This thesis develops a critical reading methodology entitled unprincipled formalism. This methodology is tested in close readings of three relatively contemporary Australian literary texts: David Malouf's short story "A Traveller's Tale" (1986) and novella Remembering Babylon (1994), and Peter Carey's short story "The Chance" (1978). Unprincipled formalism is developed in relation to three broad contexts: the fragmented state of the contemporary discipline of literary studies; the complex of international economic and social phenomena which goes under the general rubric of globalisation; and the specific Australian left-liberal literary critical tradition which I have termed, for convenience sake, the Meanjin literary formation. Unprincipled formalism does not draw a distinction between form and content. Unprincipled formalism is a critical methodology that is both avowedly socially concerned and strictly formalist. It is concerned with articulating and analysing the particular social and political interventions made by literary texts (as well as the resultant critical discussion of those texts) through a consideration of the formal techniques by which literary texts situate themselves as acts of communication. Principal among these techniques is the mise en abyme. The thesis provides a detailed analysis of debates around the mise en abyme informed by the work of theorists such as Ross Chambers, Lucien Dallenbach, Frank Lentricchia, Moshe Ron, Jacques Derrida and others. Politically, unprincipled formalism attempts to steer a middling course between neo-liberal triumphalism on the one hand and nostalgic left romanticism on the other. This involves on the one hand a critique of neo-liberalism drawing on the work of Charles Taylor, Stephen Holmes, John Frow and others, and on the other a critique of a nostalgic romantic tendency in "progressive" critical technologies such as postmodern and postcolonial literary studies.