'A novel recounting the lives of some of the troops who ended up caught in Tobruk, surrounded by the German army for some 242 days, from the time before they enlisted through to the eventual departure of the ones who survived. This is not a book on military history at all, but rather a story about soldiers' lives.' (Publication summary)
The Rats in New Guinea
Sydney
:
Horwitz
,
1963
Z207981
1963
single work
novel
war literature
'The scant academic attention Australia’s pulp publishing industry has received to date tends to focus on pulp as a quickly and cheaply made form of disposable entertainment, sold to non-elite audiences. This paper will examine Australian pulp fiction from a different standpoint, one which links New Modernist Studies and the history of the book. This approach, referred to as pulp modernism, is used to question the separation of low and high publishing culture, dominant for much of the twentieth century. I apply this methodology to late-1950s and early-1960s Australian pulp fiction by examining the Name Author series released by Sydney-based Horwitz Publications, one of the largest pulp paperback publishers in the decades after World War II. The series took prominent mid-century Australian authors and republished them in paperback with covers featuring highly salacious images and text. The series offers a glimpse into a uniquely Australian version of pulp modernism. It also yields valuable insights into the changing dynamics of local publishing and literary reputation in mid-century Australia, and the little researched operations of Horwitz Publications.' (Publication abstract)
