AustLit

'Across the century or so covered by this book, Australian novels were a consistent presence in the American marketplace even while their numbers in any particular year or publishing season were never large. Most of the novelists who would become defining, canonical figures in the articulation of an Australian literary tradition over the course of the twentieth century were published in the United States, their standing as serious authors and in certain cases as major contributors to English fiction acknowledged by American publishers, reviewers and critics (not least in their roles as book club judges). Many Australian authors also participated in and profited from the burgeoning markets on both sides of the Atlantic for light fiction or genre fiction, sometimes with careers as good-selling novelists over several decades, their books reviewed widely and favourably in the weekly book pages. Less predictably, our research has revealed a dense undergrowth of writers with more modest reputations or less obvious claims on Australian literature who were published and found different kinds of success in America. A large and diverse range of authors, as we have shown, had a small number of titles published by mainstream houses, reviewed at least briefly in the major book papers, and sometimes noticed in the bookstores - a sequence of modest successes or perhaps more commonly one big success followed by a series of "disappointments". If they made no lasting impression in the American marketplace and contributed little, if anything, to American readers' sense of Australian literature, they might nonetheless have made a small return on the publisher's investment and some additional earnings for the author. In short, these works inhabited the mainstream commercial world of books, so often characterised by the short life span of individual titles and reputations, and the small number of genuinely bestselling books. Nonetheless, it is with these ordinary mid-range titles no less than the major literary works or popular bestsellers that we see literary transnationalism in operation - a function of publishers' interests and investments as much as a specifically textual or authorial capacity, manifested in new editions as much as in new texts.'   (Introduction)