Cirrus@Austlit

'This chapter considers the way ‘companion’ collections such as this one must be seen as a product of their particular cultural moment. To refer to such collections as ‘companions’ is a means of acknowledging the sense in which literature and its cultural commentary is our companion as we navigate the world, since literature and its criticism demonstrate the sense in which we must think through and respond to the world. To refuse to do so is to submit to a kind of virus of thoughtlessness. The counter to this, however, might be an attitude of ‘viral responsibility.’ This, the chapter suggests, can be catching, primarily through our very companionship, the construction of community, the continuous, performative choice of compassion and responsibility constructed in this volume’s responses to Australian literature.'

Source: Abstract

'In the years after 1 January 1901, when ideas of a new Australian civilisation began to emerge in the wake of Federation, two novels emerged from the 1890s to become touchstones for future discussions of Australian literature and Australian literary culture: Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901) and Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life (1903). These novels represent the final moments in a long chain of events that occurred within a complex and dynamic network of individuals and institutions, all claiming some stake, small or large, in the expression and critique of Australian identity at the turn of the twentieth century. By focussing on the process of literary production rather than the product, this chapter aims to draw further attention to the evidence of multiple authorship in Australia’s literary history in order to encourage new readings of the textual, material, and cultural lives of literary works.'

Source: Abstract

'While significant Australian literary mythology surrounds the bushman and masculinity in rural settings, this chapter focusses on the larrikin in fiction around the turn of the twentieth century to examine how an idealised, nationally distinctive character type was imagined in the city as part of an evolving urban Australian culture. From the 1870s, the larrikin symbolised the violence of the working class in its most threatening and sinister guise. However, several decades later, Ethel Turner’s The Little Larrikin (1896) and Louis Stone’s Jonah (1911) contribute to the ‘rescue’ of the literary larrikin in their attempts to show the figure as endearing, distinctly Australian, and ground down by poverty. Both novels present redeeming depictions of larrikin figures, one a small middle-class boy who has pretensions to becoming a larrikin, and the other, an orphaned ‘hunchback’ who gradually builds his own fortune and progressively leaves behind the pull of the ‘push.’'

Source: Abstract

'This chapter explores the contradictions and fallacies inherent in popular literary representations of the metropolis and the bush. It examines the way the representation was constructed retrospectively, ignoring the range of perspectives and lack of a dominant popular portrayal of the bush in the nineteenth-century periodical press. The Bulletin encouraged the simplified representation to advance its agenda of ‘Australia for Australians’ and used the popular poetry of A.B. Paterson and Henry Lawson to support this agenda. This chapter uses examples of the writing of four nineteenth-century women to challenge this simplified representation of the ‘city or the bush’ with this underlying thesis that the true Australian character somehow derives from the strength of the lone bushman.'

Source: Abstract

'Kangaroo hunting was an important activity in colonial Australian life; it provided much-needed sustenance to early settlers; it provided employment, especially when land was being cleared for pasture; and it developed as a popular sport, enabling wealthier settlers to develop and consolidate influential social networks. It also soon became an available genre of writing, found in poetry, fiction, chronicles of exploration and travel, journalism, and memoirs. This chapter looks at one aspect of this genre, beginning with the first poem on an Australian topic published in Australia in 1805; it goes on to explore the figure of the ‘weeping kangaroo’ as an affective narrative trope in colonial Australian writing.'

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'This chapter illustrates the ways in which Australian women writers contested normative accounts of modernity by including powerful discussions of eugenics in their interwar fiction. Rather than providing a linear account of Australian modernity post-Federation, the chapter considers the different ways in which scholars reflect on twentieth-century modernity and how the work of cultural producers, such as writers Eleanor Dark and Christina Stead, complicates normative accounts of early nation building. Both authors coopted eugenics discourses to challenge critical aspects of development of the modern Australian state. In this enterprise, science is revealed as both progressive and regressive rather than the foundation of the nation. The authors each created a fictional family that struggles with instability and ill-health to represent the microcosm of the modern state and racialised society. Eugenics functions, therefore, as a cultural conductor of key questions across science, education, politics, health, and literary culture in early twentieth-century Australia.'

