AustLit

'A good romantic comedy balances two things: expectations and questions.'

'She’s the reality TV villain everyone will love to hate. He’s the producer tasked with making it happen. What could go wrong? A hilarious, heartfelt rom-com from Australia’s leading romance expert.  

'Reality TV producer Murray O’Connell is used to being in control. He’s the showrunner for reality dating show Marry Me, Juliet, and that means he’s the boss: he controls the cast, the crew and the story. Until Lily Fireball turns up. 

'Lily is everything viewers love to watch: she’s feisty, dramatic, and not afraid to cause a stir. Her villain narrative on the show should be the cherry on top of the cake of Murray’s perfect season, but what no one knows is that Murray already knows Lily. Not as Lily Fireball, but as Lily Ong: his former best friend. 

'Now Lily has thrust herself back into Murray’s life, and into the most stressful season he’s ever worked on. Why is she here? What is her agenda? And why can’t Murray just concentrate on his job, instead of fighting to shield her from hateful viewers – and keep her with him forever?' (Publication summary)

'When you sign up to a dating show, you’re supposed to fall in love with the male lead, not another contestant … A delightful romantic comedy with ALL the feels by one of Australia’s leading romance experts. 

'Mandie Mitchell will do anything to get over her toxic ex. Even sign up to the polarising reality dating show, Marry Me Juliet. But with her self-esteem in tatters, she’s not sure she’s brave enough to actually go on the show until she forms a friendship with Dylan Gilchrist at the auditions that gives her the push she needs. 

'Dylan is everything Mandie is not – tough, strong, and totally unafraid to speak her mind. Unfortunately, she also looks set to win, as she soon becomes the clear favourite of the Romeo, who also happens to share the same name. It’s annoying, really, just how perfect the Dylans seem for each other... 

'Mandie’s jealous. But it’s not because she wants to win the show. It’s because in her effort to get over her ex, she’s gone and fallen right back in love… with the wrong Dylan.' (Publication summary)    

'A hilarious and heart-warming romantic comedy that examines how the unlikeliest of loves can bloom in – well, the most likely of places. Perfect for fans of The Hating Game and The Spanish Love Deception.

'When Cece James agrees to be cast as a ‘Juliet’ on the next season of the hit television show Marry Me, Juliet, it’s certainly not for the right reasons. She’s knee deep in debt and desperate for the associated paycheck. The last thing on her mind is the hunky ‘Romeo’ waiting for her at the end of the gravel driveway.

'But Dylan Jayasinghe Mellor isn’t your usual fame-hungry TV star. An Olympic gold medallist with calloused hands, kind eyes and a propensity for panic attacks, it turns out he’s not here for the right reasons either. As spokesperson for a men’s mental health foundation, and the franchise’s first non-white male lead, Dylan’s got a charity to plug and something to prove.

'When Cece gets eliminated on the first night, it seems like her and Dylan’s awkward first meeting will be their last conversation. But when the TV set is shut down unexpectedly, Cece and Dylan suddenly get a little more time together than they’d expected.' 

'Will love bloom when the cameras stop rolling?' (Publication summary)

'Nineteen-year-old Libby Lawrence is good at pretending. Problem is, she's not entirely sure how to stop. Which is good for her role in the campus production of Much Ado About Nothing ... but poses problems in her personal life. Especially when the list of things she can't admit to, even to her best friend Ella, starts to build.

'Losing her virginity to the too-charming director of her uni theatre group (just before he ran off with the group's money) is only the start. There's also an uncomfortable encounter with her broody on-stage love interest Roarke, and her crackling offstage chemistry with nerdy-but-sweet new director Will.

'And while Libby is thrilled to finally be on the inside of the uni theatre group she reveres, there's a downside to being in on all the group chats, drama and backstage gossip. She must discover who she wants to be, who she wants to be with ... and how to stop pretending.

'Jodi McAlister's sparkling campus novel is a rom-com about friendship, authenticity, and all the ways we perform ourselves ... and the preciousness of those moments when all artifice falls away. Dramatic and wise, it combines the arch wit and sharp banter of Ten Things I Hate About You and Clueless with a knowing heart.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'She published more than 70 novels and sold more than 34 million books translated into 29 languages, making her one of Australia’s most successful and prolific authors. Yet many are not familiar with her name.' (Introduction)

'Things that happen sometimes when your boyfriend is a magical fairy prince: he gets kidnapped by his older brother and whisked away to fulfil his destiny in their magical fairy kingdom.

'But Pearl Linford is not having that. It’s time for a rescue mission. Pearl told Finn she was coming to get him and she's not going to let anyone in her way.

