AustLit
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Australian Popular Fictions is the umbrella term for a number of related datasets exploring popular fiction and fiction genres. Information within these datasets can be exported and downloaded for further analysis. New collaborators are welcome. Sample searches have been created to enable easy searching of these datasets. By making available more information about Australian popular fictions across time, we hope debates around these genres can be further stimulated.
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Dr Kim Wilkins's work on the representation of medievalism in post-1995 Australian popular fictions will underpin an analysis of the way medieval culture and ideas pervade, however incongruously, contemporary Australian popular fictions. This project has resulted in the Australian Popular Medievalism dataset.
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Dr Toni Johnson-Woods's Australian Pulp Fiction Industry project is a comprehensive dataset of biographical and bibliographic details on more than 100 authors, their works and the cover art from more than 5,000 books. It also contains a variety of material from radio serials and comics and includes information on romance, crime, western, science, horror, and sports fiction with a specific focus on internationally successful authors such as Alan Yates (who wrote as 'Carter Brown'), 'Larry Kent' (a pseudonym used by various Cleveland authors) and 'Marshall Grover'.
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Supported by ARC funding in 2010, the Speculations project is further developing AustLit's coverage of Australian Speculative Fictions. Embracing the genres of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction, the project is led by Dr Toni Johnson-Woods and Professor Van Ikin with Dr Kim Wilkins. Alongside enhancing biographical and bibliographical coverage of speculative fiction publishing across Australian history we have digitised a collection of early novels and other works that explore alternative realities and stranger than fiction notions. The AustLit Speculations collection will be launched in 2013.
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Other Projects
Research into Australian Popular Fictions has been enhanced by the work of the Australian Periodicals Project, which is indexing the literary content of dozens of magazines and newspapers published during the 19th and 20th centuries. Much early popular fiction never appeared in book format but was instead published in magazines and serialised in newspapers. The Australian Magazines of the Twentieth Century project provides details on the activities of many magazines published during the twentieth century, including those publishing the kind of fiction of interest to this Project.
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