Source: Abstract

'This chapter explores the ways in which the literary features of The Home and The BP Magazine played a small but significant role in introducing their readers to Australian writers and their work in an era when the publishing industry in this country was still profoundly underdeveloped. These magazines situated Australian writers amid contemporary authors and books from Britain, America, and elsewhere, and discussed their work in ways that positioned them within the currents of international modernity. Viewing these quality magazines in terms of their target readerships, and for the ways books and authors were discussed within their pages, affords different perspectives on the canonical Australian writers presented in their pages alongside international authors of their day. Further, reading interwar magazines for their affirmative relationships to Australian writers also provides ways of considering authors in relation to their own contemporaneity, including emerging models of modern literary fame adapted from overseas.'

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'This chapter examines a particular time in Australia’s history of literature and reading, during the 1970s, when protecting ‘community standards’ was paramount. Small but highly vocal groups in the community challenged the reading and study of literature: they thought certain books should be banned from educational libraries, by government censors, and from the English curriculum. This is a study that brings together the concerns of these minority pressure groups as well as an examination of the way in which these groups were successful in making their protest heard enough to influence public discourse. It does so in keeping with the publication trends of the day and in the style or form in which these groups published their views – in newsletters and pamphlets made up of bits and pieces of interest and notes threaded together in ‘toggle and weave.’'

Source: Abstract

'Patrick White’s The Ham Funeral (written 1947, first performed in 1961) has not received much critical or dramaturgical interrogation, and yet this play provides insight into how the internationally renowned novelist translated and transformed language for the stage. The draw of the inevitable somatic embodiment of the play-text is central to White’s dramaturgical knack for creating characters for the stage. This chapter considers dramaturgy as an active literary critical method that renders a narrative ‘live’ and manifesting the playwright’s intentions. White’s The Ham Funeral can be seen as a case study for how he specifically defied traditional Australian dramatic conventions of the mid-twentieth century in order to propel new ways of writing plays for Australian audiences. His focus on the somatic rendering of language in The Ham Funeral specifically requires live bodies to realise crucial dramatic meaning occurring at the interface between language and liveness.'

Source: Abstract

'As compared to American or British literature, Australian literature has had far fewer overtly political novels or poems, particularly those attuned to actual electoral politics or public ideological configurations. Yet recently more concrete references to actual political figures occur in poetry, and contemporary Australian poets have spotlighted not only the sheer fact of the politician but the way the political affects the limits and conditions of the literary. In fiction by Peter Rose, Ellen Van Neerven, and Alexis Wright, fictional Prime Ministers represent possibilities and dangers of the political imaginary, while Charlotte Wood, Michelle De Kretser, Sara Dowse, and Alice Nelson pursue a literary path of writing around the nation rather than in or of it, showing how politics can at once be tacit and focal, interstitial and implicit. Importantly, these writers show that politics cannot just be included in narrative but can operate as a narrative.' 

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'This chapter examines three major strands of literary criticism in Australia: scholarly criticism, popular criticism, and vernacular criticism. Scholarly criticism refers to peer-reviewed critical work produced by credentialed scholars within the bureaucratic structures of contemporary universities. Popular criticism is aimed at the general public and produced in print or online periodicals; its most prevalent form is the book review. Vernacular criticism refers to non-specialised modes of everyday criticism that occurs on social reading sites like Goodreads, in book clubs, in classrooms, and so forth. While these practices all have different contexts, many of them are undertaken by the same practitioners, and there is often significant overlap between scholarly and popular criticism, in particular. While it is often claimed that Australian literary criticism is in decline, available data suggest something more ambivalent: the production of scholarly criticism has increased but popular criticism may have experienced a slight decline.'

Source: Abstract. 

'This chapter surveys the long history of discussions around gender and book reviewing in Australia. It provides an overview of some common attitudes to books by women in Australian reviews since the nineteenth century as well as some key flashpoints in the history of Australian women’s writing in which the reviews played a part. We identify significant continuities in how women’s writing is described in the pages of book reviews, from the nineteenth century until recently: women are presumed to be writing from ‘life,’ not art; they are infantilised and/or sexualised and conflated with their protagonists; and the praise they receive is circumscribed by gendered assumptions about genre and genius. We also discuss several controversies about gender and book reviewing – in the mid-1980s and the 2010s – to think about the impact that gendered reviewing practices continue to have on the careers and aspirations of women writers.' 