'But will Finn want to be saved? And should she have listened to all those people who told her he wasn't worth saving?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This article inverts the title of Hayden White's 1974 essay 'The Historical Text as Literary Artifact' by exploring literary texts as historical artifacts. It uses three novels published by Australian women writers in the mid-nineteenth century - Catherine Helen Spence's Clara Morison (1854), Caroline Louisa Atkinson's Gertrude the Emigrant (1857), and Mary Theresa Vidal's 'Bengala, or Some Time Ago' (1860) - 'as historical sources to explore the emotional culture of colonial Australia in regard to romantic love. Following Sarah Pinto, this article takes the romantic couple as the centre of its analysis, and asks four key questions of the novels in the corpus: What kind of people fall in love? Who do they fall in love with? What kind of love do they fall in? And how do their lives and their loves interact with the colonial Australian landscape? It finds that romantic love in these novels is dependent on romanticised similarity and shared sensibility rather than eroticised otherness. It argues that while this might not necessarily be uniquely nationally distinctive, the Australian chronotopic context means that this narrative would have strong and specific resonances with a female colonial audience.'  (Publication abstract)

'

In The Merchants of Culture, John B. Thompson remarks on the difficulties of writing about a present-day industry, where its swift evolution renders any scholarship on it in danger of ‘immediate obsolescence’ (xi). This challenge is especially familiar to scholars of contemporary popular fiction, a sector of the industry which is in a constant state of flux, where scholarly work can go out of date soon after – or sometimes even before – it is published. This is a particular challenge when it comes to defining genres: how are we to construct genre definitions which account for the fast pace of development?

'In this article, I address this question by modelling a ‘snapshot’ approach to genre definitions: that is, offering synchronic definitions at key points in time in order to create a fuller diachronic definition of a genre. The genre I have chosen to model this approach is ‘new adult’ fiction. Numerous forces – industrial, social, and textual (Fletcher et al.) – have influenced the development of this emergent genre label, which has, in the space of less than ten years, changed its meaning significantly. This article traces the genre’s evolution by defining ‘new adult’ at three key points: its inception in 2009, its period of peak visibility in 2011–2013, and the time of writing in 2017–2018. By doing so, I seek to illustrate that genres are in continual and swift flux, and that if we are to adequately define them, we must do so continuously, by tracing the forces which shape them.'

Source: Abstract.

'This essay analyses the declarations of love in six popular romantic novels written by female Australian writers published in the latter half of the nineteenth century. By doing so, it seeks to explore the effect of the colonial Australian setting on the ways in which romantic love is imagined and constructed in the texts. Drawing on the work of Monique Scheer, who argues that emotions are practised as well as experienced, and that fictional representations can operate as templates for these practices, this essay sheds light on the emotional and romantic history and culture of colonial Australia.'

Source: Abstract.

'Pearl Linford is stuck. Her best friend won’t talk to her. She’s promised never to lie to her siblings again, so she's not exactly talking to them. And she’s waiting for the right moment to forgive Finn Blacklin, but she doesn’t know when that is.

'In Ironheart, the follow-up novel to Valentine, Pearl and Finn face a new threat. The Unseelie fairies have infiltrated their town, and they've unleashed a new horror on them - a bunch of wild, uncontrollable, angry supernatural hunters.

'On top of all this, Pearl has to a) win her best friend Phil back, b) deal with the fact that her brother is marrying his awful girlfriend, c) do something about the fact that Julian might want to kill her, d) somehow convince the internet she's not a murderer, e) maintain a presence on the Haylesford indie music scene, f) try and get over her new phobia of water, g) find time for her new job at OverWrought, and h) attend high school.

'Strange and terrible things begin to happen to four teenagers – all born on the same Valentine’s Day. One of these teenagers is the Valentine: a Seelie fairy changeling swapped for a human child at its birth. The Unseelie have come to kill the Valentine – except they don’t know who it is.

'Pearl shares a birthday with Finn Blacklin. She’s known him all her life and disliked every second of it. Now Pearl and Finn must work together to protect themselves from the sinister forces that are seeking them out.

'But there's one more problem: the explosive chemistry between them . . .'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Australian young adult (YA) fiction has a post-apocalyptic tradition that considerably pre-dates dystopia’s current global popularity. Long before characters like Katniss Everdeen and Tris Prior emerged into mainstream popular consciousness, Australian YA fiction gave us several strong heroines struggling for a better life in a post-apocalyptic setting. One such was Elspeth Gordie of Isobelle Carmody’s Obernewtyn Chronicles. The Obernewtyn Chronicles are unusual in that they have been published across a considerable span of time. The first book was published in 1987, while the final instalment is not due to be published until the end of 2015. Numerous readers of the series have, in many ways, grown up with it: discovering it as pre-teens or teenagers, and continuing to follow it into adulthood. The first Obernewtyn fan site – obernewtyn.net – was established in 1999, and continues to be active to this day. However, despite the current popularity of texts like The Hunger Games and Divergent, the Obernewtyn Chronicles are not especially well known outside Australia. This article will explore the ways in which fans interact with and respond to the Obernewtyn books, and the ways in which this has evolved and changed. It will investigate two key questions. Why have the Obernewtyn Chronicles appealed so strongly to an Australian audience? And why have they appealed so strongly to a girl audience? I will draw on several different critical theories to unpack this appeal, including postcolonial theory, feminist theory, girlhood studies, and auto-ethnography. I will also integrate this with reader-response theory, looking closely at the responses of readers who began reading these books as children and who are continuing to engage with them decades later.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.