Australian Regional Literary History: Rethinking Limits and Boundaries

educational resource

posted on 2024-06-02, 23:37 authored by Emily PotterEmily Potter

This paper emerges from a panel discussion at the ‘Texts and Their Limits’ conference (2021) between four scholars in the field of Australian regional literary history to consider its current concerns, practices and relationship to the frameworks of Australian literary studies. The panel flagged a renewal of regional literary scholarship in Australia through exploration of the panelists’ own projects and collaborations in regional and rural Victorian and Western Australian communities. Drawing on their reflections on the doing of regional literary history, the conversation canvassed the distinct qualities of contemporary regional Australian literary scholarship; the role of place, situated practice and community engagement in this field; and the implications for the regional literary studies of the always unsettled boundaries and status of the ‘region’ in Australian life. Following the original panel event, this paper discusses questions such as: what is regional literary history, where is it going, and what are limits?

History

Volume

Pagination

1-12

Language

English

Notes

https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/JASAL/article/view/15865

Research statement

Background This panel discussion took place at the Texts and Their Limits literary convention in 2021, held at Victoria University in Melbourne. Australia’s Triennial Literary Convention, which brings together four of the major Literary Studies associations in the country—ASAL, AAL, AVSA and AULLA—is a prestigious venue for discussion of literary studies. The convention panel featured four settler scholars of Australian regional literary history in conversation about their respective projects and ways of undertaking research. The editors of JASAL subsequently invited them to publish a transcription, in order to contribute to ongoing discussions of this sub-field. Contribution The roundtable panel at the conference and the subsequent publication in JASAL explore the methods used by scholars working in this evolving field. Brigid Magner, Emily Potter, Jo Jones, and Tony Hughes-d’Aeth reflect on their experiments with writing literary history across three projects, including moments of self-critique, doubt, and failure. The roundtable format offers a site for information sharing and knowledge production that serves to develop this discipline. Significance The research contributes to the field of Australian literary-critical regionalism, which highlights the specific, the singular, the imagined, and historical places of literary texts and the locational perspectives on authors, oeuvres, and reception. This transcribed discussion is framed to be accessible to other researchers and to generate further dialogue about how to do regional literary history. It considered why some Australian literary regions are well known while others are forgotten. The panel advanced thinking around the sub-field of Australian regional literary studies as a collaborative space of diverse practices, texts, sites, and communities.

Publication classification

JO3 Original Creative Works – Textual Work

Scale

NTRO Minor

Editor/Contributor(s)

Magner B, Jones J, Hughes-D'aeth T

Issue

Publisher

Sydney Open Journals

Place of publication

Sydney, N.S.W.

Source

Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature

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Keywords

Australian regions Literary history Place