AustLit

'Gretchen Shirm’s The Crying Room and Briohny Doyle’s Why We Are Here share a preoccupation with death and grief and what it means to live on, without intimate others, during a climate crisis. Both novels feature protagonists who lose parents and partners, and both explore their themes via writer-narrators who are producing fictions.' (Introduction)

'This paper emerges from a panel discussion at the ‘Texts and Their Limits’ conference (2021) between four scholars in the field of Australian regional literary history to consider its current concerns, practices and relationship to the frameworks of Australian literary studies. The panel flagged a renewal of regional literary scholarship in Australia through exploration of the panelists’ own projects and collaborations in regional and rural Victorian and Western Australian communities. Drawing on their reflections on the doing of regional literary history, the conversation canvassed the distinct qualities of contemporary regional Australian literary scholarship; the role of place, situated practice and community engagement in this field; and the implications for the regional literary studies of the always unsettled boundaries and status of the ‘region’ in Australian life.  Following the original panel event, this paper discusses questions such as: what is regional literary history, where is it going, and what are limits? ' (Publication abstract)

'When we were asked to write a piece for The Conversation in 2021 about whether audiobook reading is ‘cheating’, we found ourselves deluged with comments from audiobook readers, showing the immense popularity of this medium. Along with a multitude of scholars of reading, we firmly believe that the production and reception of audiobooks support an array of active, participatory and social reading practices. In this essay, we consider audiobook reading as a collective enterprise which augments and invigorates our sensory consciousness of narratives. (Introduction)     

'Catherine de Saint Phalle lived alone for many years in the country in France, where she published five novels and toured with controversial author Michel Houellebecq.' (Introduction)

'The winners of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards were announced this morning at a ceremony in Launceston. This year’s shortlists presented a challenge for the judges, who selected 30 titles from more than 540 eligible entries.' (Introduction)

'Katharine Susannah Prichard is an iconic, larger-than-life figure in Australian literary culture who has been poorly served by biography, until now. When she was dubbed ‘the red witch’ by a journalist it was a term of disparagement, but it is deployed affectionately by Nathan Hobby. This book derives from Hobby’s 2019 PhD on the early life of Prichard at the University of Western Australia. His training in librarianship is evident in his confident handling of the material, which daunted earlier would-be biographers. The KSP collection at the National Library runs to 3.9 metres or approximately twenty-four boxes.'  (Introduction)

'Shannon Burns’ memoir Childhood begins with an epigraph from Leo Tolstoy’s book of the same name:

The happy unrecoverable days of childhood! How could I not love, not cherish its memories? They have lifted up and refreshed my soul and served as the source of its finest pleasures.

The South Australian suburban childhood explored in this memoir is far from idyllic. Burns’ early life was one of disconnection, neglect, violence and poverty.' (Introduction)

'In an age of polarisation, it’s instructive to return to the late 1930s, in the lead up to World War II, when the far left and far right were energised and prominent. In Australia, we tend to think that Nazi sympathisers didn’t exist, or were never significant, but in fact there were documented events in Adelaide and Katoomba that revealed fervent support for Hitler’s rise to power.'  (Introduction)

'Regional readers in Australia face real and ongoing challenges when it comes to obtaining the reading matter they truly desire. As scholars, we contend with the related difficulty of tracking and mapping historical reading life in the regions without access to records that are either absent or carefully protected. Navigating this territory, we seek in this article to provide a suggestive account of literary activities in a region much more associated with the hardships of agricultural labor than with reading. Our specific focus is on readers in the Mallee region of northwest Victoria and what we term the “literary infrastructures” made available to them over time, since the early years of colonization. These infrastructures that enable, promote, and support reading publics have offered a surprisingly diverse but also highly uneven access to books and reading cultures in the Mallee. Our study reveals the specificity of the Mallee as a site of institutional and community interest that mobilized specific visions and assumptions of what Mallee people need and want. We illuminate the ways in which external actors and organizations constructed an image of the Mallee as suffering, ravaged, and worthy of pity, leading to charity drives and mobile library services that sought to compensate for the lack of available reading materials. This article shows how readers were imagined, solicited, and serviced by literary infrastructures. Although the Mallee may not have identified as a literary community in the early twentieth century, it did regard itself as a reading community, albeit one shaped by isolation.' (Publication abstract)

'Myra Morris (1893–1966) was a prolific author of poems, short stories, novels and children’s books. Best known for her short stories, which were published in a wide array of Australian periodicals, Morris’ novels have been less celebrated. This article considers The Wind on the Water (1938) set at the ‘Four Mile’ hotel near ‘Brown’s Town’ in the Mallee region, which was serialised in the Australian Women’s Weekly and as a popular ABC radio broadcast after publication. Due to its generic romance elements, the novel’s quietly radical critique of the cruel subjection of women and animals has been largely overlooked. When discussed with book groups in the Mallee region, the novel offered a springboard for discussion of womens’ intimate relationships, class dynamics in small towns and considerations of inheritance. Although it was over ninety years old at the time of these sessions, readers of different genders and ages tended to identify closely with the novel’s protagonist and her thwarted efforts to find fulfilment and create a better future for her children. We argue that Morris’ novel might be regarded as a crucial antecedent of a number of contemporary novels about sensitive women seeking beauty in small Mallee towns. Her own early experiences in country towns may have contributed to her understanding of the lot of rural women who slaved to maintain their households in precarious conditions. The more complex renderings of the Mallee offered by Morris’ novel, along with the readers’ response to it, show how places are continually being made by the stories told and read about them.' (Publication abstract)

'Drawing on fieldwork in the Victorian Mallee region of Australia, this article explores the ways in which reading groups can elicit rich information about the relationship between literature, reading, and place. The study found that book group participants “recognized” the Mallee in the texts under discussion and engaged in their own forms of place knowledge and “history‑telling” in response, making corrections to, and even rejecting, literary representations of their area. We argue that the resources for enhancing literary infrastructure exist, both in the broad history and diversity of Mallee writing, and in the social infrastructure of the Mallee. Readers’ knowledge, captured through book‑related discussion in community spaces, offers the potential for enhancing existing literary resources in rural and remote regions.'

Source: Abstract.

'The Black Summer bushfires may have ended, but the cultural cost has yet to be counted.' 

'In this article, we use Nielsen BookScan data, in particular, the Top 2000 Australian-only titles from 2005-2018, spanning the five years before the collapse of the REDGroup in Australia and the five years afterwards, to examine the sustainability of the midlist in Australia. Midlist titles are often said to be an indispensable part of the publisher’s list, yet the role of the midlist author seems to be increasingly difficult to inhabit from both a creative and a financial point of view. Through the analysis of sales data which shows a rise in the volume of bestsellers, we argue that the ‘thinning out’ of the midlist is leading to lessening returns for Australian authors in this bracket. The steady decline in the profitability of midlist titles indicates that many authorial careers may be becoming increasingly untenable. The following discussion considers the implications for the health of the publishing ecosystem and canvasses alternative strategies for helping Australian authors and publishers to survive.' (Publication abstract)