AustLit

'Recent scholarship on the international dimensions of Australian literature has tended to focus on the ways in which Australian writers adopted and adapted overseas models, and demonstrated overseas influences in their work, or, conversely, on the extent to which Australian books were able to reach international readerships. Our concern, however, is with the larger, more diffuse phenomenon of overseas reading by Australian readers, and what we want to suggest is that Australia's 'world reading' in the interwar period - its people's efforts to engage with the rest of the world, affectively and intellectually, through the reading of non-Australian books - might be framed by seeing those efforts as being partly a constructive and outwardly directed, but at the same time self-protective, cultural response to a growing awareness of instability, threat and uncertainty in the world, and by a sense of the danger to which Australia's geographical isolation and cultural inwardness exposed it' (p. 51).