Cirrus@Austlit

'Recent accounts of Australian literary studies that have privileged book history, or empirical or digital approaches to the discipline, imply a shift of emphasis away from the text itself towards its reception. Usually implicit in such accounts is the idea that the reader is a valid focus for scholarly attention in thinking about 'Australian literature' we are applying the national descriptor not just to the books we study, but to their readers. We are thinking, in William St Clair's terms, of 'the reading nation' rather than the nation's writers. What might it mean to think of Australia as a nation of readers, or of readerships as forms of local or national community in Australia?' (Kirkpatrick, Peter and Dixon, Robert: Introduction 27)