Cirrus@Austlit

'Australian literary studies has been shaped by crises in both its own development and in the history of literary studies in higher education. As the study of a “national” literature at the university level it had both assertive and disputed beginnings, a varying but impressive history of establishment and legitimacy, and ongoing challenges in the present: uncertain educational frameworks and pedagogical practices, the continued under-funding of the humanities in universities, and the effects, on disciplinarity and employment, of repeated institutional restructuring. A determining aspect of those challenges is the constantly evolving nature of its object of study, Australian creative writing, which literary studies needs constantly to adapt to and engage with. Also on the disciplinary side, things are equally shifting. Australian literary studies, as a field of knowing, is “neither pure nor autonomous: it exists in relation to a series of distinct though overlapping domains that together make up the total field of knowledge production in the humanities” (Dixon, “Boundary Work”).' (Introduction)