Source: Abstract.

The influence of the literary prize in contemporary literary culture can often be observed in the expanded constituencies for shortlisted and winning authors and titles. Winners of major awards like the Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award commonly report a rapid increase in sales and media attention following the announcement by the judges. However, it is not just the prize that brings about this increased attention. The public impact of the prize’s proclamations exists in a context that is supported by adjacent literary institutions, influential individuals, and the media. This chapter examines the short history of the Stella Prize to explore the radiating power of the literary prize within the public sphere and illustrates the ways in which contemporary literary activists use the literary prize as a vehicle for achieving their aims.

Source: Abstract.

'Since the 1970s, there has been a steady increase in the proximity between literary authorship and popular media entertainment, so that the phenomenon of literary celebrity and its conventions of media performance as a form of entertainment have now become a significant part of the postmodern literary experience. As such, many Australian authors are no longer perceived as localised, national figures, but emerge as international mediagenic star author-personalities, which, in turn, has led to an increase in focus on their public personas and the manner in which these authors are curated for public consumption. By creating an operational framework in relation to the study of characterisation, this chapter presents a methodology to study the micro aspects of an author’s star persona. It offers Thomas Keneally as a case study to demonstrate how the micro aspects of authorial persona in the mediasphere functions to assist in the creation of literary celebrity.' 

Source: Abstract. 

'Why study Australian literature? This question has been debated for a century by academics, creative writers, and students. An examination of these debates, which have occurred over the last hundred years, shows that participants on all sides have quite different values. Some put ‘the discipline’ first, suggesting that literary studies cannot – or must – make room for local writing. Others work from economic or nationalist premises: the nation cannot – or must – make money available to promote local writers and study of their work. This chapter examines these debates, while reflecting on the problems of finding forms of data to develop a historical narrative that accurately accounts for past and present. It concludes that the study of Australian literature in Australian universities was at its healthiest in the last quarter of the twentieth century, while more recently, a sharp decline in the study of reading has been counteracted by an efflorescence in the study of creative writing.' 

Source: Abstract. 

'At the turn of the century, John Guillory made the grand claim that reading is ‘the principle ethical practice of modernity.’ For Guillory, the persistent gap between what he refers to as professional (or academic) and lay modes of reading is the key reason why we have not been able to recognise reading as an ethical practice. This paper explores this claim and teases out its implications through the lens of shared reading and suggests that the phenomenon of the book club may well be one of the principal ethical spaces of modernity. In thinking through this question, this paper outlines a range of arguments in relation to the ethics of reading and draws on recent theorisations of post-critique, which has also advocated a commitment to overcoming the distance between academic and lay readers.

What does it mean to be an ethical reader? Is it an attitude that one brings to a text, or is it a mode or practice of reading? If so, what would that practice look like? How does one become an ethical reader? Does it require disciplinary training, or does reading ethically pay no heed to literary features? Can an ethical relation to a text be established in advance – or does it emerge through the process and practice of reading? And, more pertinent to this collection, but also more speculatively, is there a national dimension to these questions – is there an Australian ethics of reading?' 

Source: Abstract.

"One of the major developments in literary studies of the past two decades is the resurgence of interest in the discursive fields of both modernism and modernity. This chapter asks what the case of Australian modernism can offer to global modernism studies. In many ways, Australian modernism provides an exemplary illustration of the temporal, geographical, vertical, and aesthetic expansions theorised by the ‘new modernist’ studies. Yet Australian modernism can also point to some of the problems, blind spots, and elisions of expanded theorisations of modernism. By exploring examples from both settler and Indigenous art and literature, this chapter shows that the concepts produced in the metropolitan centres of modernism studies can be modified and made more nuanced by coming into contact with the complexities of a settler-colonial situation."

Source: Abstract.