SOURCE: Moore, Nicole. “Lessons on Biting the Tongue in Your Cheek.” Overland, no. 149 (summer 1997): 87, 89.

In the following essay, Moore provides an unfavorable assessment of Somewhere New: New and Selected Stories and Studies in Classic Australian Fiction, finding both to be lacking in substance.

Michael Wilding's contribution to Australian literature and its study has been long exploited, and these two volumes [Somewhere New: New and Selected Stories and Studies in Classic Australian Fiction] together represent a long chronology, the fiction alone stretching from 1972 to encompass three new stories first published here. The essays collected in the volume of studies are from specialist and hard to obtain sources, published between the mid–1980s and early 1990s, and offer a singular, important and too often neglected mode of analysis that should assume a stronger place in Australian literary criticism after this release. The Marxist politics of these readings of Marcus Clarke...