AustLit

Michael Farrell observes 'a textual community is conventionally defined as people brought together by shared texts or reading practices, though 'such a bringing together may be virtual, through online networks'. Recognising that imagined communities, even in Anderson's classic formulation, are indeed 'imagined', papering over forms of difference in inequality, Farrell examines a seemingly disparate group of text by Charles Harpur, Norman Harris and Dorothea Mackellar that betray the 'plural knowledges of the past', forms of poetry that do not support the settlement upon which the imagined community of the nation depends. These are works that by virtue of their aberrant style and form and stance have been left to one side of the cultural nations canon, even when written by poets like Harpur and Mackellar, who otherwise have been enlisted into that settlement. They form, he argues, a community of 'wild' or 'fugitive' texts distinguished by 'their disinterest in building a national literature'. (Source: Kirkpatrick, Peter and Dixon, Robert: Introduction xviii)