AustLit

'The reading nation m the Leseland - or at least distinct reading formations within two separate national politics - remains an important determinant in Nicole Moore and Cristina Spittel's comparative study of the reception of Dorothy Hewett's novel Bobbin Up (1959) in Australia and the German Democratic Republic. These distinct reception histories work 'as revealingly transposed opposites', as between 1949 and 1990 Australian titles published in East Germany formed 'an alternative cannon, a shadowy literary archive that rewrites Australia's post-war cultural history from behind the iron curtain.' In Australia, the networks of production and reception for Bobbin Up were focused on the Australian Book Society and the GDR on that nation's centralised cultural administration. This meant that its readerships in Australia were at once nationally distinctive but internally marginal within the wider culture of the Menzies era. Moore and Spittel's case study is also sensitive to the discursive frames - humanist, universalist, socialist and feminist - which allowed for the transnational mediation of meanings between these two distinct though internally diverse national cultures of reading. They argue that 'Eastern Bloc editions...formed threads along which literary realisation of intensely localised expressive identity, as Bobbin Up so thoroughly is, travelled beyond themselves and their reading worlds.'' (Kirkpatrick, Peter and Dixon, Robert: Introduction xv)