Cirrus@Austlit

'In the six novels that Langley sets in Australia, that is, the two published ones and her first four unpublished manuscripts, Langley's narrator Steve travels widely through the countryside of Victoria, as an itinerant field hand and self-styled rover. She regularly returns to her mother's house and on these visits home she invariably brings with her evidence of her adventures. In this essay I explore the nature and employment of these souvenirs. The souvenirs archive Steve's day-to-day life away from her mother's house, but in doing so, as distancing devices, they assert a reconfiguration of the social space of that house. This, then, raises questions regarding the social landscape both within and beyond the house.' (Author's abstract)

'This paper analyses the divergences between Derrida's notion of the archive and hypermedia theory as it emerges in the late twentieth century through the writings of George P. Landow. The online presence of Australian poet Derek Motion is examined in order to demonstrate the distinction between the physicalised archive and the virtual electronic space of hypertexts, and to explicate some of the issues of legitimacy that exist around electronic texts.' (Author's abstract)

'An apparently convenient way of studying Australian science fiction is to analyse the contents of ready-made anthologies of Australian science fiction. In doing so, the researcher discreetly circumvents the thorny issue of 'What is Australian?' and also 'What is science fiction?' by taking for granted that the texts within collections of Australian sf necessarily are Australian science fiction. Things, however, are never quite so simple and before being able to add to the debate as to what Australian science fiction truly is, it is necessary to overview the 50 odd years separating the most recent sf anthologies from the very first anthology showcasing Australian science fiction and to plot the meandering course of the genre's commercial development.' (Author's abstract)

'There is an identifiable 'archive' of colonial Australian popular fiction consisting of romance, adventure fiction, Gothic fiction, crime fiction, Lemurian fantasy and a significant number of related subgenres (bushranger fiction, convict romance, Pacific or 'South Sea' adventure, tropical romance, 'lost explorer' stories, and so on). Looking at this archive soon reveals both its sheer size and range, and the fact that so little of it is remembered today. Rachael Weaver, Ailie Smith and I have begun to build a digital archive of colonial Australian popular fiction with the primary aim of making this material available to an interested reading public, as well as to scholars specialising in colonial Australian (and transnational) literary studies. At the time of writing we are really only about 20% complete with around 500 authors represented on the site, although many with only a fraction of their work uploaded and with only the bare bones of a scholarly apparatus around them: a few short biographical notes, a bibliography, and the texts themselves: first editions in most cases.' (Author's introduction, p. 1)

'This paper positions the work of colonial poet Eliza Hamilton Dunlop amongst international Romantic poetry of the period, and argues that Dunlop's poetry reflects a transposition of Romantic women's poetry to Australia. Dunlop's poetry, such as 'The Aboriginal Mother', demonstrates the relationship of Romantic women's poetry to early feminism and Social Reform. As with the work of Felicia Hemans, Dunlop was interested in the role of women, and the 'domestic' as they related to broader national and political concerns. Dunlop seems to have been consciously applying the tropes, such as that of the mother, of anti slavery poetry found within American, British, and international poetic traditions to the Australian aboriginal context. Themes of indigenous motherhood, and also of Sati or widow burning in India, and human rights had been favored by early women's rights campaigners in Britain from the 1820s, focusing on abolition of slavery through the identification of white women with the Negro mother. Dunlop's comparative sympathy for the situation of aboriginals in Australia has been given critical attention as the aspect which makes her work valuable. However, in this essay I hope to outline how Dunlop's poetry fits in to the international context of the engagement of Romantic women poets with Western Imperialist models and colonial Others.' (Author's abstract)

'In 2009 David Malouf's Ransom was published to great critical and popular acclaim. Ransom presents itself very simply as a beautiful story about (among other things) loss, love, vulnerability and storytelling. But what does it mean to talk about the beautiful in writing? Etienne Gilson argues that writing is a making before it is a knowing or willing, so its primary concern is not a truth to be known or a good to be willed. Its primary concern is beauty. This paper explores how the beautiful operates in, and structures, Ransom.' (Author's abstract)

