Katherine Bode

Graphically gendered: a quantitative study of the relationships between Australian novels and gender from the 1830s to the 1930s.

The rediscovery, reclamation and revisioning of women’s writing have been major features of feminist literary criticism since the 1970s, especially in the 1980s and early 1990s. A particular focus in the Australian context has been on the recovery and rereading of women novelists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period identified as foundational in producing and defining Australian cultural and literary traditions, and the gender constructions informing those traditions. Before this revisionist project, as Fiona Giles observes, ‘it was widely accepted that there were no [Australian] women writers in the nineteenth century’ (1998, 1). Some early twentieth-century women novelists (such as Miles Franklin and Katharine Susannah Prichard) were ‘prominent figures in Australian popular cultural memory (however much they have been neglected by the literary academy)’ (Sheridan 1995, viii). But most have been excluded from cultural memory and Australian literary history. Feminist scholarship of the past three decades has created a greater awareness of the presence of nineteenthand early twentieth-century Australian women writers, while challenging the parameters of literary history (for instance, by discussing romance authors). Gradually, a general picture of the position and history of Australian women novelists has emerged from feminist literary scholarship; namely, women novelists were a significant presence in the nineteenth century, but became particularly prominent in the first few decades of the twentieth century. This paper aims to continue and expand, while critiquing aspects of, previous feminist analyses of authors and authorship in Australia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The majority of such studies have focused on particular women writers and/or on aspects of their fiction. I consider the number and proportion of published novel titles by Australian men and women from 1830 (when publication of Australian novels effectively began) to 1939 to determine whether and what gender trends emerge. This study also departs from the majority of previous explorations of Australian literary history (including feminist accounts of that history) in not pre-emptively selecting the authors or texts considered. Rather, I explore gender trends in relation to all Australian novel titles published before 1939. Thus, some of the authors included in this study published one novel, some many; some wrote what Gayle Tuchman (1989) describes as the ‘high culture novel’, others published in genres such as romance, action, fantasy, science fiction and crime. Some of these novel titles were read by thousands of people; others by only a handful. Traditional paradigms of literary analysis would regard many of the texts and authors considered in this paper as unimportant. My contention is that only by considering the entire spectrum of texts and authors can we determine the ways in

A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History

This project was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, from 2013 to 2016.

Fictional Systems: Mass-Digitization, Network Analysis, and Nineteenth-Century Australian Newspapers

Abstract:Based on an analysis of the largest collection of mass-digitized newspapers available internationally, this article critiques current approaches to digital periodical studies, particularly relating to network analysis, while radically revising existing accounts of fiction reprinting and syndication in nineteenth-century Australia. It challenges the perceived dominance of Tillotson’s Fiction Bureau in this market and the associated ascendancy of syndicated British fiction over local writing. Turning to the critically neglected provincial press, it shows that these newspapers published and reprinted more fiction than their metropolitan counterparts. This material was supplied by an extensive, active, and hitherto essentially unrecognized array of syndication agencies operating within and beyond the colonies.

Methods and Canons

A growing number of data-rich analyses of literature and literary culture— variously described as ‘distant reading’ (Moretti 2005), ‘algorithmic criticism’ (Ramsay 2008), ‘macroanalysis’ (Jockers 2013), and ‘new empiricism’ (Bode and Dixon 2009) —have in the last decade significantly transformed literary studies. This international trend is strongly reflected in Australian literary studies, where there have been multiple quantitative analyses of borrowing records (Dolin 2004, 2006;Lamond 2012;Lamond and Reid 2009), book sales (Davis 2007; Zwar 2012a, 2012b), newspaper reviews (Thomson and Dale 2009), and bibliographic data (Bode 2010, 2012a, 2012b;Carter 2007;Ensor 2008, 2009;Nile and Ensor 2009). As important as this work has been for reconceptualizing the object and scope of literary studies, its credibility and progress as a whole is inhibited by the fact that many of these authors provide little detailed discussion of the processes involved in creating, curating, and analysing their data sources. Even less rarely do they publish these sources. While there are exceptions,1 such lack of access to data is true of the most high-profile work in this field—including Jockers’s and Moretti’s influential monographs—and prevents other scholars from investigating, extending, and potentially challenging these authors’ findings and arguments.

Literature as Olympic Event?: Understanding the Scoreboard for Australian Women's Writing

he Olympics were in full swing when I was approached to be part of a town hall forum on gender equality in Australian literature at James Cook University. I have never watched much sport. But in July 2016 I had a three-month old baby to look after, meaning I was spending a lot of time on the couch watching daytime television; and when the Olympics are on, there’s not much other daytime television on offer.

