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So You Think You Know Australian Fiction?

Challenging pre-conceived ideas is always a tricky business. But sacred cows are meat and drink to academics, and Dr Katherine Bode, in her project, Reading By Numbers, has not shirked the job of challenging accepted ideas about Australian novels and their history.

And she used AustLit to help her do it.

The established arguments Bode investigates include:

  • that colonial authors were entirely – or even predominantly – reliant on British publishers (they weren't)
  • that men were the most successful authors of nineteenth-century Australian novels (also untrue; women outstripped men in the lucrative serial writing field and in the frequency of book publication in Britain).

Bode also challenges the notion that contemporary Australian literature and publishing are in crisis because of the dominance of multinational publishing conglomerates.

To make her case, Bode used AustLit data to analyse the historical reality. She published the results in her new book Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field (London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857284549).

In  her introduction, she sets out her arguments for a new history of the Australian novel and describes her methods.

'In the popular imagination, archives remain dusty, hidden, forgotten places; in fact, they are increasingly likely to be digital and available online. By changing the form that archives take, technology also transforms the ways in which they can be searched and the types of questions that can be asked of them. This shift affords opportunities for more extensive, data-rich and quantitative approaches to literary historical scholarship. But it does not negate – it actually increases – the potential for what we find in the archives to challenge and transform the way we understand the past.' 

Bode's research was an AustLit-supported project, funded through an Australian Research Council Discovery grant. For anyone wondering what 'digitial humanities' means, here is a perfect example. AustLit would be happy to hear from other scholars who would like to mine its vast body of resources for research.

As Bode graciously says about AustLit: 'Australia is leading the world in the scope and comprehensiveness of its digital bibliographical archive'.

On the project page, Bode has made her datasets available for other scholars, believing there are many other research areas that could be investigated using them. Two that are available are:

  • Australian Novels, 1830 to 1899
  • Australian Novels, 1945 to 2009

But there are others, including material on the critical attention paid to novelists by newpapers and academic journals. Please let us know if you would like to work with us.

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Posted by AustLit on 27 July 2012 7:37:41 AM #


Avatar: James Cumes
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Re: So You Think You Know Australian Fiction?

Comment from James Cumes on 29 July 2012 5:30:08 PM #
AustLit is doing a splendid job so far as it goes; but it does not go far enough in encouraging others to get to know - and hopefully appreciate - Australian literature. Only "subscribers" have access to AustLit and you cannot be a "subscriber" unless you fulfil certain conditions , most irritatingly if you are already placed in a position - and location - to deal with Australian libraries. I am outside Australia so I cannot qualify. I cannot "subscribe". I cannot benefit from the literature with which AustLit would or should most eagerly want to bless me. Sad but so many good things in life are denied to the underprivileged, the vulnerable and the culturally undernourished. At least I can object
Avatar: James Cumes
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Re: So You Think You Know Australian Fiction?

Comment from James Cumes on 1 August 2012 7:00:01 PM #
I had no idea my grump would receive such overwhelming publicity. I imagined that if I could not "subscribe", I would not be allowed to throw rocks over the AustrLit fence to object to my exclusion. Although that will seem a light-hearted comment, there is a serious purpose. We should not put hurdles in the way of spreading knowledge of Australian literature. I was once a teenage member of Colin Roderick's tutorial group at King's College in Brisbane. He was noble in the attention he paid to what our literary greats had written - and our literary moderates, minors and minnows had done for that matter. Later on, he spread the word - personally - about our literature throughout Europe, sometimes addressing the just one man or one woman who turned up for his lecture. It would be a more admirable world if we had more like Colin who loved what people had to say - and how they said it - and was prepared to work hard to tell others all about it. In saying that I do not intend to reinforce my grump but rather to apologise for my brashness.
Avatar: James Cumes
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Re: So You Think You Know Australian Fiction?

Comment from James Cumes on 6 August 2012 5:49:55 PM #
"Mining the vast body of resources for research." There is no doubt that this "mining" could have great value to researchers. In the 1970s I wrote a book on "Leisure Times in Early Australia" called "Their Chastity was not too Rigid." Published in 1979, it is still available from major Australian libraries. So the demand for it is there but its writing was a long, hard slog. I was then an officer of the Department of Foreign Affairs and had to ration my time especially for visiting other State repositories of letters, diaries, short histories and almost anything that showed how Australians between 1788 and 1850 amused and entertained themselves, played sport and the rest. Most of the "archives" were just heaps of documents stuffed into cupboards. So the attention given to ordering the archives now will be a godsend to researchers in future.The digitalising will create a marvellous new world for people like me who had to spend what time he could in, for example, Adelaide libraries as an aside to delivering a lecture on Australian foreign policy there in 1973 immediately on return from a conference in Paris. Not only will life be, I hope, easier for researchers but researchers will be more valuable for us. They will tell us more faithfully who we are and where we come from.

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