AustLit

'Over the last couple years, declarations of a crisis in the humanities have started to become shrill. As Joel Barnes observed in 2020, in Australia such pronouncements are at least partly a response to the 115 per cent increase in the cost of student contribution to humanities degrees since the passing of the so-called Jobs Ready Legislation package 2020. Apart from a BA majoring in English or Languages, a Bachelor of Arts at most universities in Australia will now cost a student $45,000.'  (Introduction)

'This article explores Dale Collins as an intriguing gap in the Australian literary record. A prolific writer and a creature of the transnational and Australian interwar periodical press who was subsequently reviled and forgotten, Dale Collins is worthy of attention because of his output alone. But the vicissitudes of Collins’ fame and repute position him as a particularly thought-provoking and revealing case study in relation to new understandings of the literary past. They also potentially open up ways to consider the technologies of the self through which Australian Literature has become coherent to itself in ways that need to be continually reconceptualised, expanded, or worked through.' (Publication abstract)

'In the early twentieth century, new technologies of media, communication, and transportation opened up a world of possibilities and led to transformations of the public sphere. Amongst the hundreds of new periodicals flooding the Australian marketplace, quality culture and leisure magazines beckoned to readers with the glamour of modernity and exotic images of pre-modern paradise. Through instructive and entertaining content, these glossy modern magazines widened the horizons of non-metropolitan audiences and connected readers in rapidly urbanising cities such as Sydney and Melbourne with the latest fashions, current affairs, and cultural offerings of London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and beyond. Designed by fashionable commercial artists, travel advertisements for shipping companies such as Burns Philp, Cunard, Matson, and P&O lined their pages. The golden age of the culture and leisure magazine coincided with the golden age of sea travel, middlebrow aspiration, and modernity.

'Focusing on the Australian interwar periodicals The Home, The BP Magazine, and MAN, this book explores the contraction of vast geographical spaces and the construction of cultural hierarchies alongside the advent of new media. This book investigates the role tastemaking culture and leisure magazines played in transporting the public imagination outward beyond the shores of Australia and upward or downward on the rapidly changing scales of cultural value. By delivering a potent mix of informative instruction, entertainment, worldliness, and escape, these magazines constructed distinct geographical imaginaries connected to notions of glamour, sophistication, and aspiration. They guided their readers through the currents of international modernity and helped them find their place in the modern world.

'This book is based on thorough research into an archive of important yet under-examined modern Australian periodicals, and makes a significant contribution to the scholarly literature on magazines and middlebrow culture in the interwar period. It offers new insights into the formation of the tastes of a rapidly modernising and differentiating reading public, as well as new understandings of the cultures of vernacular modernity and colonialism. This book also offers alternative perspectives, and positions Australia’s cultural and literary history within transnational cultural flows across the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Its analysis of Australian colonial modernity thus provides a model for examining collisions of modernity and colonialism, and for investigating connections between geographical imaginaries and social mobility, in other international contexts.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This article reviews the illustration history of Australian periodicals to place modern illustrated short stories in this context.  It argues that illustrated periodicals drew on networks of etchers, engravers, printers, promoters, advertisers, authors, and artists that were globally distributed as well as locally contentrated.  As Victorian Studies have experienced a visual turn in the last decade, and as modern periodical studies have also gained momentum, this paper argues that the time is past due to consider Australian Literature in terms of its connections to visual print culture, especially in the peridocial scene. Of the several reasons this article offers to account for persistent oversights of this material in the Australian context, it explores the ways that modern magazines challenge existing paradigms of national literature because of their intensive investments in travel, mobility, and commercial culture. Yet, in their original contexts, illustrated short stories in modern Australian magazines that celebrated these values existed side-by-side with nationalist literature and national brands.' (Publication abstract)

'In the late 1980s, as the Canadian scholar Robert David Stacey remarks, 'talk of postmodernism was everywhere' (2010, xii). Yet postmodernism certainly took regional forms. Novelists in Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific briefly and tentatively identified under the banner of the postmodern, while writers in Canada took up the cause and title of the postmodern more visibly and actively.'