Republics of letters: literary communities in Australia is the first book to explore the notion of literary community or literary sociability in relation to Australian literature. It brings together twenty-four scholars from a range of disciplines - literature, history, cultural and women's studies, creative writing and digital humanities - to address some of the key questions about Australian literary communities: how they form, how they change and develop, and how they operate within wider social and cultural contexts, both within Australia and internationally.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: republics of letters and literary communities by Peter Kirkpatrick and Robert Dixon
Part 1: sites of sociability, scenes of reading
1. Literary community, cultural hierarchy and 20th-century American readers by Joan Shelley Rubin
2. The ‘federation of literary sympathy’: the Australasian Home Reading Union by Kyle Mirmohamadi
3. Communities of readers: Australian reading history and library loan records by Julieanne Lamond
4. Pacifying Brisbane: The Muses’ Magazine and the 1920s by Patrick Buckridge
5. Books and debate about the Australian government’s policies towards asylum seekers by Jan Zwar
Part 2: republics of letters – local, national and international literary communities
6. Scenes of reading: is Australian literature a world literature? by Robert Dixon
7. Modernising Anglocentrism: Desiderata and literary time by David Carter
8. Jindy modernist: the Jindyworobaks as avant garde by Peter Kirkpatrick
9. Bobbin Up in the Leseland: Australian literature in the German democratic republic by Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel
10. An American introduction: perfect readers, unread books and Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children by Fiona Morrison
11. Connectivity, community and the question of literary universality: reading Kim Scott’s chronotope and John Kinsella’s commedia by Philip Mead
Part 3: sociality, gender and genre
12. The great parenting tradition: charting a history of parenting-book writers and readers in colonial Australia by Michelle de Stefani
13. Reading publics, watching audiences: Lady Audley’s Secret in 19th-century Melbourne by Susan K. Martin
14. ‘I must be my own director’: Cynthia Reed, Elisabeth Lambert and Read & Harris, Publishers by Jane Grant
15. ‘Opposing all the things they stand for’: women writers and the women’s magazines by Susan Sheridan
16. Seven writers and Australia’s literary capital by D’Arcy Randall
Part 4: unsettlements – emerging literary communities
17. ‘Networking, bumping into, sucking up to, catching up with, meeting, greeting, chatting, joking, criticising’: the emerging writers’ community as respublica literaria by Keri Glastonbury
18. An unsettled community: Harpur’s carnival, Harris’ assonance, Mackellar’s code by Michael Farrell
19. The beginners guide to being an Australian: John O’Grady’s They’re a Weird Mob by Lindsay Barrett
20. ‘He lacks almost all the qualities of the novelist’: G.M. Glaskin and his Australian contemporaries by Jeremy Fisher
21. Anthologies and the anti-republic of Australian gay and lesbian poetry by Ann Vickery
22. ‘All the village was running’: some voices from young refugees in western Sydney by Lachlan Brown
23. Distance by Bonny Cassidy
Contributors
Index
About the Author :
Peter Kirkpatrick is an associate professor of Australian literature at the University of Sydney.
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.
