Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Culture

This collection provides the first comprehensive account of eResearch and the new empiricism as they are transforming the field of Australian literary studies in the twenty-first century. These effects are especially evident in the exponential expansion of the online research environment, the rise of book history, print culture studies, the history of reading and publishing, and in the resulting transformation of Australian literary criticism and history. The essays range from accounts of the state of the discipline in its international contexts with a particular focus on future directions, to exemplary applications of empirical methods by leading critics and scholars. Reports on current large-scale online projects that represent a significant future direction of literary studies in Australia are also included. Together, they demonstrate the possibilities and the range of new empirical and electronic approaches to Australian literary studies.

Table of Contents:
Contributors Resourceful reading: a new empiricism in the digital age? Katherine Bode and Robert Dixon Section 1: the state and future of the discipline 1. Structures, networks, institutions: the new empiricism, book history and literary history David Carter 2. The book, scholarly editing and the electronic edition Paul Eggert 3. Old tricks for new dogs: resurrecting bibliography and literary history Carol Hetherington Section 2: case studies 4. Australian literature in the translation zone: Robert Dessaix and David Malouf Robert Dixon 5. Australian literature in a world of books: a transnational history of Kylie Tennant’s The Battlers Roger Osborne 6. Books in selected Australian newspapers, December 1930 Robert Thomson and Leigh Dale 7. Magical numbers Ivor Indyk 8. Emerging black writing and the University of Queensland Press Deborah Jordan 9. Making Aboriginal history: the cultural mission in Australian book publishing and the publication of Henry Reynolds’s The Other Side of the Frontier Mark Davis 10. From British domination to multinational conglomeration? A revised history of Australian novel publishing, 1950–2007 Katherine Bode 11. Squinting at a sea of dots: visualising Australian readerships using statistical machine learning Julieanne Lamond and Mark Reid 12. Is a picture worth 10,175 Australian novels? Jason D. Ensor 13. Voices from the past: gender, politics and the anthology Gillian Whitlock Section 3: project reports 14. AustLit: creating a collaborative research space for Australian literary studies Kerry Kilner 15. A place in stories: a report on the literature of Tasmania subset of the AustLit database Tony Stagg and Philip Mead 16. AusStage: from database of performing arts to a performing database of the arts Neal Harvey, Helena Grehan and Joanne Tompkins 17. Constructing APRIL: the Australian Poetry Resources Internet Library John Tranter and Elizabeth Webby 18. An Australian reading experience database, 1788– Patrick Buckridge Index

About the Author :
About the editors: Katherine Bode is an associate professor in literary and textual studies at Australian National University. Robert Dixon is professor of Australian literature at the University of Sydney. He is a general editor in Sydney University Press' Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series.

Review :
'The impressive range of material assembled here demonstrates that Australian literary studies are alive and well and opens up new perspectives for future study.'