'The cultural capital attached to the Australian literary archive reflects those nation-specific values and discourses that have been historically 'constrained and enabled' by national literary institutions (Dixon 2005). The body of Australian texts which, through translation, is made available to the Italian readership constitutes an extension of that national archive which is shaped by another set of dynamics - both cultural and economic - that further constrain those selections. Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural production foregrounds the role of socio-cultural agencies in the production of texts and provides the framework for my recent research into the selection, translation and publication of Australian texts translated into Italian between 1945 and 2006. In this article I examine how in this period the selection of Australian texts for translation into Italian was 'constrained' by agencies in the target culture and also offer some insight into the manner in which Australian cultural institutions influenced that process. By foregrounding the role of socio-cultural agencies in the selection of Australian titles for translation, this article acknowledges the complexity of the relationship between translated literature as cultural artefact and as commodity, stresses the interconnectedness between texts and society, and suggests how this has contributed to shaping the archive of Australian texts in Italian.' (Author's abstract)

'This paper is, circuitously, all about my mother, and me: my formal, legal role as Dorothy Hewett's literary executor (along with my brother, Tom Flood); the experience of growing up in the archive and of being, in a sense, part of the archive; and the task of curating a part of that archive as the editor of the new Selected Poems of Dorothy Hewett published by the University of Western Australia Press.' (p. 10)

'In ' "A heart that could be strong and true": Kenneth Cook's Wake in Fright as queer interior' Monique Rooney presents a compelling reading of the complicated relations between self and other, interior and exterior, in the iconic, troubling text of Wake in Fright. Her discussion focuses on the play of aurality and lyricism in the novel's account of outsider relations, and proposes a reading that draws on Michael Snediker's 'emphasis on a potentially joyful Freud' in classic accounts of queer melancholy in order to attend to what she determines is a 'critique of processes of masculinist dis-identification' in the novel. This important discussion works to reanimate critical consideration not only of a significant and neglected text, but also of broader debates around the reach and nature of metropolitan subjectivities in post- WWII literature in Australia.' (Source: Introduction : Archive Madness, p. 3)

'In recent years debates about the ethics of portraying Indigenous subjects and subject matter have almost been superseded by circular debates about 'true' Australian history and who has the right to tell it. This has been disappointing in a context of the morally and formally imaginative speculations of historians such as Tom Griffiths, Fiona Paisley, Stephen Kinnane and Greg Dening, and also in a context of Indigenous studies Professor Marcia Langton's evidently too-hopeful calls for the activation of a shared cultural space. But as this local debate has become more heated, more public, the oddest spectacle of all in recent years was the recent lambasting of historical novelists.

Novelist Kate Grenville was a particular target of attack. Notable historians such as Mark McKenna, John Hirst and Inga Clendinnen vociferously condemned dramatic accounts of the past as anachronistic, unethical and, most curious of all in relation to the fictioneer's job description, untrue. I revisit the 'history wars' stoush to argue that these historians overlooked the suasion of broader, local political battles to determine and culturally enshrine particular narratives of Australian pasts; I argue that they also eschewed the linguistic turn of postmodernism and the contributions made therein by prominent historical scholars in their own field such as Hayden White and Dominic LaCapra. The paper finally shows how Grenville, Kim Scott and other novelists have engaged with colonial archival materials, deploying particular narrative techniques that enable them to generate compelling postcolonial dramatisations of colonial pasts. (Author's abstract)

'Angelo Loukakis's 'The Missing Archive' addresses a suitcase of correspondence comprised mostly of letters between his parents from the years before their marriage. The letters present moving, tangible, and at times mysterious connections between Greece and Australia during WWII, including the occupation of Crete, and the years just following. The connections between these particular lives, bodies and memories, constitute a profound and insistent alternative to the monolingual 'colonial and war missives' that comprise the vast bulk of public library repositories of letters.' (Source: Introduction: Archive Madness, p. 2)

'The theme of this issue 'Archive Madness,' was that of the 2010 ASAL conference, held at the University of New South Wales and convened by the editors of this issue.The theme aimed to promote and enable consideration of the limits of disciplinary borders and the revival of the archive in literary analysis and the implications of these for the study of Australian Literature...

