Review of *Polities and Poetics: Race Relations and Reconciliation in Australian Literature* by Adelle Sefton-Rowston

Abstract

Notwithstanding criticism of the project or process of reconciliation, literary scholars have continued to use it as a productive framework for analysing (mostly) non-Indigenous authored novels of the 1990s and 2000s. This monograph also embraces reconciliation as a framework, though it expands that frame in two ways. First, it looks beyond the novel to also incorporate an eclectic range of memoirs, poetry and fictional and non-fictional stories within a more broadly defined ‘reconciliatory literature’. Second, Indigenous-authored texts are also examined here as reconciliatory. The author sees an empowering role for literature in seeking to explore ‘how creative writing can “do” reconciliation’. Each of the five analytical chapters concentrates on a major ‘trope of reconciliation’ in Australian writing from the period 1990–2010.