AustLit
Anthony Hassall is Professor of English Literature at James Cook University and founding general editor of the UQP Studies in Australian Literature series. He has published extensively on Australian Literature and eighteenth-century English Literature. His most recent book is a revised edition of Dancing on Hot Macadam: Peter Carey’s Fiction (UQP, 3rd edition 1998).
(Bio from The Writer's Press, 1998)
Anthony Hassall retired from James Cook University in 2005, and became Emeritus Professor of English Literature. He continues to publish on Australian writing, particularly Peter Carey.
IT IS NOW A DECADE since the Studies in Australian Literature (SAL) series was initiated by the University of Queensland Press and I was offered the role of founding General Editor. I doubt whether anyone ever sets out to become a series editor, and I was no exception. My encounters with Australian writing in the course of a fairly typical Australian education in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were limited to Paterson and Lawson in primary school, Judith Wright's poetry and, unforgettably, Richard Mahony in secondary school, and nothing at all in an English Honours course at university. These very limited contacts were, however, sufficiently engaging to encourage me to diversify my teaching and research interests in the 1970s. I had begun as an eighteenth-century scholar, with a PhD and a book on Henry Fielding. By the time that was published in 1979, I had begun reading, teaching and writing about Australian literature. I had also decided that my next book would be on the Western Australian poet and novelist Randolph Stow, whose work I greatly admired and whose achievement I thought was undervalued, something he had in common with many Australian writers at that time. My involvement with and commitment to Australian literature was intensified when I moved to the Chair of English at James Cook University in 1983, a position traditionally occupied by an Australian literature specialist, which carried with it the Executive Directorship of the Townsville Foundation for Australian Literary Studies. Since then I have written and edited mainly in the field of Australian literature.
On the basis of a generous assessment of Strange Country, my book on Randolph Stow (UQP 1986), Laurie Muller invited me to become General Editor of a proposed new series of critical studies of Australian writers, a series designed to strengthen and support UQP’s already extensive Australian list. It was a meeting of like minds. There was a real passion for Australian literature at UQP, a passion I shared, and I was delighted to accept the proposal. It is a decision I have never regretted, though it has certainly involved a great deal of careful, patient and time-consuming work. Since 1990 I have had the assistance of two Advisory Editors, Jenny Strauss of Monash University and Bruce Bennett of the Australian Defence Force Academy, both of whom are strongly committed to the critical study of Australian literature and distinguished practitioners of it.
Back in 1987 there was very little critical writing on Australian literature. The only long-running series was the pamphlet-sized Australian Writers and Their Work, which Oxford University Press had taken over from Lansdowne Press in 1966. The abridged treatment this series afforded was evident in Recent Fiction (1973), which crammed Randolph Stow, Thomas Keneally, Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower into 46 pages. There was also Edward Arnold's short-lived Studies in Australian Literature series, which produced two titles, again not much more than pamphlet length, though Dennis Douglas's Maurice Guest was a valuable contribution. In 1992 Oxford replaced Australian Writers and Their Work, discontinued in the early 1980s, with a new Australian Writers series. This published some dozen titles, still relatively slim, though larger than the earlier pamphlets, but ceased in 1996 because of what was judged to be a disappointing response. Those of us working on the SAL series at UQP have been aware of the disappointing track records of these other series, but we have continued to believe that substantial critical studies of Australian writers are needed, and we remain determined to succeed where others have failed or lost heart.
In addition to these rival series there were, when the SAL series began, very few book-length studies of Australian writers, and only a handful of histories of Australian literature. The best single-author study was Dorothy Green’s Ulysses Bound: Henry Handel Richardson and Her Fiction (1973). The histories of Australian literature had enjoyed mixed success. H. M. Green's standard two-volume A History of Australian Literature (1961) was by then dated in content and approach. Leonie Kramer's Oxford History of Australian Literature, published in 1981, was widely dismissed as old-fashioned and authoritarian at a time of innovation, diversity and new theoretical insights.
There was clearly a need for a new and up-to-date history, and in 1986 I convinced the Executive of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature to undertake The Penguin New Literary History of Australia as a Bicentennial project, and I persuaded the distinguished and long-serving editor of Australian Literary Studies, Laurie Hergenhan, to accept the role of General Editor. It was an innovative and deliberately multivocal project, designed to reflect the many different theoretical and political approaches then being taken to the study of Australian literature. It was a timely volume, the reviews were generally favourable, and the Bicentennial fervour should have helped sales, but it was not a publishing success. This relative failure was the more striking, as the earlier Penguin, The Literature of Australia, edited by Geoffrey Dutton in two editions (1964 and 1976), which had been conventional in format and which reflected the critical orthodoxies of its time, had sold extremely well.
The contrasting sales of these Penguin histories clearly did not encourage the proposed new series to pursue the more esoteric trends in literary criticism too enthusiastically. On the other hand, the fate of the Leonie Kramer edited Oxford History did not recommend conservatism. If there was a lesson to be learnt, it was that the SAL series should aim to capture as much as possible of a limited market by being theoretically literate and up-to-date, while retaining a style that was lucid and accessible to non-professional readers. That represented quite a challenge.
With this in mind, we developed a set of guidelines for books in the series:
1. The SAL series would aim to produce a collection of critical studies of Australian Literature which would merit a place in every worthwhile library with a serious interest in Australian literature in Australia and overseas.
2. The books would be substantial, full-length critical studies, not patronisingly slight ‘slim volumes’ or pamphlets.
3. At least to begin with, the SAL series would address a concept of Australian literature that was constructed in a relatively straightforward and unproblematic manner. We would not indulge in the luxury of questioning at too great a length whether, or how, Australia should be seeking its literary identity at a time when such concepts were under challenge, not least from the globalising of communications technology.
