AustLit

'This article combines Indigenous mobility studies with recent work on seriality and periodical form to examine how the structural necessities of serialised periodical fiction reinforced representations of settler and Aboriginal mobilities for Australian readers across the nineteenth century. It considers the limits or gaps in the project of Australian settlement that these serial texts highlight through an exploration of how settler authors formulated ideologically acceptable and more ‘suspect’ manifestations of Aboriginal mobilities and persistence. Building upon Katherine Bode’s work in World of Fiction (2018) on Aboriginal presence in nineteenth-century Australian periodical fiction, this article considers how the structure of the serial itself worked to reinforce – and occasionally disrupt – perceptions of Aboriginal-settler frontier violence and white supremacy. It also explores moments of settler discomfort and unsettlement in these serial texts that operate as counterpoints to the larger imperatives of this periodical fiction to support and reinforce the colonial project. By aligning the disruptive potential of these serial narratives and their representations of Aboriginal and settler mobilities, I argue we can uncover moments when these texts appear to resist the rhetoric of forward momentum and advancement traditionally associated with narratives of colonial modernity.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper analyses the work of Paul Wenz (1869-1939). Born in Reims, France, Wenz moved to Australia in the 1890s, settling in New South Wales and establishing himself as a grazier. Beginning in 1900, he published several short stories and novels set in Australia. He wrote nearly all of his texts in the French language. Although he was part of literary circles in Australia in the 1920s and 1930s, his writing was little known there and his few works in English garnered little attention. Interestingly, however, his writing has recently found a new audience. First in the mid-1980s to 1990s, then in the 2000s and 2010s, Wenz’s work has been recouped: retranslated, republished and redisseminated – both for a French audience and especially for a contemporary Australian audience. In this article, we examine the different ways in which Wenz’s work has been repackaged, focusing on the paratextual elements in each stage: from Wenz’s initial writing in the early twentieth-century, to its reedition in the mid-1980s and 1990s, through to its retranslation in the early twenty-first century. We chart the stages of the reception of Wenz’s work and its successive translations in order to understand the changing profile of Australian literary studies and of French-Australian cultural connections.' (Publication abstract)

'Book reviews have an understudied commercial function, acting as a crucial link between publishers and the press within the interactive book trade. For most of the modern period the newspaper and periodical press were the dominant print media and therefore an important source of information and entertainment for the public. The book trade relied on the press to distribute book-related content, including reviews. Yet in existing scholarship, reviews tend to be cited only as evidence of reception for individual titles, authors or genres. In contrast, this paper interrogates historical reviewing from the perspective of Angus & Robertson, the leading Australian publishing house in the twentieth century. It undertakes a close qualitative and distant quantitative analysis of the firm’s surviving promotional records, finding that in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries Angus & Robertson distributed tens of thousands of review copies all around the world. In return they secured extensive press coverage, ensuring their books were placed before the attention of large audiences. From this specific case study, the paper seeks to extrapolate broader ideas about the commercial function of reviewing, positioning it firmly within a publishing and marketing nexus.' (Publication abstract)

'Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver have accomplished an impressive feat of scholarship in collecting and curating a record of settler interaction with the kangaroo from 1770 to 1900. It is not a pretty picture, though many of the fine illustrations in the volume do their best to make it so. This sort of exploration of a well-defined – if small – area of colonial Australian experience has only been possible with the expansion of the Humanities in Australian universities in the last fifty years in addition to the philanthropy of private citizens. This elegantly published book comes from the Miegunyah Press, an imprint of Melbourne University Press, which is funded by bequests from Sir Russell and Lady Grimwade. The Humanities are now threatened by the present Australian Government’s current tertiary education policies which will make such research in the Humanities extremely difficult. This book exemplifies the character of research we will sadly lose as a result.' (Publication abstract)

'Grouping sets of novels and stories to elucidate the functions of key tropes in Jones’s fiction, Dalziell covers the writer’s entire output up to 2020. With recourse to the novelist’s essays and interviews, chapters provide close readings of weather, time, reading and writing, image and modernity. The interest overall is to show how unstable oscillations in the stories serve to express an idea of ethical relations as tentative constructions of community aware of their limitations, both in life and literature.' (Publication abstract)