Cirrus@Austlit

'This special issue tracks the ways in which Victorian literary texts and ideas were transformed by their arrival and reception in the Australasian colonies and then re-transmitted around the trade lines of Empire. The literary migration outlined here involved the marketplace and the production of cultural meaning; the transportation and importation of printed artefacts and the re-location, and re-working, of ideas and approaches. The articles in this issue explore how the colonial arrivals and departures of textual traffic in the Victorian marketplace involved complex cultural and literary exchanges and re-negotiations of story, character, genre and form.'

Source: Abstract.

'While Babes in the Bush is an artefact of Federation nationalism, the original serial, An Australian Squire, belongs to an earlier, pre-Federation era of colonial writing. That fine distinction is germane to my purpose in this essay, which explores the cartographic imaginary of that time before the nation. My reading of An Australian Squire is routed through the novel’s many allusions to James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), among other British and American classics. My purpose is to view citational writing as an aesthetic practice that defines colonial literary culture prior to its self-consciously national period. Intertextuality is an aesthetic strategy by which colonial writers, in the absence of a felt national tradition – though in deliberate anticipation of one – set about using the classic works of British and American literature from the perspective of a new society. In the absence of such a tradition, An Australian Squire is a text whose cartographic imaginary is intra- and inter-colonial rather than national, albeit located within broader transnational or trans-imperial horizons. Finally, I use this case study of transnational fictions to reflect on the problem of scale in literary history and literary criticism, especially in the relationship between Australian literature – as an academic discipline – and world literature. What is the appropriate scale for the study of Australian literature? Is it desirable or even possible to study it on a ‘global’ or ‘world’ scale? What are the consequences of approaching a pre-national literature from the scale of the nation, or a national literature from the scale of the world?'

Source: Abstract.

'This essay is an experiment in a reader-focused historicism. It reconsiders the cultural-political circumstances under which Marcus Clarke rewrote George Eliot's ‘The Lifted Veil’, reframing it as a radical late departure from Eliot’s mid-Victorian realism, and from the Englishness of that realism. In doing so, the essay takes seriously the critical commonplace that texts ‘exist only in their readings’ (Frow 244), their ongoing uses. By recovering something from a later moment (and a sharp lateral movement) in the history of ‘The Lifted Veil’, I aim to show how that side-history, too, can illuminate the story, as well as our understanding of Eliot’s career and the wider history of the mid-Victorian novel.'

Source: Abstract.

'Both Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Clarke’s ‘The Mystery of Major Molineux’ (1881) appear to have influenced a small group of Australian short story writers who were working in the decade immediately preceding Federation. Their work appeared in The Bulletin, The Boomerang and the Australian Journal, as well as in privately edited collections of short fiction. This essay examines Campbell McKellar's 'The Premier's Secret' (1887) and Ernst Favenc's 'My Only Murder' (1893), in addition to Clarke’s ‘The Mystery of Major Molineux’, to determine how these three writers used the concepts of degeneration, the double brain and multiple personality, and to what ends. My contention is that, like Stevenson, the colonial writers explore atavism and reversion by using motifs and elements drawn from Gothic and popular crime fiction to expose the depravity of members of the nation’s ruling classes, but paradoxically also to lend them a more human face. While we might recognise greater moral ambiguity in the Australian stories compared to Stevenson’s, accounting for that ambiguity is more difficult. One possible explanation is that the writers were not just more mindful of the public’s growing taste for fictions that shocked and thrilled, they were also more willing to satisfy this demand. A second is the greater class mobility within Australian society compared to that of Britain, and that this generated a stronger tolerance for the savage impulses that lay at the heart of the settler enterprise. In other words, in that the violence that accompanied settlement had become a part of everyday life, the Australian stories appear to be more at ease with the atavistic elements of their characters – the veneer of civilisation seems to be much thinner in Australia than in Britain. Closely related to this idea is Australian audiences’ more ready acceptance of personal traits like eccentricity, mateship and anti-authoritarianism, which can arguably be traced to the colony’s convict beginnings but also to its mounting desire for an independent future.'

Source: Abstract.

'The first weekly instalment of the Australian Journal, published on 2 September 1865, declared its intention to ‘reflect the Literature, Art, and Science of Australia’. Issued from Melbourne, its inaugural editorial declared that the journal would engage the ‘ablest Colonial pens of the day’, in an ambitious venture that sought to ‘please everybody’. The promise was to ‘record the phases of Colonial literature; to direct attention to the triumphs of art; and to explain the most recent efforts of mechanical genius’ (‘To Our Readers’). Guided by this statement’s fusion of different modes of representation and knowledge, its engagement with technological advancement, and its emphasis on place, my purpose here is to explore how a specifically Australian version of sensation was crafted in the serial fiction and scientific non-fiction published in the early years of the Australian Journal. This essay identifies the Australian Journal as a key player in the multiple and multi-directional migrations of text, images and ideas in the Victorian era. The movement of English literature into other Anglophone places in the nineteenth century created a community of connected, if remote, readers who participated in a global network of print as producers, consumers, and agents of circulation. This migration was of literary form, genre, convention, and technique as much as it was of the printed object. Although the material published was often of colonial origin, the Australian Journal, modelled as it was on the London Journal, engaged in the transportation of British literary platforms, genre, and styles, especially sensation, from the centre of Empire to the colonies.'