4. One of the urgent tasks confronting Australian literary criticism was to provide a context of sophisticated and informed critical discussion for the endeavours of writers such as David Malouf, Peter Carey and David Williamson, who were consciously seeking to create and consolidate distinctively Australian narratives.
5. The SAL series would not engage in agonised debates about what might or might not be classified as ‘Australian’ or ‘literature’. It would not radically reappraise broadly agreed definitions of ‘literature’. It would include within its brief all writing that was generally regarded as Australian, in all its current and future diversity. Elizabeth Jolley, for example, was an interesting test case, because she grew up in England and moved to Australia at the age of thirty-six. Almost all of her publishing history and a significant amount of her subject matter is Australian, and she is widely regarded as an Australian author. So a book on Jolley by Paul Salzman eventually became part of the series.
6. The question of how the series would reflect the increasing complexity and diversity of literary critical discourses had to be addressed. The view adopted was that SAL volumes should be informed by current critical theory and practice, and that they should aim to interest academic readers and postgraduate students at the forefront of new critical and theoretical developments; but they should also be accessible to undergraduate readers and to senior high school students and their teachers. The market we were targeting was limited: we could afford neither to bore the sophisticated nor to exclude the relative newcomer with jargon or theoretical impenetrability. So prospective authors would be asked to write lucidly.
In designing the SAL series for a limited market, we were obliged from the beginning to address severe financial constraints. There is an opinion in the trade that in money terms literary criticism is not worth publishing. At the launch of the tenth SAL title a senior editor at Penguin Australia described book-length Australian literary criticism as ‘vanity publishing’. Fortunately this view was not shared by Laurie Muller, Craig Munro, Rosanne Fitzgibbon and Clare Forster at UQP. But realism had to prevail. So the binding was paperback, the covers two-colour — green and gold of course — the paper quality basic, and the books limited to about 200 pages. Even so, the initial price was $29.95.
Reviewers generally welcomed each volume, but there were complaints about the paper quality, the binding and the price. In 1994 UQP responded by redesigning the books in a smaller format, adding full-colour covers, improving the quality of the paper and reducing the price. All previously published volumes are eventually to be reissued in the new format, in revised editions where appropriate.
Early in the life of the SAL series, UQP decided to ask all authors with institutional support to provide camera-ready copy. The technology was available in universities, and employing it transferred a significant component of the cost from the Press to the host university.
In recent years Australian universities have received some $3000 for each substantial book-length research publication as part of the Government’s Research Quantum funding. This could be used by university departments to offset the costs of preparing camera-ready copy.
This strategy saved the Press a significant part of its previous costs, and was essential to the survival of the SAL series; but it was not without its effects on the finished product. One was that authors had to learn how to drive the software needed to produce a finished, formatted book in electronic form. This returned to the author an unprecedented degree of control over appearance and formatting, but it meant that the author and the General Editor had to do most of the editing formerly done by professional copy editors. UQP casts a technical and editorial eye over the camera-ready copy, and provides advice and support, but it does not undertake full copy-editing and proofreading in the traditional manner. Electronic correction and spellchecks still leave a considerable amount to be done by the General Editor and the author. Unfortunately, too many errors and typos survive this scrutiny, as reviewers properly remind us. They are corrected in second editions, of which there have been seven to date.
In a further cost-cutting development, the Press has recently acquired the technology to produce small runs of books on demand, in place of a single large print run. This obviates the need for expensive warehousing of stock, with concomitant remaindering and wastage. UQP are presently considering publishing the series in electronic form, but no decision has yet been made.
In the decade since the Studies in Australian Literature series began more than twenty titles have been published. As the following details indicate, the series is diverse and deliberately unformulaic. Five early books — J. J. Healy on Literature and the Aborigine in Australia, Anthony J. Hassall on Randolph Stow, Shirley Walker on Judith Wright, Laurie Hergenhan on convict fiction and Carole Ferrier's Gender, Politics and Fiction — were new and revised editions of existing books. Twelve are studies of single authors, all but one by single authors. Eight volumes address themes, periods or literary movements, such as The 1890s or Michael Dransfield and the New Australian Poetry, and of these, three are collections of essays by various hands. One volume, released in two editions to date, is a cumulation of the invaluable annual bibliographies in Australian Literary Studies.
Two of the first three titles concerned Aboriginal writing and writing about Aborigines [sic], and the third, David Brooks and Brenda Walker's Poetry and Gender, was a collection of essays and statements on women’s poetry and poetics. This demonstrated from the beginning that the series would reflect matters of current concern in Australian culture and welcome work on and from minority groups and writers. Three of the books have won the annual Walter McCrae Russell Award of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature for the best book of literary criticism: Adam Shoemaker’s Black Words White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929-1988, which is our bestseller to date, Clifford Hanna’s The Folly of Spring: A Study of John Shaw Neilson's Poetry, and Julian Croft’s The Life and Opinions of Tom Collins: A Study of the Works of Joseph Furphy. Many other series titles have been welcomed by reviewers as ground-breaking studies of major Australian writers and literary topics.
Although UQP has made a substantial contribution to its study, there is still not nearly enough Australian literature taught in our universities, and there are still only two Chairs of Australian Literature in Australia, one at Sydney University and one at James Cook University. When I began my university career in the 1960s, English literature precluded or marginalised Australian literature. Nowadays English departments give generous space to Literary Theory, Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies and Postcolonial Studies, and while these are worthy in their own right, they continue to displace or marginalise Australian literature.
Nonetheless, I am heartened by the quality and volume of literary criticism that has appeared in the journals and from a number of publishers in the last decade. Although the support base seems likely to remain small, another decade of comparable productivity would establish a solid body of secondary literature, and ensure that Australian literature continues to be taken seriously by literary communities in Australia and throughout the world.