Issue Details: First known date: 2013... 2013 Australia's World Literature : Constructing Australia's Global Reading Relations in the Interwar Period
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Recent scholarship on the international dimensions of Australian literature has tended to focus on the ways in which Australian writers adopted and adapted overseas models, and demonstrated overseas influences in their work, or, conversely, on the extent to which Australian books were able to reach international readerships. Our concern, however, is with the larger, more diffuse phenomenon of overseas reading by Australian readers, and what we want to suggest is that Australia's 'world reading' in the interwar period - its people's efforts to engage with the rest of the world, affectively and intellectually, through the reading of non-Australian books - might be framed by seeing those efforts as being partly a constructive and outwardly directed, but at the same time self-protective, cultural response to a growing awareness of instability, threat and uncertainty in the world, and by a sense of the danger to which Australia's geographical isolation and cultural inwardness exposed it' (p. 51).

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Scenes of Reading : Is Australian Literature a World Literature? Robert Dixon (editor), Brigid Rooney (editor), North Melbourne : Australian Scholarly Publishing , 2013 6581736 2013 anthology criticism

    'Australian literature is negotiating the relationship between its legacy as a national literature and its growing international reach. Scenes of Reading explores some of the key questions and issues arising from this moment of apparent transformation. How is Australian literature connected to other literatures? What potential might transnational reading practices have to renew the practice of Australian literary criticism? And as such criticism challenges the provincialising of knowledge, to what extent might perspectives routed through the literary province in turn challenge 'world' literature?' (Publisher's blurb)

    North Melbourne : Australian Scholarly Publishing , 2013
    pg. 47-59
Last amended 24 Jan 2014 11:57:24
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