Source: Abstract.

'The English-born traveller and writer Francis Adams, who was in Australia from 1884 to 1890, was a cultural activist and a conduit in both directions for the late-Victorian migration of ideas. His book The Australians (1893) was an important source for the ‘Legend of the Nineties’, but there was a good deal more than the celebration of the Bush in his Australian writing. He was a keen critic of Britain’s management of its empire, and a sensitive observer and analyst of social and cultural life in the colonies. Stephen Murray-Smith described Adams’ impact on his contemporaries as that of an ‘active intellectual […] who brought something of “modernity,” of sophisticated European modes, to the discussion of Australian problems’ (14). He expressed progressive views on sex, marriage, and the rights of women; Marxist theories on class war, property and power; a huge amount of sympathy for the working class (whose poverty he sometimes shared, but to which he did not belong); and ‘advanced’ notions about art, literature and science. His respect for science came in part from his father, Andrew Leith-Adams, an army surgeon and natural historian who corresponded with and greatly admired Charles Darwin.

'The focus of this essay is on how Adams’ first two novels can be read in relation to late nineteenth-century categories of literary and popular fiction, via two terms ubiquitous in reviews and publishing of the day: ‘realistic’ and ‘sensational’. The phrase may seem tautological to twentieth- or twenty-first century readers, whose ideas about realism may align it with representation of the everyday. However this was not the case in the late nineteenth century: British newspaper reviews and advertising feature the phrase frequently in relation to novels, plays, and other forms of entertainment, the emphasis being on spectacle as well as verisimilitude. Such generic flexibility as Adams demonstrates in his fictional output between 1886 and 1889 calls for a nuanced understanding of literary culture in Australia in the 1880s. This is particularly true with regard to definitions of ‘realism’, but it applies also to ideological and gender-based assumptions about popular genres such as ‘sensation’ and ‘romance’. Adams’ 1888 essay on ‘Realism’, and contemporary debates about realism within which it was published, remind us that colonial press and literary establishments were both responsive and hostile to ideas and trends from the northern hemisphere – not simply British, French, and American, but filtered versions, such as British accounts of French naturalism.'

Source: Abstract.

'For many in Adelaide, the appointment in 1899 of Hallam Tennyson as governor of South Australia was a perfect ending for the nineteenth century. The city had long regarded its interest in literature as an important part of its identity, and, although Hallam might officially have been the representative of the British crown, he was received equally, or even more, as the heir of one of the great literary figures of the age. A poem published on the day of his arrival began, ‘Welcome, son of thy great father’. Similarly, a piece in the South Australian Register was unashamedly more interested in the new governor’s literary ancestry than in any qualities that he might, himself, possess: ‘Lord Tennyson, all hail you! South Australia gives you hearty greetings. As the son of the late illustrious Alfred Tennyson—a name of which the whole Empire is proud—and as a scholar and a gentleman, colonists welcome you. This essay traces the literary migration of one Tennyson and the literal migration of the other. It comes out of a larger study of literature in Adelaide, research that examines, among other things, Adelaide’s sense of itself as a city in which literature is highly valued. The reception of Alfred Tennyson during the second half of the nineteenth century is evidence of strong interest in Victorian literature; the welcome given to Hallam shows just how much Adelaide enjoyed seeing itself as a literary city.'

Source: Abstract.

'This essay considers Caroline Leakey's volume of poetry, Lyra Australis, or Attempts to Sing in a Strange Land (1854), and argues that the more broadly feminist aspects of Leakey’s poetry, particularly its sympathetic portrayal of ‘the fallen woman’, are connected with developments in Anglophone women’s poetry in the first half of the nineteenth century. It reads Leakey's volume as a radical rejection of the increasing restrictions placed on sympathetic narratives about ‘fallen women’ by the mid nineteenth century by contextualising it within broader frameworks of women’s writing on the fallen woman.'

Source: Abstract.

'The history of Australian stage adaptations of Jane Eyre illustrates the shifting fortunes and reach of melodrama and its conventions, as they become psychologised over the course of the twentieth century. The earliest adaptation of Jane Eyre written for the Australian stage was Rose Evans’s Quite Alone (1872). Working within highly melodramatic codes, Quite Alone portrayed ‘hate, sympathy, love, and finally marriage’ (‘Miss Rose Evans’s “Quite Alone”’). Two creative engagements by Australian writers have reached wide international audiences: Helen Jerome’s 1936 stage adaptation, published in 1937, was the most performed and successful adaptation of the twentieth century; the chamber opera with music by British composer Michael Berkeley and libretto by Australian writer David Malouf premiered in 2000, and has been performed in Britain, Australia and the U.S. In adapting a three-volume novel within the demands of contemporary staging, both Jerome and Malouf explore the nuances of a particular affect in the relationship between Jane and Rochester. In Jerome’s 1936 stage adaptation the affect is passion, signalled in the published play’s subtitle A Drama of Passion; in Malouf’s libretto, the predominant affect is sympathy. Jerome’s adaptation struggles to mesh melodrama, realism and more modernist elements in her rereading of the novel for the stage, whilst Malouf and Berkeley’s chamber opera is late modernist. I place the adaptations in a broader history of creative engagements with Jane Eyre, drawing out intermedial influences on the staging of Jerome’s and Malouf’s adaptations in particular.'

Source: Abstract.