Kylie Mirmohamadi

Howling Wilderness and Promised Land: Imagining the Victorian Mallee, 1840–1914

This article traces the changing understandings and representations of the Victorian Mallee region in the years 1840–1914. It tracks the multiple ways in which the region was imagined and discussed, paying close attention to how these imaginings were both shaped by and in turn themselves shaped the landscape. We argue that while the Mallee experience became emblematic of the broader Australian struggle with the land and thus the founding narrative of the pioneer legend, the Mallee as a distinct region retained local, specific meanings, including the idea of a preferred English settler. We identify the Federation Drought as a turning point in ecological, national and cultural understandings of the region.

Melbourne’s sites of reading: Putting the colonial woman reader in her place

This paper investigates the representations and experiences of white women readers in colonial Melbourne by locating them particularly in two literary sites: the Public Library and Mullen’s Bookshop and Circulating Library. Reading, and the search for reading material, placed colonial women in the street as well as the home, taking them into metropolitan places, libraries, shops and restaurants. The physical presence of female readers challenged the gendered spatial demarcations of Melbourne society, and made the readers themselves objects of inspection and subjects of discussion. This article has been peer-reviewed.

Reading (Austen) on Wattpad

This chapter focuses on the developing literary practices of the digital age. Resisting the assumption that the codex holds a monopoly on materiality, this chapter examines the physical and interpretive implications for reading of the screen in general, and Wattpad’s systems of display and delivery in particular. It explores how the structure of the electronic ‘page’ that contains (Austen-themed) text, and its live web provenance, allows for an interactive and ongoing commentary on reading and writing practices. Engaging the paradigm of the serial publication processes of the Victorian era, it also examines the active reading and reactive writing practices of Wattpadders who are given, in this digital environment, the opportunity to read and write Jane Austen in endless and endlessly proliferating new ways, but also through mimicking the practices at the apotheosis of the print age.

Jane Austen’s Adventures in Wattpadland

This chapter explores the place of Jane Austen and her work on Wattpad, an online literary community which launched from Canada in 2006. From paranormal and fan fiction, to werewolf, historical, romance, ‘chick lit’ and even a substream of Mormon faith-inflected stories, Austen-related work abounds in ‘Wattpadland’. This chapter offers close readings of a number of Austen-themed fictional works published there, such as a Pride and Prejudice update novel by a commercially published LDS [Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints] author, and amateur fan fiction involving werewolves, time travel and even the members of the boy band, One Direction.

‘Canon can only get you so far’: Janeites Read and Write ‘The Bennet Brother’

This chapter analyses a collaborative serial penned between January and September 2013 by published Austen spin off at the ‘Austen Authors’ website. This reading gives an account of the textual and intertextual implications of this endeavour’s location(s) within its digital provenance and print culture background. It comments further on the mimetic functions of this updated use of nineteenth-century serial forms of publishing, especially in relation to their specific writing demands and active reading practices. This incremental narrative, like the other Austen fan productions discussed throughout this study, reveals a synergy between urtext, spin off writing and adaptation. It similarly signifies an expansion of the boundaries of the canon, and the open-ended textual proliferation enacted by and enfolded into spin off and adaptation processes and products.

Introduction: Janeites at the Keyboard

Lined up amongst the icons on my iPad screen is a picture of a bonneted Jane Austen. She sits amongst the other Lilliputian images and fingerprint smears, as if waiting to enlarge and materialise into the twenty-first century at the slightest tap. ‘Everybody’s Jane’ has arrived on the screens that increasingly furnish our daily lives. In word and image Jane Austen inhabits the glass worlds of the television screen, computer, laptop, tablet and smart phone. From the perspective of the most recent surge in this author’s long and uneven transition from Regency obscurity to global celebrity, Digital Afterlives of Jane Austen explores the modes, nature and cultural impulses of contemporary online Austen fandom.1

The Ambitions of Jane Franklin: Victorian Lady Adventurer/The Old World and the New: The Marriage and Colonial Adventures of Lord and Lady Northcote

Historical biography is a difficult undertaking. Sifting through a necessarily selective and partial archive, the biographer must contextualise each document they encounter within a broad historica...

Angus & Robertson and the British Trade in Australian Books, 1930–1970: The Getting of Bookselling Wisdom

further explores the questions thrown up by records he could not have obtained in the 1980s. He realises, with an impressive humility, that (paradoxically) exposure to detailed records challenged seeming certainty based on interviews. Bill Langham’s wife in 1987, for example, was not the woman he married in the 1920s. Thomson’s use of the three men’s now available ‘Repat’ files further demonstrates their value as rich sources for comprehending the lasting effects of the Great War and strengthens calls that they be digitised. (That files detailing gallantry medals are all available digitally but not files documenting hardship and pain says much about Australia’s view of war.) One of the most satisfying aspects of Anzac Memories is that the new edition not only confirms its central contention, that individuals and societies reshape their versions of the past, but also shows us a historian actively reflecting on the ways his interpretation also changes. Running through the entire book is Thomson’s own ruminations about his grandfather, Hector, and his father, David. His revelation of what he learns about Hector (a Light Horse ambulance driver) is alone worth the price of the new edition. Thomson explores what the Great War did to his father’s family without ever exploiting it, showing the manifold ramifications of war, and the various ways we can understand it, entirely in accord with the spirit of the original book. The new chapters strengthen the claim that Anzac Memories is one of the richest and most powerful encounters between the people of Australia’s past and one seeking to make sense of it. Having praised Anzac Memories twice in twenty years as a superb piece of historical writing, let me end on a critical note. One of the tiny changes in the new edition is that when Thomson talks about the greater array of sources he has used, he now talks about ‘accessing’ them. It is a word we hear every day now, though we didn’t in 1994. Even people whose job entails thinking about historical evidence use it, unthinkingly. This is not just grumpy-old-man pedantry. Words (as this book reminds us on every page) have meanings. A student (say) ‘accessing’ a source means something different from them ‘consulting’, ‘listening to’ or ‘reading’ it. Lazily using the same verb to convey a range of distinct and critical actions surely erodes the clarity which the English language allows. For a review of a book energised by explicit reflection on historical change, this is no bad place to end. We can hope for a third (revised) edition of Anzac Memories, after the centenary of the Great War becomes the subject of mature analysis. It may use a more subtle range of verbs for the actions—finding, requesting, opening, reading, considering, noting, quoting and citing—we employ in conducting research.