Cirrus@Austlit

'This is the first collection in print of the letters of Australian colonial poet Charles Harpur (1813–68) and his circle. Supported by extensive annotation newly prepared for this edition, the 200 letters and life-documents open up successive phases of colonial culture from the 1830s to the 1860s in a newly focused way. Harpur’s two-way correspondence with poet Henry Kendall, and with poet and future premier of NSW Henry Parkes, is especially impressive.

'The letters selected for this edition document Harpur’s life in a previously unavailable way. They reveal the intriguing struggle of a high-minded young man to pursue a serious vocation as a poet amidst the unpromising contours of colonial New South Wales society. Despite bearing the taint of a convict family background, Harpur took his vocation with utmost seriousness and had much to endure before he would find recognition as a poet, mainly in colonial newspapers where his poems made over 900 appearances.

'This edition captures the process in detail, as well as the production in 1883 of his Poems in book form. Even though editorially mangled, Poems confirmed his reputation and led to his presence in dozens of anthologies down to the present day.' (Publication summary)

'By the late 1980s the concept of the work had slipped out of sight, consigned to its last refuge in the library catalogue as concepts of discourse and text took its place. Scholarly editors, who depended on it, found no grounding in literary theory for their practice. But fundamental ideas do not go away, and the work is proving to be one of them. New interest in the activity of the reader in the work has broadened the concept, extending it historically and sweeping away its once-supposed aesthetic objecthood. Concurrently, the advent of digital scholarly editions is recasting the editorial endeavour. The Work and The Reader in Literary Studies tests its argument against a range of book-historically inflected case-studies from Hamlet editions to Romantic poetry archives to the writing practices of Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence. It newly justifies the practice of close reading in the digital age.' (Publication summary)

The Charles Harpur Critical Archive (CHCA) is a digital archive and a scholarly edition of the poetic works of Charles Harpur (1813-1868).

The archives traces–in manuscript, in colonial newspaper, and in other printed forms–more than 2,700 versions of his 685 verse works (excluding his plays), as well as his prose notes for them.

With a few exceptions, including two long dramatic works, the CHCA includes archival transcriptions of all known versions of Harpur’s poems to 1900: from ‘The Wreck’ (The Australian, 20 December 1833) to three poems in the Windsor and Richmond Gazette on 23 March 1895. It aims to provide a high-quality image of every Harpur artefact (manuscript, newspaper or book) that contains his poetic work.

Archival content in the form of images were largely in place by 2016. Transcription and editing was ongoing into 2017.

Source: CHCA.

Professor Paul Eggert, Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Canberra, launched the '25 Years of AustLit' exhibition at the Academy Library on 8 August 2013. In his launch speech, Professor Eggert traces the history of UNSW Canberra's commitment to the research, study and promotion of Australian Literature. He includes reference to the early years of English teaching at the Royal Military College Duntroon, the establishment of the English Department at the Australian Defence Force Academy, and the involvement of the Academy Library. Professor Eggert acknowledges several scholars and academics who fostered this work including Professor Harry Heseltine, Grahame Johnston and Bill Wilde.

'Fifty-two of Henry Lawson's stories and sketches that he had first published in newspapers and magazines from 1888 onwards were gathered in his collection While the Billy Boils (Angus & Robertson, 1896). Lawson was not responsible for their ordering and he had to give ground on their texts, especially on his idiosyncratic presentation of wordings that helped to breathe life into his characters and situations. The present edition dismantles the fait accompli of 1896 by presenting the individual items in the chronological order of their first publication and with their original newspaper texts. This will allow a new appreciation of Lawson's writing, one that is attentive to his developing powers.

'The edition also facilitates a close study of Lawson's collaboration with the producers of the collection in 1896, in particular with his copy-editor Arthur W. Jose and publisher George Robertson. Facsimile images (available online) of the printer's copy that they prepared for While the Billy Boils supplement the edition's listing of the alterations that each of them made, revealing the textual history of each story or sketch.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Paul Eggert writes on the discovery of Henry Lawson's prose sketch 'Selection Farms'.

'D. H. Lawrence left England in May 1912; thereafter he would always, to some extent, be writing about foreign cultures and places without fully mastering any other language than English. Joseph Conrad made his name as one of the great masters of fictional prose in English, his third language. His contemporary, Henry Lawson, the finest Australian short-story writer of the 1 890s, was nearly deaf for most of his life yet found subtle ways of rendering the characteristic idioms and speech rhythms of a series of down-at-heel character - narrators from the Outback and from the city. Like Conrad, he staged story-telling situations where idiomatic language becomes the potent vehicle of truth-telling effects. In practice, none of them could keep full control over their texts, largely because they were writing into literary marketplaces where other considerations came into play. These considerations entered into their prose at the moments of writing and revision, not only later at the interfering hands of publishers, copy-editors and typesetters. The dilemmas occasioned for scholarly editors by such cultural translations can be eased or at least better understood if we plot them against the differences between Anglo-American and German editorial traditions. Those differences are reducible, I argue, to different inflections of the same fundamental work-related principles of agency and chronology. Emerging from this line of reflection is the idea of the editionas-argument: that the edition needs to take an attitude to the work that goes beyond the difficult textual cruces encountered by the editor - more generally put, that the edition needs to be seen as an embodied argument about the work.'

Source: Introduction.