AustLit

'This issue opens with JASAL’s second commissioned essay for the Copyright Agency’s Reading Australia project, aimed at producing scholarly essays around key works of Australian Literature for use by tertiary students and teachers. A.J. Carruthers has approached the selected text, Out of the Box: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Poets, edited by Michael Farrell and Jill Jones, through a broad consideration of a range of anthologies of Australian poetry, and an examination of the nature and function of the poetry anthology more broadly. The essay conceives the project in formal and conceptual terms, while at the same time attending to the demands of particular poems and poets, producing a provocative essay that foregrounds the roles played by ‘inventive poetics . . . in the broader institution of poetry and its multiply-linked communities.’ It concludes speculatively with a sense of a poetic anthology informed by ‘material poetics,’ which might provide the capacity to ‘more deeply theorise shifting historical and formal tendencies in Australian poetry and poetics rather than being burdened with the task of representing a national literature.’ The issue also features the 2015 A.D. Hope prize-winning essay by Shaun Bell. The A.D. Hope judges’ citation commends Bell for bringing fresh attention to the oeuvre of Sumner Locke Elliot, through his innovative re-reading of the primal scene of an emergent writing self in Elliott’s fiction. Working from Lee Edelman’s concept of homographesis, Bell attends to Elliott’s various recastings and reconfigurations of this signature scene, both autobiographical and fictional, real and imagined. Bell argues that Elliott’s fiction rightly belongs neither to any narrowly conceived nationalist literary paradigm nor to the category of the middlebrow to which it is often consigned. Rather he wants us to see that its significance arises from Elliott’s homographetic negotiation of the writing self, and from his vivid illumination of a queer writer’s trials and tribulations in Sydney during the interwar years.' (Introduction)