Thousands of Titles Without Authors: Digitized Newspapers, Serial Fiction, and the Challenges of Anonymity

The study of literary anonymity and pseudonymity outside of our existing disciplinary infrastructure raises a variety of questions for book history scholars. How can we study areas of print culture not organized in terms of the relationship between authors and texts, and/or resisting such organization altogether? How can our analyses progress critical debates arising from our existing author-centered perspective without naturalizing that perspective and projecting it onto the past? This article describes how the ongoing digitization of print cultural records, and new methods for accessing and analysing digitized documents, brings to our bibliographic attention not only thousands of new works, but thousands of titles without authors. Using a case study of serial fiction in nineteenth-century Australian newspapers, it articulates a new conceptual and methodological framework for exploring literary anonymity and pseudonymity not predicated on authorship.

A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction

generational feminisms. Zines, she concludes, have links to earlier grassroots feminist media practices, including the mimeographed manifestos that were widely produced and distributed by second-wave feminists. As such, Eichhorn points to the limitations of segregating generational feminisms into a series of successive ‘waves’ that celebrate ‘newness’ rather than feminism’s enduring practice of historical cross-pollination. While Eichhorn is certainly not the first to critique the reifying tendencies implicated by the ‘wave’ metaphor, this example demonstrates how zines may be seen as an extension of the rich media practices of feminist communities across history. Such insights convincingly illustrate how feminist archives enact their own disorderly encounters and uncanny moments of proximity which, far from preserving the archive’s fixed relation to the past, allow the past and the present to be imagined differently. Thus for Eichhorn the subversive potential of the feminist archive lies in the way it continues to legitimise forms of cultural production and political alliances at risk by a neoliberal investment in entrepreneurial individualism. While Eichhorn’s compelling investigations of the archive’s complex field of cultural production (donating, collecting, cataloguing) give us a rare insight into the important intellectual and logistical work carried out by archivists and librarians, the book also tackles the trickier question of what is at stake, politically and culturally, for the future of feminism. In other words it brings into view some of the tensions that continue to define feminism – as a site of activism and politics as well as a site of scholarly and intellectual engagement. Refreshingly, the book never attempts to resolve this tension but convincingly argues that feminism’s emotional investment in outrage lives on in the archive, strengthening contemporary feminism as a form of genealogical politics. This is an original and perceptive book that provides an exemplary interdisciplinary model for future work on archives, all the while demonstrating the archive’s central importance to the kinds of stories we tell about feminism’s past, present and future.

DIVERGENT CONVERGENCES: Manifesting Literary Feminisms Conference, Monash University and the University of Queensland, 13–14 December 2007

Over the past three decades, feminism has been a major force in literary studies, while literary studies have represented an important strand of academic feminism. This interrelationship has been reflected in the prevalence of feminist papers at literature conferences, and literary papers at feminist conferences. Few conferences, however, have focused exclusively on feminist literary criticism. The Manifesting Literary Feminisms conference therefore offered a rare opportunity for feminist literary scholars to come together with the purpose of listening and responding to, and being challenged by, the stimulating diversity of work in progress in the field. For this opportunity, participants at the conference repeatedly thanked the convenors, Margaret Henderson from the University of Queensland and Ann Vickery from Monash. The conference was also an occasion to engage with and celebrate the contributions to feminist literary scholarship of the plenary speakers: acclaimed American poet and critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis, from Temple University, Philadelphia, and Susan Sheridan, one of Australia’s most influential feminist literary critics, recently retired from the position of Head of Women’s Studies at Flinders University. The experience of listening to these eminent scholars on consecutive days writ large the way in which many conference papers brought the Australian context into conversation with international and transnational themes, theories and debates in feminist and literary theory. In her opening address, ‘Manifesting Literary Feminisms: Thinking into Future Work’, DuPlessis offered a thought-provoking list of some of the ‘gender buttons’ that feminist literary scholars are pressing. Among these was the idea of ‘nexus’*defined by the OED as a ‘bond, link, or junction; a means of connection between things or parts’. DuPlessis identified ‘nexus-thinking’ as a way of moving beyond the hierarchical paradigm of major and minor writers, and instead considering the literary field in terms of connections, interactions, relationships and communities. Conference papers and sessions focusing on literary communities, and on genres such as detective fiction, ably demonstrated ways that ‘nexus thinking’ is informing work in contemporary feminist literary studies. The ‘nexus’ theme continued in Susan Sheridan’s address that opened the second day of the conference: ‘Generations Lost and Found: Reading Women Writers Together’. Exploring the ‘eclipse’ of Australian women writers of the 1950s, Sheridan noted the value of ‘nexus thinking’ as a way of investigating groups, even when these groups do not see themselves as such. Susan Sheridan’s attention to the social, political, economic and geographic conditions of Australian women writers of the 1950s demonstrated another