Book history
Articles
- Review of Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field, by Katherine Bode
It is not often—or often enough—that one is confronted by a work that has the power to transform a field of study, but this is…
1 November 2012 - Review of By the Book: A Literary History of Queensland, edited by Patrick Buckridge and Belinda McKay
Although one might wonder at the enterprise of compiling a literary history of a state, which is, after all, a political entity, one could argue…
1 November 2008 - Review of Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia, 1946-2005, edited by Craig Munro and Robin Sheahan-Bright
Once upon a time, I thought that the book I bought in the bookshop was the book the author wrote. Yes, silly I know, but…
1 November 2008 - Review of Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing, edited by David Carter and Anne Galligan
This volume of writings from UQP is a timely contribution to a cultural arena currently caught up in discussions about publishing and books, about priorities…
1 May 2009 - Review of A History of the Book in Australia 1891-1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market, edited by Martyn Lyons and John Arnold
Literary studies have changed, as readers of this review will know well. They are increasingly concerned with context, one example being the acknowledgment that an…
1 May 2003 - The Reading Communities of Collecting: Sale Catalogues, Sociability, and Ephemerality, 1676-1862
"In this essay I want to explore the status of the sale catalogue as 'ephemeral literature' with two broad aims: firstly, as a means of…
1 October 2014 - Introduction
This special issue tracks the ways in which Victorian literary texts and ideas were transformed by their arrival and reception in the Australasian colonies and…
31 October 2015 - ‘An Explosive Novel of Strange Passions’: Horwitz Publications and Australia’s Pulp Modernism
The scant academic attention Australia’s pulp publishing industry has received to date tends to focus on pulp as a quickly and cheaply made form of…
19 December 2019 - Culture wars and corporatism: The cultural mission in Australian non-fiction book publishing, 1958–2018
In this article I investigate four phases in Australian non-fiction publishing between the late 1950s and early 2000s, focused on works of current affairs, politics…
28 April 2020 - The Commercial Function of Historical Book Reviews: An Interrogation of the Angus & Robertson Archives
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…
30 April 2021 - Review of Thomas Keneally’s Career and the Literary Machine by Paul Sharrad.
There is no doubt that Thomas Keneally’s Career and the Literary Machine will, for many years to come, be an indispensable resource for scholars writing…
28 October 2021
Contributors
- Maryanne Dever
- Mark Davis
- Ross Harvey
- Per Henningsgaard
- Toni Johnson-Woods
- Susan K. Martin
- Kylie Mirmohamadi
- Andrew Nette
- Gillian Russell
- Terri-Ann White
- Rebekah Ward
- Robert Zeller