AustLit logo
image of person or book cover 4685490962154038564.jpg
Cover image courtesy of publisher.
Issue Details: First known date: 2013... 2013 Scenes of Reading : Is Australian Literature a World Literature?
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Australian literature is negotiating the relationship between its legacy as a national literature and its growing international reach. Scenes of Reading explores some of the key questions and issues arising from this moment of apparent transformation. How is Australian literature connected to other literatures? What potential might transnational reading practices have to renew the practice of Australian literary criticism? And as such criticism challenges the provincialising of knowledge, to what extent might perspectives routed through the literary province in turn challenge 'world' literature?' (Publisher's blurb)

Contents

* Contents derived from the North Melbourne, Flemington - North Melbourne area, Melbourne - North, Melbourne, Victoria,:Australian Scholarly Publishing , 2013 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Introduction : Australian Literature, Globalisation and the Literary Province, Robert Dixon , Brigid Rooney , single work criticism (p. ix-xxxvi)
Recycling the Epic : 'Gilgamesh' on Three Continents, Wai Chee Dimock , single work criticism (p. 3-15)
Which World, and Why Do We Worry about It?, Paul Sharrad , single work criticism

In addressing the question of 'whether or not Australian literature is a world literature', Paul Sharrad looks at three scenes of reading: 'first, the public arena of the literary industry; second, the scenes of our own academic reading; third, the scenes that may result if we do move towards a world literature framework for reading Australian literature' (p.16). His discussion is illustrated with analysis of overseas reception of works by Thomas Keneally and a number of Aboriginal writers.

(p. 16-33)
Beyond the Nation : Australian Literature as World Literature, Bill Ashcroft , single work criticism (p. 34-46)
Australia's World Literature : Constructing Australia's Global Reading Relations in the Interwar Period, Patrick Buckridge , Eleanor Morecroft , single work criticism

'Recent scholarship on the international dimensions of Australian literature has tended to focus on the ways in which Australian writers adopted and adapted overseas models, and demonstrated overseas influences in their work, or, conversely, on the extent to which Australian books were able to reach international readerships. Our concern, however, is with the larger, more diffuse phenomenon of overseas reading by Australian readers, and what we want to suggest is that Australia's 'world reading' in the interwar period - its people's efforts to engage with the rest of the world, affectively and intellectually, through the reading of non-Australian books - might be framed by seeing those efforts as being partly a constructive and outwardly directed, but at the same time self-protective, cultural response to a growing awareness of instability, threat and uncertainty in the world, and by a sense of the danger to which Australia's geographical isolation and cultural inwardness exposed it' (p. 51).

(p. 47-59)
Literary History as a Cultural Challenge : Rewriting Local Literary Histories in the Age of Globalisation, Svend Erik Larsen , single work criticism (p. 60-70)
'Upon the Airy Ocean' : Australia, the Russian Pacific, and the Transnational Imaginary, Nicholas Birns , single work criticism

Nicholas Birns examines the transnational turns in Russian and Australian literature, with particular attention to the intersections of the two literatures.

(p. 73-85)
Antipodean Romance, Crime and Sensation : Australian Popular Fiction in British and American Markets 1890-1925, David Carter , single work criticism

'In this essay, I want to look back to an earlier period in the history of the international bestseller, when the modern genre system emerged in the Anglosphere. In particular, I want to trace the participation of Australian writers in this moment, focusing on their presence in the transatlantic book trade and their movement from Australia to Britain and the United States, and sometimes back again. 'Australian literature', in this view, was international (and not merely imperial) before it was ever national' (p. 86).

(p. 86-100)
Time's Abyss : Australian Literary Modernism and the Scene of the Ferry Wreck, Brigid Rooney , single work criticism

'The desire to challenge or escape colonial provincialism in search of a freer, more cosmopolitan modernity finds expression in three works of fiction by women writers that stage the drama of ferry wreck on Sydney Harbour, and that thread - as Wai Chee Dimock would say - local Australian scenes into the deeper time of world literature: Christina Stead's short story 'Day of Wrath' (1934), Eleanor Dark's novel Waterway (1938) and The Transit of Venus (1980) by Shirley Hazzard' [p. 102].

