Cirrus@Austlit

'Even within the humanities, the discipline of English is unusually diverse in both its object of study, and its approaches and methodologies. It has multiple subfields and frequently aligns with other disciplines including creative writing, cultural studies, and theatre/screen studies. As Ronan McDonald explains:

A typical department of English … might include one faculty member working on a research-funded project with colleagues from the sciences on neurological dimensions to narrative, another researching the philology of Icelandic quest narratives, another working on performativity and gender in relation to contemporary urban street theater, and another working on neglected social histories of Jacobean chapbooks. All these projects are informed by diverse agendas and methods and would provide widely different accounts of their raison d’être. (3)

'The porousness of its disciplinary identity is what makes English studies so compelling. However, this openness may also make it difficult to survive let alone flourish in the metric-driven rankings culture that currently dominates the academy, and which frequently determines institutional priorities as well as the flow of funding. Moreover, in the Australian context, waves of restructures have seen many English departments folded into larger institutional entities with which they are more or less aligned.' (Introduction)

'Despite recognition that the use of journal rankings in research assessment is problematic, they are implicitly or explicitly used by institutions to evaluate individual researchers. This essay reports on a study we undertook on behalf of the Australian University Heads of English (AUHE) investigating research assessment policies within the field of English, and their impact on academics’ publishing strategies and careers. After an initial online questionnaire, we conducted follow-up interviews with twenty-seven Australian literary studies academics from a range of institutions and at varying academic levels. Given generally widespread scepticism about the role of journal rankings in measuring quality, we asked these academics how they think literary studies can and should be evaluated. What we discovered was a broad and rich range of responses to this challenging question, as well as various creative ways literary studies academics negotiate questions of value in relation to institutional priorities and modes of evaluation. This paper suggests that broadening conceptions of value may be an important strategic response to the current institutional context in Australia.' (Publication abstract) 

'Book reviews have an understudied commercial function, acting as a crucial link between publishers and the press within the interactive book trade. For most of the modern period the newspaper and periodical press were the dominant print media and therefore an important source of information and entertainment for the public. The book trade relied on the press to distribute book-related content, including reviews. Yet in existing scholarship, reviews tend to be cited only as evidence of reception for individual titles, authors or genres. In contrast, this paper interrogates historical reviewing from the perspective of Angus & Robertson, the leading Australian publishing house in the twentieth century. It undertakes a close qualitative and distant quantitative analysis of the firm’s surviving promotional records, finding that in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries Angus & Robertson distributed tens of thousands of review copies all around the world. In return they secured extensive press coverage, ensuring their books were placed before the attention of large audiences. From this specific case study, the paper seeks to extrapolate broader ideas about the commercial function of reviewing, positioning it firmly within a publishing and marketing nexus.' (Publication abstract)