Australian Literary Studies Now

Authors

  • Philip Mead University of Western Australia

Abstract

In 2024, Emeritus Professor Philip Mead was the inaugural visiting fellow at the Roderick Centre for Australian Literature and Creative Writing. This paper, based on a public talk in June 2024, is a personal perspective on the current state of Australian literary studies, both as project in its own right and as a subset of the larger field of literary studies.

The study of Australian literature had an understandably national focus at its outset and that’s been both an asset and a liability. There’s always been a tension between valuing writing by Australian writers and the effects of ‘nationalism’. The same is true today, though in different and important ways.

Literature in Australia has had to create a space for itself that started off with a readership and a publishing industry to support that readership. Then came an at times fierce struggle for recognition in both the school and university curricula. Both sectors have had to negotiate continued and multi-factored pressures. And all along there has been a complicated and dynamic two-way relationship with a globalised publishing industry, writers’ careers, and literary culture in Australia and overseas.

Australian literary studies has been shaped by crises in both its own development and in the history of literary studies at universities. It is facing new challenges at the moment, new perspectives on national literatures, changing educational practices, and constant institutional restructuring.

So how does it look? Should we be encouraged or anxious about the future of Australian literary studies?

Author Biography

  • Philip Mead, University of Western Australia

    Philip Mead was inaugural Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia (2009-2018). He is currently Emeritus Professor, University of Western Australia, and Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne. In 1991 he co-edited, with John Tranter, The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry. In 2008 Philip published Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry and in 2018 Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916-2016 (with Gordon McMullan. London: Arden/Bloomsbury) and The Social Work of Narrative: human rights and the cultural imaginary (ed. with Gareth Griffiths. Hannover: Ibidem/Columbia University Press). In 2023 he published Literary Knowing and the Making of English Teachers: the Roles of Literature in Shaping English Teachers’ Professional Knowledge and Identities (with Larissa McLean Davies, Brenton Doecke, Wayne Sawyer, and Lyn Yates. London and New York: Routledge).

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Published

2024-12-20

Issue

Vol. 24 No. 1 (2024): JASAL 24.1

Section

Articles

License

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How to Cite

Australian Literary Studies Now. (2024). Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 24(1). https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/JASAL/article/view/20454