Bøker i Anthem Australian Humanities Research Series-serien

Given Australia's status as an (unfinished) colonial project of the British Empire, the basic institutions that were installed in its so-called 'empty' landscape derive from a value-laden framework borne out of industrialization, colonialism, the consolidation of the national statist system and democracy - all entities imbued with British Enlightenment principles and thinking. Modernity in Australia has thus been constituted by the importation, assumption and triumph of the Western mind - materially, psychologically, culturally, socio-legally and cartographically. 'Inside Australian Culture: Legacies of Enlightenment Values' offers a critical intervention into the continuing effects of colonization in Australia and the structures it brought, which still inform and dominate its public culture. Through a careful analysis of three disparate but significant moments in Australian history, the authors investigate the way the British Enlightenment continues to dominate contemporary Australian thinking and values. Employing the lens of Indian cultural theorist Ashis Nandy, the authors argue for an Australian public culture that is profoundly conscious of its assumptions, history and limitations.

‘Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field’ proposes and demonstrates a new digital approach to literary history. Drawing on bibliographical information on the Australian novel in the AustLit database, the book addresses debates and issues in literary studies through a method that combines book history’s pragmatic approach to literary data with the digital humanities’ idea of computer modelling as an experimental and iterative practice. As well as showcasing this method, the case studies in ‘Reading by Numbers’ provide a revised history of the Australian novel, focusing on the nineteenth century and the decades since the end of the Second World War, and engaging with a range of themes including literary and cultural value, authorship, gender, genre and the transnational circulation of fiction. The book’s findings challenge established arguments in Australian literary studies, book history, feminism and gender studies, while presenting innovative ways of understanding literature, publishing, authorship and reading, and the relationships between them. More broadly, by demonstrating critical ways in which the growing number of digital archives in the humanities can be mined, modelled and visualised, ‘Reading by Numbers’ offers new directions and scope for digital humanities research.

With its close analysis of the phenomenon of the migration of Indian students to Australia, this book critically approaches the entanglement of the education industry with migration opportunities, and looks into the goals and aspirations of the Indian middle class. It discusses the overlaps of studies on migration and transnationalism, and raises questions on skilled migration.

Australian photographer and film maker Frank Hurley became an international celebrity through his reporting of the Mawson and Shackleton Antarctic Expeditions, the First and Second World Wars, the England-Australia air race of 1919, and his own expeditions to Papua in the 1920s. This book is an account of his stage and screen practice in the context of early twentieth-century mass media.'Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity' is not a biography of Frank Hurley the man; it is instead an examination of the social life of the many marvellous and meaningful things he made as a professional photographer and film maker in the early twentieth century: the negatives, photographic prints, lantern slides, stereographs, films, diaries and newspaper articles. His stage and screen practices offer an insight into Australia's engagement with the romance and wonder of international modernity in the early years of the twentieth century. The level of description at which this volume works is not that of personality or the originary events of Hurley's life - the Mawson and Shackleton Antarctic Expeditions, and the First and Second World Wars - but the media events he worked so hard and so professionally to create. He called them his 'synchronized lecture entertainments'.These media events were at once national and international; they involved Hurley in an entire culture industry comprising many kinds of personnel, practices and texts that were constantly in movement along global lines of travel and communication, and in a variety of institutional locations around the world. This raises complex questions both about the authorship of Hurley's photographic and filmic texts - which were often produced and presented by other people - and about their ontology, since they were in a more or less constant state of re-assemblage in response to changing market opportunities. This unique study re-imagines, from inside the quiet and stillness of the archive, the prior social life of Hurley's creations as they were once accelerated through the complicated topography of the early twentieth century's rapidly internationalizing mass media landscape. As a way to conceive of that space and the social life of the people and things within it, this study uses the concept of 'colonial modernity'.

This study discusses modern Australian life writing by sons who focus on their fathers. Termed patriography (by Couser) or The Sons Book of the Father (by Freadman), this rich field of relational autobiography offers insights into modes of masculinity, notions of identity and heritage and the ethics of representation. The current proliferation of father memoirs in the marketplace demonstrates that such writing is fulfilling and being fuelled by the need to better understand the traditionally lesser-known parent.Beginning with an analysis of the paradigmatic case of the sub-genre, Edmund Gosses Victorian masterpiece Father and Son, the study moves quickly on to embrace its Australian literary frame, demonstrating Gosses influence on a range of classic Australian autobiographies, including Hal Porters The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony. Mansfield then offers five case studies on the seminal works of the current era: Raimond Gaitas Romulus, My Father; Richard Freadmans Shadow of Doubt; Peter Roses Rose Boys; John Hughess The Idea of Home; and Robert Grays The Land I Came Through Last.How do these authors perform their masculinity in the act of writing the father? What are some of the ethical complexities that must be negotiated when representing the reticent-laconic in autobiography? And, ultimately, how does one decide what an ethical representation of the father is? These are some of the questions Mansfield addresses in Australian Patriography, the first study of its kind in Australian literature.

This exacting study makes the case that a diverse range of theatre, film and activism engaged in the portrayal or participation of asylum seekers and refugees since 2001 has been informed by and contributed to the consolidation of 'irregular' noncitizenship as a cornerstone idea in contemporary Australian political and social life. This idea has been reified as a direct consequence of the asylum seeker-related public discourse that has been prominent in twenty-first century Australia, to the extent that it has become impossible to imagine what Australia means without it. 'Performing Noncitizenship' is the first book-length study of its kind to focus on Australia's urgent and fraught asylum politics, and its implications extend beyond one country's problems. To date, there has been little attention paid to theatre and performance's implicatedness in how irregular noncitizenship has been taken up in Western neoliberal democracies as a core diagnosis for the ills of a precarious social and economic status quo. This study is unique among studies of asylum seeker and refugee representation in theatre, film and activism in its interest in the ways representations of asylum seekers are informed by and inform identity politics among citizens. The book's purpose is to identify and illuminate the increasing leverage of noncitizenship as a marker of twenty-first century human illegitimacy.

Christos Tsiolkas is one of the most recognizable and internationally successful literary novelists working in Australia today. He is also one of the country's most politically engaged writers. These terms - recognition, commercial success, political engagement - suggest a relationship to forms of public discourse that belies the extremely confronting nature of much of Tsiolkas's fiction and his deliberate attempt to cultivate a literary persona oriented to notions of blasphemy, obscenity and what could broadly be called a pornographic sensibility.

Carrying forward the momentum of the twenty-first-century 'rediscovery' of Patrick White (1912-1990), winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature, this book features work by White scholars aiming to stimulate future research into 'world' modernism, queer literature, and the 'jittery' modernist impulses of contemporary culture.

Carrying forward the momentum of the twenty-first-century ¿rediscovery¿ of Patrick White (1912¿1990), winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature, this book features work by White scholars aiming to stimulate future research into ¿world¿ modernism, queer literature, and the ¿jittery¿ modernist impulses of contemporary culture.