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Book Details

The Archibald Paradox

A Strange Case of Authorship

Second Edition

Sylvia Lawson

J.F Archibald, the man behind the famous prize for portraiture, was also the founding editor of The Bulletin, one of the most lively and influential journals ever produced in Australia.

Awards

Winner, NSW Premier's Award for Non-Fiction 1984
Winner, Wilke Award 1984
Winner, Walter McCrae Russell Award (Association for the Study of Australian Literature) 1984

Opinion

'An extraordinary book about Archibald and about The Bulletin. . .. a remarkable patchwork of provocative ideas and new insight.' (Courier-Mail)

'A complex, elegant, reflective, passionate work.'
Bulletin

"a vibrant, theoretically informed look at colonial Australia and the paper that both shaped and reflected that world"
(Steven Carroll, The Age, 11/3/06)

About this Title

A NEW EDITION OF THIS CLASSIC, WITH AN UPDATED EPILOGUE

'A complex, elegant, reflective, passionate work.'--Bulletin

'Lawson tells an exhilarating tale . . . a tract for the times.'--Times Literary Supplement

'Great stuff; a work of scholarship so seriously yet racily written that it's un-put-downable.'--Sydney Morning Herald

Winner, NSW Premier's Award for Non-Fiction 1984
Winner, Wilke Award 1984
Winner, Walter McCrae Russell Award (Association for the Study of Australian Literature) 1984

The early Sydney Bulletin, 'a parade of expressive tricks and marvels', came out of the vociferous clamour that was the late nineteenth-century press--British radical weeklies, battling American dailies, lively news sheets from bush towns and goldfields.

Turning up every week in its violent pink cover--'half Australia writes it', they said, 'all Australia reads it'--the Bulletin was the Great Print Circus: 'a better book' said one of its veterans 'than any of the books that came out of it'.

In this remarkable study of the Bulletin and its founding editor , J. F. Archibald, Sylvia Lawson provides a provocative re-interpretation of the legendary 1880s and 1890s, looking at the dark side of the circus as well as its high entertainment.

About the Author

Sylvia Lawson writes essays, fiction and journalism. Her recent work includes the prizewinning collection How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia (UNSW Press, 2002) and the novel The Outside Story (Hardie Grant, 2003), which is centred on the Sydney Opera House.

978-0-522-85249-3