'Paradoxically, Australian nationalist accounts have tended to slight the earliest Australian literature by white settlers from the nineteenth century. This chapter surveys the literary history of this period, examining writers such as Oliné Keese, Ada Cambridge, Henry Kingsley, Rosa Praed, and Catherine Helen Spence. Drawing connections between these writers and the transnational Anglophone literary world centering on Great Britain and the United States, this chapter takes a comparative perspective that at once acknowledges the peripheral standing of these Australian texts and argues for their relevance to the history of the novel in English.' (Publication abstract)
Novel Politics : Studies in Australian Political Fiction
Carlton
:
Melbourne University Press
,
2020
18807115
2020
multi chapter work
criticism
'Percy Bysshe Shelley once described poets as the 'unacknowledged legislators of the world'. If this is true, Australian political scientists have shown curiously little interest in the role that literary figures play in the nation's political life.
'Novel Politics takes the relationship between literature and politics seriously, analysing the work of six writers, each the author of a classic text about Australian society. These authors bridge the history of local writing, from pre-Federation colonial Australia (Catherine Spence, Rosa Praed and Catherine Martin) to the contemporary moment (Tim Winton, Christos Tsiolkas and Kim Scott). Novel Politics unpicks the many political threads woven into these books, as they document the social world as it exists, while suggesting new possibilities for the nation's future. As political commentators of a particular kind, all six authors offer unique insights into the deeper roots of politics in Australia, beyond the theatre of parliament and out into the wider social world, as imagined by its dreamers and criticised by its most incisive discontents.'(Publication summary)
'Victorian settler fiction produced in colonial Australia and New Zealand increasingly expressed a search for settler identity, and yet it partly remained targeted at readers “at home,” at the centre of the British Empire. Nineteenth-century novels of daily life in the colonial settlements, therefore, also functioned as fictional maps for readers in Victorian Britain and elsewhere in the expanding empire. While some of these publications explicitly addressed potential emigrants, others endeavoured to reshape Britain’s antipodes in the popular imagination more generally. Australian and New Zealand women writers dismantled clichés involving bush-rangers, gold-diggers, as well as escaped convicts and resented returnees. By drawing on a variety of settler novels by female authors, I aim to track how their fictional maps for readers overseas worked and how these maps shifted in the course of the century. In particular, I focus on the motif of the homecoming and how its reworking in nineteenth-century settler fiction reveals shifting attitudes towards emigration and empire, homemaking and homecoming, old and new homes.'
Source: Abstract.
