Issue Details: First known date: 2010... 2010 The Novel Newspaper and its Role in the Transmission
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Given their similar beginnings as colonies, including penal colonies, of Great Britain it was inevitable that the United States would early be seen as providing a possible model for the future development of Australia. While most were concerned with political developments, those interested in the possibility of an Australian literature also looked to the American model. By the 1840s, thanks to the popularity of works like Washington Irving's The Sketch Book (1820) and the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, American literature was becoming internationally known. So much so, that canny British publishers took advantage of the lack of international copyright protection to bring out cheap editions of novels by Cooper and other Americans. While literary historians have long been aware of American piracies of works by Dickens and other British authors, little attention has been paid to British piracies of American fiction. These, marketed as the 'Novel Newspaper', were produced very cheaply and, because of their cheapness, circulated very widely throughout the Australian colonies during the 1840s. This paper will focus on the significance of the Novel Newspaper titles in the transmission of American fiction, paying particular attention to the influence of writers such as Fenimore Cooper on early Australian fiction.' (Author's abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Reading Across the Pacific : Australia-United States Intellectual Histories Robert Dixon (editor), Nicholas Birns (editor), Sydney : Sydney University Press , 2010 Z1754436 2010 anthology criticism 'Reading Across the Pacific is a study of literary and cultural engagement between the United States and Australia from a contemporary interdisciplinary perspective. The book examines the relations of the two countries, shifting the emphasis from the broad cultural patterns that are often compared, to the specific networks, interactions, and crossings that have characterised Australian literature in the United States and American literature in Australia.
    In the twenty-first century, both American and Australian literatures are experiencing new challenges to the very different paradigms of literary history and criticism each inherited from the twentieth century. In response to these challenges, scholars of both literatures are seizing the opportunity to reassess and reconfigure the conceptual geography of national literary spaces as they are reformed by vectors that evade or exceed them, including the transnational, the local and the global.
    The essays in Reading Across the Pacific are divided into five sections: National Literatures and Transnationalism, Poetry and Poetics, Literature and Popular Culture, The Cold War, and Publishing History and Transpacific Print Cultures' (Source: Publisher's website).
    Sydney : Sydney University Press , 2010
    pg. 167-176
Last amended 8 Nov 2018 16:19:30
167-176 The Novel Newspaper and its Role in the Transmissionsmall AustLit logo
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