The theme also addresses the new role of the archive in digital information systems and as a rubric to consider the archive of the literary-disciplinary formation itself, which is currently undergoing radical revisions. The 16 papers collected here consider these important questions in their various attentions to literary texts, their circulations and their disappearances. From their respective positions each asks how we think about the trace of word, text and object in the formation of the literary object and literary cultures? They question and perform our increasing attachment to the archival trace and speculate on their relationship to questions of the national literature and the annals of nation-formation?' (Source: Introduction p.1)

'Paula Abood's 'Archive of the Displaced' presents a related lacuna in the present institutionalised account of the nation. Abood writes of a current community cultural development program working to provide refugee women with the means to record the 'living repository' of war, displacement, racism and resistance through collective storytelling. Her account and the project itself provide a mindful response to the fleeting nature of the present and its traces in the face of official records.' (Source: Introduction : Archive Madness, p. 2)

'In a profound meditation on the complex genre of autobiography, W.E.B. Du Bois, toward the end of his extraordinary life, wrote: 'What I think of myself, now and in the past, furnishes no certain documents proving what I really am. Mostly my life today is a mass of memories with vast omissions, matters which are forgotten accidentally or by deep design' (cited in Sundquist 3). Situated in the context of Du Bois' haunting meditation on loss, memory gaps and historical omissions, I want to ask the following question: What if some of these vast omissions, forgotten accidentally or because of the violent historicidal forces of assimilation, were recuperable through the staging of an archaeology of one's body, through the reflexive examination of the self as repository of so many dense cultural sedimentations and as archive of accumulated histories and practices? The question, then, that I want to pose in the course of this paper is: In what ways may our lived bodies be seen as living, corporeal archives, repositories of historical practices and inventories of almost invisible traces?' (Author's abstract)

'The paper discusses Peter Mathers' The Wort Papers in terms of Derrida work Archive Madness. It examines the way in which the idea of "the anarchivic" can be used to read the novel in relation to the texts resistance to categorisation and it s hybrid construction.' (Author's abstract)

'The article is a ficto-critical piece that imagines an Australian poetry that has been influenced by the innovative Diary of Chinese gold-miner Jong Ah Sing. The Diary was written 1866-72 and is held by the State Library of Victoria. The stylistic devices, such as capital letters and unorthodox syntax, as well as references to invented punctuation, all derive from this manuscript which is one of the texts I am examining for my PhD thesis.' (Author's abstract)

'If the archive is, according to Derrida, a site of revelation and concealment, so too is the pseudonym, the 'false' proper name used to sign and thereby guarantee the 'true' authenticity of original works. This paper concerns itself with the double possibilities of the true writer and the fake name instantiated by Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson's use of the pseudonym Henry Handel Richardson, and the concomitant economy of the secret and the disclosed in all that related to her authorial signature. Richardson's deployment of her male pseudonym (and the other signatures she used to distinguish and manage different literary labour) will be considered in the context of expatriate literary production and reception. This paper will suggest that where the masculine proper name was one way in which nineteenth century British women writers negotiated their literary marketplace, Richardson's pseudonym more particularly allowed her to mediate and control proliferating complexities of genre, mode and national identity.

Emerging from these material considerations, several other questions will be considered in light of Richardson's fiction, letters and autobiography. The question of pseudonym as a form of cross-gender disguise or performance and the attendant possibilities of female spectatorship/authorship will be addressed in light of Richardson's early naturalism and its relation to decadence and aestheticism.' (Author's abstract)