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Philip Mead, UWA
Philip Mead Philip Mead i(A4776 works by) (a.k.a. Philip Stirling Mead)
Born: Established: 1953 Brisbane, Queensland, ;
Gender: Male
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BiographyHistory

Philip Mead was educated primarily in Australia, gaining his B.A. (Honours) from the Australian National University (1975), an M.A. from La Trobe University (1981), a Dip. Ed. from the University of Melbourne (1982), and his Ph.D from the University of Melbourne (1990). He has held academic positions at Deakin University, University of Melbourne, and the University of Tasmania. At the University of Melbourne, he was Lockie Fellow in Creative Writing and Australian Literature from 1987 to 1991 and Lockie (Senior) Lecturer in Australian Writing from 1991 to 1994. From 1995 to 2009, he was Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Tasmania. He was then appointed the inaugural chair in Australian literature at the University of Western Australia.

During the seventies, together with Alan Gould, David Brooks, Bronwen Levy and others, Mead was one of the founders of the periodical, Canberra Poetry. From 1987-1994, he was poetry editor for Meanjin, and since 2005, he has been co-editor of the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.

Philip Mead was co-editor with Gerald Murnane and Jenny Lee of The Temperament of Generations: Fifty Years of Writing in Meanjin (1990); with John Tranter of The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991); and with Marion Campbell of Shakespeare's Books: Contemporary Cultural Politics and the Persistence of Empire (1993).

As a reviewer and poet he has contributed to published collections such as Be Faithful Go : Poems (1980), The Spring-Mire : Poems (1982), This River Is In The South (1984), and periodicals and newspapers such as the Literary Review, the Phoenix Review, the Age, Island, Meanjin, and the Times Literary Supplement.

The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature describes his poetry as being 'concerned mostly with the inward experience, the consciousness of mutability, the curious paradoxes of memory .... or the promise of meaning offered by the natural scene.'

Mead's research interests include Australian literary and cultural studies (including the literature of Tasmania), contemporary poetry and poetics and Shakespearean institutions.

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Zanzibar Light Sydney : Vagabond Press , 2018 13999394 2018 selected work poetry

'These poems play with the endlessly malleable form of the sonnet, across a spectrum of tone and register, from traditional to terminals. They are in the innovative traditions of contemporary poetry that are willing to explore and remediate any of the conventions of the poetic archive. In the longer form poems shifting states of consciousness are tagged to scraps of language and mysteriously resonant scenes of contemporary life. The emphasis is always on the ephemeral, the intersections of dreamscapes with the barely noticeable strata of everyday life. The sentences are always close to ordinary, but unafraid to follow the runs of association and blockage generated by language itself.' (Publication summary)

2019 longlisted ASAL Awards ALS Gold Medal
y separately published work icon Networked Language : Culture and History in Australian Poetry North Melbourne : Australian Scholarly Publishing , 2008 Z1519945 2008 single work criticism 'Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry is the result of a fascination with poetic language and with the networks of culture and history within which it lives. The language of poetry, which may appear obscure or annoyingly uncommunicative, is nevertheless always meaningful in the time and place of its creation. This study presents new ways of understanding Australian poetry, drawing on an equal fascination with the artifice of poetry and the complexity of culture. It is about the way poetry changes in relation to its social, political and historical contexts, the way poetic communities and the readerships of poetry have changed through history, and continue to change in the present.' (Publisher's blurb)
2010 winner New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Literary Scholarship
2009 shortlisted ASAL Awards Walter McRae Russell Award

Known archival holdings

National Library of Australia (ACT)
Last amended 17 Oct 2016 16:17:35
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