AustLit

'It is possible that the transnational nature of popular fiction networks is best appreciated from the perspective of one of their more remote nodes, rather than from the largest and most powerful centres from which we habitually take our bearings. If we begin from Sydney and Melbourne, instead of New York or London, we find a set of relations that extend beyond the usual transatlantic and imperial frames that dominate understandings in the field. This chapter will trace the structure and dynamics of popular fiction’s transnational traffic by following Australian books and authors on their travels into the American marketplace, first as part of the rapid expansion of the international Anglophone market for romance fiction in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and then, as this market begins to collapse in the early twentieth century, through the stabilisation of the modern popular genre system. The Australian perspective reveals both the mobility of books, genres and authors, and the barriers to that mobility determined by the unequal relations of power governing ‘world literary space’ (Casanova 2004), at least in the Anglophone book world. We discover transnationalism not as a form of literary transcendence but as a contingent, rather messy set of economic, industrial and legal constraints working both with and against contiguities of taste and ideology.' (Introduction)