AustLit

'This chapter charts how the rise of book history and publishing studies has reshaped the Australian literary field. In the 1990s, it was widely believed that Australia-based publishers were in danger of being absorbed into transnational corporate behemoths. The twenty-first century, by contrast, has witnessed a resurgence in Australian literary publishing. Firms such as Text and Giramondo were able to distribute their books internationally, while also fashioning local models of literary discernment. Although not economically lucrative in an absolute sense, the branding of a literary style of Australian book has reinvigorated the visibility of the Australian novel in the twenty-first century.' (Publication abstract)

'How do you review a novel when its author has already written a book-length work of criticism on it before it was published? The rise of the Creative Writing PhD in Australia has created this perhaps unexpected dilemma for critics, who will now find that many contemporary novels come predigested, with the exegetical section of the PhD offering more extensive analysis than any in-depth review ever could.' (Introduction)

'This article considers Alexis Wright's novel The Swan Book (2013) and argues that the text's difficulty, which recalls literary modernism, should be understood as a Latourian affordance. An affordance is a quality that facilitates interaction between objective and subjective elements within readerly networks. To analyze this affordance, we examine two influential accounts of literary difficulty: George Steiner's (1978) conceptual schema of four kinds of difficulty (contingent, modal, tactical and ontological) and Leonard Diepeveen's (2003) historicised account of modernist difficulty and the various rhetorical claims made about its value. We counterpoise these accounts with an analysis of 99 Goodreads reviews of The Swan Book. We find that many Goodreads reviews foreground affective and social qualities, in which difficulty becomes a shared problem for readers. They thereby resist the traditional imperative to aesthetic judgment and offer a new set of aesthetic responses to difficulty, which we term post-critical reviews.' (Publication abstract)

'The Australian literary great bows out with a collection of essays that ruminate on his experience of reading all his books in order.'

'This article employs a bibliometric dataset comprising forty years of Australian sole-authored short story collections to examine the degree to which non-economic values, such as cultural value and symbolic value, regulate cultural production in Australian book publishing. While short story collections may be an unexpected and oblique measure, the variable status of the sole-authored short story collection makes it a useful barometer for examining publishers’ investments in cultural forms of value, as opposed to commercial ones. This data suggests two findings that diverge from accounts of recent Australian literary production: (1) that the flowering of Australian short fiction in book-length form occurred slightly later than commonly noted (in the mid-1980s rather than the 1970s), and (2) that there has been a significant contemporary increase in the publishing of largely non-commercial short story collections since 2012. This second finding potentially problematises narratives of literary decline in Australian publishing. In particular, the re-emergence of the short story collection suggests that debates about the disaggregation of the literary field may be overstated, since this data potentially suggests a repolarisation of the field. Rather than reinscribing hierarchies of literary value, however, this repolarisation may simply reflect trends within readerly demographics that consume different kinds of texts.' (Publication abstract)

'There has been no shortage of bad news for Australia’s literary and publishing sector in the last year. Major literary journals Island and Overland have been defunded. Only 2.7% of Australia Council funding went to books and writing. The Chair in Australian Literature at University of Sydney is not being renewed.' (Introduction)

'There has been no shortage of Australian critiques of literary prizes over the last few years. Giramondo’s Ivor Indyk argued that ‘no one is really suitable to be a judge of literary prizes’ and therefore ‘we should get rid of prizes altogether’. Terri-ann White, the director of University of Western Australia Publishing, announced in 2016 that the press would no longer enter its titles in literary awards, because ‘the expense (of entry fees, books and postage) and the time involved in . . . has exceeded our resources’. In what may be the most incisive and blistering recent critique, Maxine Beneba Clarke raised a series of pointed questions about prize-awarding practices, noting their ‘conservative shortlists’, the lack of diversity among awardees, and the absence of ‘a major book award for queer writing’.'  (Introduction)

'With The Saturday Paper’s controversial experiment with pseudonymous book reviews coming to an end, what have we learned?' (Introduction)

'It has been a big 12 months for Australian small publishers, who have swept what are arguably the three most important national literary awards. Sydney press Giramondo published Alexis Wright’s biography Tracker, winner of the 2018 Stella Prize; Melbourne’s Black Inc. published Ryan O’Neill’s Their Brilliant Careers, which won the 2017 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction; and Josephine Wilson’s Extinctions (University of Western Australia Publishing) won the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award.'  (Introduction)

'The New York Times calls him one of the best English-language writers alive. So why isn’t he a household name?' 

'This collection of essays by established and emerging scholars of Australian publishing examines the industry in the wake of both the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the various shocks and upheavals associated with the rise of ebooks. The authors here look beyond the digital, so prominent in many considerations of contemporary publishing, to questions of the book as a material artefact. As consumer trends increasingly suggest print will remain the central medium for the global publishing industry, it is asked if the messy state of affairs existing now, 'after' the digital revolution, can be described as 'post-digital'. With reference to a range of cultural, economic and technological issues, these essays examine how publishers are leveraging the possibilities afforded by multiple modes of dissemination. Contributors include David Carter, Sarah Couper, Mark Davis, Beth Driscoll, Ben Etheringtson, Lisa Fletcher, Sybil Nolan, Tracy O'Shaughnessy, Anne Richards, Emmett Stinson, and Kim Wilkins.' (Publication summary)