Cover -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- PART ONE -- Chapter One: Landscape -- 1. Definition Of landscape: framing the world -- 2. Mysterious and unknown landscape -- 3. Utopia of no-place -- 4. Terror and paranoia about place -- 5. The sublime -- Chapter Two: The Frontier That Frames the Desert: Dino Buzzati's "Il deserto dei tartari" and Patrick White's "Voss" -- 1. Stories -- 2. War and desert -- 3. "These who died of landscape" -- 4. The journey to the desert -- 5. Imagining and becoming the desert -- 6. Exploration and waiting -- Chapter Three: Apparitions in the Desert: Drogo and Voss Meet the Unknown -- 1. The Tartars and the inland sea -- 2. Apparitions and bunya bunya -- 3. Undone by the desert -- 1. The Tartars and the inland sea -- 2. Apparitions and bunya bunya -- 3. Undone by the desert -- PART TWO -- Chapter Four: The Act of Naming -- 1. Naming beyond the frontier -- 2. Primeval language and Genesis -- 3. Existence and speech -- Chapter Five: "Silence, the Virtue of Speaking:" David Malouf's "An Imaginary Life" -- 1. Ovid, the sad exile -- 2. The translation of a world -- 3. Fragments of pure language -- 4. Beyond the river of silence -- Chapter Six: An Angelic Rape: Guido Ceronetti's "Difesa della luna e altri argomenti di miseria terrestre" -- 1. Guido Ceronetti and the moon -- 2. an ambiguous oracle: the Bible and the dominion over the universe -- 3. The first naming: a mesmeric caress over the universe -- 4. "Et Indi Vanno Al Regno De La Luna": myth, footprint and violation -- PART THREE -- Chapter Seven: "Le colonie si fanno con la Bibbia alla aano": Ennio Flaiano's "Tempo di uccidere" -- 1. Historical background -- 2. The African landscape as a stage and the Orientalist gaze -- 3. Mariam: "something more than a tree, something less than a woman" -- 4. Naming in the African biblical setting.

5. Sleeping in a tomb -- 6. Leprosy: the manifestation of guilt -- Chapter Eight: Visionaries and Prophets in Barbara Baynton's "The Chosen Vessel" and Randolph Stow's "Tourmaline" -- 1. "And has Thou chosen me?": the elusive smile of the Madonna -- 2. Saint or whore? The interpretation that kills -- 3. The mouthpiece of God in the desert -- 4. Christianity, the Tao and the land on its own terms -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index of Names.