Cirrus@Austlit

'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)