Bradshaw, Wayne (2025) Anna Kornbluh. Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. Verso, 2024. 240 pages. Paperback ISBN: 9781804291344. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 25 (1/2).

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Abstract

[Extract] Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism may well be the most important work of cultural criticism to be published in the English-speaking world in the past twenty-five years. Nevertheless, there are challenges for reviewing such a book for the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. The first is the not insurmountable problem that Kornbluh’s book was published almost two years ago in January 2024, and might be seen as already a little long in the tooth. The second, more difficult matter is that Kornbluh is a North American critic, and her book has no direct connection to Australian literature. Nevertheless, Kornbluh’s analysis applies to a globalised milieu of cultural production of which Australia is unquestionably a part. This review reads some recent Australian writing in the context of Immediacy to examine how our national literature has responded to the conditions of what Kornbluh labels “too late capitalism.” So in this sense it might be more apposite to consider it a review of Patrick Marlborough’s novel Nock Loose (2025), or Jen Craig’s novel Wall (2023), in the light of Kornbluh’s criticism.

Item ID:	90438
Item Type:	Article (Book Review)
ISSN:	1833-6027
Copyright Information:	JASAL provides open access to all of its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Such access is associated with increased readership and citation levels. JASAL uses open source software, developed by the Public Knowledge Project <http://pkp.ubc.ca> to help make open access economically viable, and to improve the scholarly and public quality of research. Articles are made available under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
Date Deposited:	02 Feb 2026 00:22
FoR Codes:	47 LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE > 4705 Literary studies > 470502 Australian literature (excl. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literature) @ 100%
SEO Codes:	13 CULTURE AND SOCIETY > 1302 Communication > 130203 Literature @ 100%
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