Cirrus@Austlit

'Even within the humanities, the discipline of English is unusually diverse in both its object of study, and its approaches and methodologies. It has multiple subfields and frequently aligns with other disciplines including creative writing, cultural studies, and theatre/screen studies. As Ronan McDonald explains:

A typical department of English … might include one faculty member working on a research-funded project with colleagues from the sciences on neurological dimensions to narrative, another researching the philology of Icelandic quest narratives, another working on performativity and gender in relation to contemporary urban street theater, and another working on neglected social histories of Jacobean chapbooks. All these projects are informed by diverse agendas and methods and would provide widely different accounts of their raison d’être. (3)

'The porousness of its disciplinary identity is what makes English studies so compelling. However, this openness may also make it difficult to survive let alone flourish in the metric-driven rankings culture that currently dominates the academy, and which frequently determines institutional priorities as well as the flow of funding. Moreover, in the Australian context, waves of restructures have seen many English departments folded into larger institutional entities with which they are more or less aligned.' (Introduction)

'Arguably the first to profess literature in the antipodes was one George Bernard Barton, elder brother to the rather more famous Edmund Barton, Australia’s first Prime Minister. In a 1901 obituary published in The Bulletin, the children’s author and poet Robert Richardson claimed Barton the elder ‘may be fairly regarded as the first purely literary man whom New South Wales has produced’, a distinction in no small part occasioned by the three years he spent as the first ‘Reader in English [Language and] Literature, as the office was then styled, at the Sydney University’. We can recover some of the idiosyncrasies of this initial posting in The Study of English Literature (1866), the published form of the first in a series of lectures that Barton delivered at Sydney University that same year, in which he takes it upon himself to make a case for the scholarly integrity of his nascent discipline. ‘It is a common notion, or, at least, it seems to be a common notion,’ Barton hedges, ‘that English Literature is not a subject for study, in the strictest sense of the term’ (3). What seemed to him an obstacle might now appear an advantage, at least to those of us interested in making the case for literary studies today: he can, at least, readily presume that his audience will associate literature with ‘pleasant, miscellaneous reading in leisure hours—reading pursued with no method, and aiming at no precise end’ (3). From the vantage point of a media ecology he could not have imagined, this assumption is no longer tenable.'  (Introduction)

'John Guillory’s Professing Criticism (2022) is, without doubt, a tour de force of critical scholarship and intellectual acumen. He delves deep into the rise of vernacular languages and the history of English literature, charting the development of literary criticism as a profession and the emergence of English literature as a discipline. Guillory’s account makes it clear that one of these things need not inevitably lead to the other, a point reinforced by his explanation of their separate origins and the case studies he puts forward of two ‘failed disciplines’ (belles lettres and philology). The meticulous and exhaustive genealogy he provides for the formation of English literature makes the narrowness of his definition of what constitutes such a literature all the more startling. From an Antipodean perspective, it is astonishingly Americentric, especially for a theorist so clearly attuned to the expansion of English literature beyond national borders.'  (Introduction)

'Those of us who teach literature at universities in Western Australia may soon find ourselves before a new cohort of first-year undergraduates, the majority of whom have not read a poem or play since the age of fifteen. Or rather, it’s now possible to imagine a scenario in which an increasing share of Australian high school graduates have not in their last two years of study been assigned any poetry or drama—there is of course nothing to prevent them from having read such texts in their spare time, other than the usual distractions of homework, co-curriculars, adolescent ennui and social media. If this scenario eventuates, one of the straws that broke the camel’s back will have been an ostensibly minor change to the structure of the Western Australian Certificate of Education [WACE] English examinations: this change stipulates that, from 2023, the two written, visual, or multimodal stimulus texts provided in the unseen section of the examination cannot be works of poetry or drama (15). Works of poetry and drama can, of course, still be assigned as set texts at a teacher’s discretion, and knowledge of these texts may be deployed by students in the second section of the examination. But this change not only removes a significant incentive to do so—previously, assigning poetic and dramatic texts would have prepared students to encounter them in the unseen section—it in fact disincentivises doing so, as assigning written or visual texts in any other genre would serve the dual purpose of familiarising students with the kind of material they may encounter in the unseen section. By the same logic, this change may have knock-on effects for the subject Drama, where students routinely put their interpretive skills to use as actors. Poetry, on the other hand, remains a mode of writing only rarely encountered in any other subject. The rationale for this change seems to have been that it might help differentiate examinations in English from those in the alternative course, Literature, for this split is a key component of WA’s curricular structure, as it is in other states. The hope seems to have been that changes to the examination might induce a few students in English to jump ship to the Literature course (in recent years there have been approximately six times as many students enrolled in the former as there were in the latter). More likely, given that undergraduates who took English in WA secondary schools vastly outnumber those who took Literature even in our discipline’s undergraduate classrooms, is that a growing fraction of our matriculants will lack more than a rudimentary familiarity with these genres of writing.'  (Introduction)

'My copy of Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius came adorned with a blue and white sticker from the Australian Booksellers Association, proclaiming the book as a ‘staff favourite’. Although a complex and demanding book, it is not hard to see its appeal for an Australian audience. Ford and Clemens offer a detailed analysis of the first collection of poetry published in Australia, Barron Field’s First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819). Far from treating Field’s collection as a historical curiosity, the poetry serves as a launching pad for the authors’ wide-ranging and innovative discussion of the origins of colonial Australia and its fraught relationship with Australia’s Aboriginal people.'  (Introduction)

'Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction and the Rise of the Australian Paperback is an informative, fascinating book focused on one of the main Australian publishers of the twentieth century, Horwitz Publications. Many of us lurking in the shadows, or it might be in the full sun, of Australian literary studies will know the name of Carter Brown, but few of us will know very much at all about his main Australian publisher, Horwitz, and its connections both in Australian book publishing and the international pulp fiction world. Horwitz Publications is a rare book in the Australian scene. Apart from works on Angus & Robertson (Jason Ensor, Jennifer Alison) and the New South Wales Bookstall Company (Carol Mills) there are very few book-length studies of specific publishing houses and their social or cultural contexts. There have been field-defining broader studies of publishing, such as Katherine Bode’s work, and critical essays, old and new, covering specific periods. But much remains scattered across these different works, even as new avenues and pathways for cultural history are revealed. My own essay on post-war Australian publishing and cultural politics in the 2009 Cambridge History of Australian Literature does mention Horwitz and other popular publishers as ‘the most active local publishers of new Australian novels’, but I also have to admit that these firms do not play a larger part in the essay’s arguments.'  (Introduction)