Cirrus@Austlit

'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)