This book is an interdisciplinary and multicultural study of ancient and contemporary texts that encode women's spirituality. The contributors, using modern critical methods such as feminist theory, postculturalism, and the new historicisms, examine how the ideas in these texts are being reworked in different religious traditions. The volume encompasses both contemporary and historical contexts, tracing the roles, actions, writings, and beliefs of women in pre-Christian, Christian, Islamic, indigenous, and neo-pagan contexts. The book builds on three decades of feminist research into such areas as goddess worship, indigenous spiritualities, eco-feminism, biblical hermeneutics, Christian and Islamic mysticism, subversive poetics, and mythological systems inside and outside the mainstream.

In The Fiction of Tim Winton, Lyn McCredden explores the work of a major Australian author who bridges the literary-popular divide. Tim Winton has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award a record four times and has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His novels and short stories are widely studied in schools and universities, and have been lauded by critics both in Australia and internationally. Unusually for an Australian literary author, he is also one of the country's most enduringly popular writers: Cloudstreet was voted 'Australia's favourite book' in a poll conducted by the ABC, his books regularly appear on bestseller lists, and his stories have been adapted for the stage, television, cinema and opera. In this wide-ranging study of Winton's work and career, McCredden considers how Winton has sustained a strong mainstream following while exploring complex themes and moving between genres. Attending to both secular and sacred frames of reference, she considers his treatment of class, gender, place, landscape and belonging, and shows how a compassion for human falling and redemption permeates his work. She demonstrates how his engagement with these recurring ideas has deepened and changed over time, and how he has moved between - and challenged - the categories of the 'popular' and the 'literary'.

In Tim Winton: Critical Essays, the editors have brought together an international lineup of scholars - new voices and established - to consider the work of Australia's most celebrated and loved contemporary novelist. From Shallows to Eyrie, this book extends beyond the singular novels, into thematics identified across Winton's body of work, thinking through his place and reception in Australian and world literature. The author Tim Winton is both a popular and literary success, and this volume has been conceived for a critical audience of professionals and students, as well as for the readers who have made Tim Winton a household name.