lamond (ANU), I am conducting a big data study of book reviewing in Australia, comparing 1985 with today. We  collaborate with The Stella Prize organisation on the annual ‘Stella Count‘. I am the Series Editor of the forthcoming Contemporary Australian Writers for Monash University Press.

Modernism

I have published on Katherine Mansfield – on her book reviews, relationship with Anton Chekhov and treatment of animals in her life and fiction. My edited collection (co-editor Sarah Ailwood from the University of Canberra), Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2015.

Current Supervisions:

'David Foster Wallace and Affect'

'The Lyrical Essay'

'Australian Cinema and Fear'

'After Fukushima'

I welcome enquiries on the following topics:

20th and 21st century literature

Women’s writing

Modernism

Contemporary literature

Contemporary literary culture

Creative nonfiction, especially the essay

Explorations of the real-world uses of literature

Cinema, the visual arts and literature

ATS2164/3164 Italian Transformations (Prato, 2018)

ATS3502 Contemporary Literature (S2, 2018)

ATS3503 Writing Women (2020)

ATS3421 Literature and Modernism (2020)