(p. 101-114)
Worlds without and within : Reading through Patrick White's Library in 'The Solid Mandala', Bernadette Brennan , single work criticism (p. 115-126)
'The Last Curve of the Globe' : Deep Time and Scenes of Reading in Shirley Hazzard's 'The Great Fire', Brigitta Olubas , single work criticism (p. 127-136)
'A New Continent into Literature' : Patrick White's World Literature, Georgina Loveridge , single work criticism

'This chapter turns its attention to the transnational impulse of Patrick White's works: their weaving in and out of spatial, temporal, cultural, linguistic and literary contexts. From as early as White's first novel Happy Valley in 1939, and as late as his recent posthumous novel, The Hanging Garden, dated 1981, we can trace this impulse. [...] Taken together, White's works reveal a consistent set of spatial reference points or coordinates, between and through which they move. These lie within, without and along national boundaries,at the sub-, supra- and transnational levels. This chapter traces the development of White's transnational aesthetic, his representation of transnational flows' [p. 137].

(p. 137-146)
The Digital Pacific : Jack Spicer, Michael Dransfield and the Poetics of Addictation, Aaron Nyerges , single work criticism

'The purpose of this essay is to delimit a zone of inquiry around three emerging and interlaced issues: the parallel history of digital computing and postmodern poetry, with attention to the digitisation of poetic thinking; various post-Enlightenment theories of poetic possession and intoxication; the legal issue of literary properties, both intellectual (as ideas) and real (as books)' [p. 148].

(p. 147-155)
Inheriting the World : German Exiles, Napoleon's Campaign in Egypt, and Australia's Multicultural National Identity, Lynda Ng , single work criticism

Lynda Ng reads three Australian works (two historical novels and a fictional biography) to demonstrate 'how contemporary Australian authors reflect the rise of global culture by deepening and broadening Australia's historical timeline. The willingness of these authors to show the indebtedness of Australian culture to that of other nations echoes Wai Chee Dimock's attempts to move American literature beyond its national confines by repositioning it on the scale of a planetary "deep time". Paradoxically, however, in these novels the incorporation of historical events that would not traditionally be regarded as Australian does not diminish the preponderance of Australian nationalism. Rather, it enhances the prestige of the Australian nation by representing it as an active participant in a network of cosmopolitan and transnational cultural flows' [pp. 165-166].

(p. 156-167)
'Dostoyevsky Understood Newcastle!' : Reading John Hughes's Citational Autobiographies, Stephen Mansfield , single work criticism (p. 168-177)
Outside Country : Indigenous Literature in Transit, Gillian Whitlock , single work criticism (p. 178-188)
'Cheeky', Nicholas Jose , single work criticism

Nicholas Jose considers 'the language of Australian literature as being distinct from other Englishes in its relationship with Aboriginal English, a language that is used creatively in Aboriginal literature. Aboriginal English and Aboriginal literature have, in turn, their separate relationships with Aboriginal languages, many of which are lost, and with Indigenous knowledges, which they continue and communicate. Those other Aboriginal languages, known and unknown, shadow Australian literature in English and set it apart. To this extent, I will argue, Australian literature speaks a language that resists ready assimilation to Anglophone and world literary constructions' [p. 189].

(p. 189-196)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Works about this Work

Catherine Noske, of Robert Dixon, Brigid Rooney (eds.), Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature? Catherine Noske , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 75 no. 1 2015; (p. 231-234)

— Review of Scenes of Reading : Is Australian Literature a World Literature? 2013 anthology criticism
Proust at Caloundra Philip Mead , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 14 no. 5 2014;

— Review of Scenes of Reading : Is Australian Literature a World Literature? 2013 anthology criticism
The ‘New’ World Literature : A Review Essay Russell McDougall , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: Transnational Literature , May vol. 6 no. 2 2014;

— Review of Scenes of Reading : Is Australian Literature a World Literature? 2013 anthology criticism
Untitled Debjani Ganguly , 2013 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , November vol. 28 no. 4 2013; (p. 127-130)

— Review of Scenes of Reading : Is Australian Literature a World Literature? 2013 anthology criticism
The ‘New’ World Literature : A Review Essay Russell McDougall , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: Transnational Literature , May vol. 6 no. 2 2014;

— Review of Scenes of Reading : Is Australian Literature a World Literature? 2013 anthology criticism
Proust at Caloundra Philip Mead , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 14 no. 5 2014;

— Review of Scenes of Reading : Is Australian Literature a World Literature? 2013 anthology criticism
Untitled Debjani Ganguly , 2013 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , November vol. 28 no. 4 2013; (p. 127-130)

— Review of Scenes of Reading : Is Australian Literature a World Literature? 2013 anthology criticism
Catherine Noske, of Robert Dixon, Brigid Rooney (eds.), Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature? Catherine Noske , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 75 no. 1 2015; (p. 231-234)

— Review of Scenes of Reading : Is Australian Literature a World Literature? 2013 anthology criticism
Last amended 17 Apr 2014 12:31:12
X