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Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia is the first book to explore the notion of literary community or literary sociability in relation to Australian literature. It brings together twenty-four scholars from a range of disciplines – literature, history, cultural and women's studies, creative writing and digital humanities – to address some of the key questions about Australian literary communities: how they form, how they change and develop, and how they operate within wider social and cultural contexts, both within Australia and internationally.

Peter Kirkpatrick is an associate professor of Australian literature at the University of Sydney.

Robert Dixon is professor of Australian literature at the University of Sydney. He is a general editor in ¿ìèÊÓƵ’ Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series.

Introduction: republics of letters and literary communities by Peter Kirkpatrick and Robert Dixon

Part 1: sites of sociability, scenes of reading
1. Literary community, cultural hierarchy and 20th-century American readers by Joan Shelley Rubin
2. The ‘federation of literary sympathy’: the Australasian ¿ìèÊÓƵ Reading Union by Kyle Mirmohamadi
3. Communities of readers: Australian reading history and library loan records by Julieanne Lamond
4. Pacifying Brisbane: The Muses’ Magazine and the 1920s by Patrick Buckridge
5. Books and debate about the Australian government’s policies towards asylum seekers by Jan Zwar

Part 2: republics of letters – local, national and international literary communities
6. Scenes of reading: is Australian literature a world literature? by Robert Dixon
7. Modernising Anglocentrism: Desiderata and literary time by David Carter
8. Jindy modernist: the Jindyworobaks as avant garde by Peter Kirkpatrick
9. Bobbin Up in the Leseland: Australian literature in the German democratic republic by Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel
10. An American introduction: perfect readers, unread books and Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children by Fiona Morrison
11. : reading Kim Scott’s chronotope and John Kinsella’s commedia by Philip Mead

Part 3: sociality, gender and genre
12. The great parenting tradition: charting a history of parenting-book writers and readers in colonial Australia by Michelle de Stefani
13. Reading publics, watching audiences: Lady Audley’s Secret in 19th-century Melbourne by Susan K. Martin
14. ‘I must be my own director’: Cynthia Reed, Elisabeth Lambert and Read & Harris, Publishers by Jane Grant
15. ‘Opposing all the things they stand for’: women writers and the women’s magazines by Susan Sheridan
16. Seven writers and Australia’s literary capital by D’Arcy Randall

Part 4: unsettlements – emerging literary communities
17. ‘Networking, bumping into, sucking up to, catching up with, meeting, greeting, chatting, joking, criticising’: the emerging writers’ community as respublica literaria by Keri Glastonbury
18. An unsettled community: Harpur’s carnival, Harris’ assonance, Mackellar’s code by Michael Farrell
19. The beginners guide to being an Australian: John O’Grady’s They’re a Weird Mob by Lindsay Barrett
20. ‘He lacks almost all the qualities of the novelist’: G.M. Glaskin and his Australian contemporaries by Jeremy Fisher
21. by Ann Vickery
22. ‘All the village was running’: some voices from young refugees in western Sydney by Lachlan Brown
23. Distance by Bonny Cassidy

Contributors
Index

Format: paperback
Size: 250 × 176 × 25 mm
322 pages
5 b&w tables and 9 b&w illustrations
Copyright: © 2012
ISBN: 9781920899783
Publication: 18 May 2012