Convict Narratives, a project under development from 2013-2015, will bring together literary works and print artefacts dealing with the Australian penal colonies that were published in the long nineteenth century. A diverse selection of works will be included in the dataset, ranging from ballads and songs about transportation to convict memoirs and autobiographies, from novels and stories of the penal colonies to officers’ journals and newspaper reports.
The ultimate aim of the project will be to produce a definitive, annotated bibliography, hosted on AustLit, of the contemporary literature surrounding the Australian penal colonies; this resource will in turn inform a reassessment of how nineteenth-century print culture has helped shaped our view of Australia’s convict past.
Conducted under the direction of Dr Nathan Garvey, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Queensland, the project is supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award.
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