This chapter examines the small press activity that continued to flourish in large Australian cities in the 1980s while smaller centres were dominated by particular individual writers. It considers how some poets began to adapt poetic language to the novel. It also tracks the publication of anthologies by mainstream publishers, including important collections of Aboriginal writing and women’s poetry by Penguin. The chapter includes a discussion of the Sydney Women’s Writers Workshop that began in the 1970s and continued through the first half of the 1980s. It analyses poetry by a wide range of writers, including John Tranter, John Forbes, Les Murray, Robert Gray, Vicki Viidikas, Anna Couani, Martin Johnston, Laurie Duggan, Alan Wearne and John A. Scott.

This chapter considers the empire- and nation-building capacities of the long poem in the nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries, including epics by R. H. Horne, Will X. Redman and Rex Ingamells. It then analyses revisions of the epic in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including examples that undo settler monumentality, explore other cultural narratives or make use of other media such as film. It discusses the popularity of the verse novel, observing its beginnings in the World War I writing of C. J. Dennis. It considers the renaissance of the verse novel in the late twentieth century, examining how its cross-genre form was often able to accommodate transgressive desires. The rising popularity of young adult verse novels is also detailed. The chapter traces the emergence of non-fiction long poetry, viewing it through the sub-categories of documentary, history and biography. It then discusses Indigenous long poems and recent experimental long poems, including ones that explore visual, conceptual and digital possibilities.

This chapter traces a path from the literary canonization of traditional forms of paraliterature, such as detective fiction and science fiction, to Latin American authors’ recent engagement with extraliterary reading practices. It also expands the definition of paraliterature to include widely disseminated informational and regulatory texts not typically considered literary, such as encyclopedias and state-administered exams, and examines paraliterature’s intersections with the avant-garde. Using a theoretical framework centered on Latin American ideas of engaged and “postautonomous” literature, this chapter first examines the embrace of popular categories of genre fiction by literary writers and then turns to autofictional, testimonial, and pseudo-referential works that cross boundaries between literature and the real. Through works from canonical authors such as Roberto Bolaño, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Diamela Eltit, as well as younger writers such as Verónica Stigger, Ricardo Lísias, and Ena Lucía Portela, this chapter addresses ways in which contemporary fiction and poetry intersect with their sociopolitical contexts and call into question the limits and purposes of literary writing and reading practices.