Crime novels are central to the literary traditions and social histories of Australia. Often dismissed as cheap entertainment, these works demonstrate how the settlers of a newly conquered continent took on the task of transforming a gaol into a nation. As colonisation spread, so too did crime writers, publishers and readers. Over time the crime fiction novel became an essential vehicle for communicating ideas of right and wrong as well as ideas of what it meant to be an Australian. In a vast array of crime-focused works, the central protagonist investigates a dreadful crime while readers are asked to work through issues of class, gender and race. As stories sorted out who was guilty and innocent, authors also reveal some of the tensions within a society that still holds fast to ideals based upon egalitarianism but allows deep fractures between different social groups. Indeed, as the country marched relentlessly forward in the pursuit of progress crime novelists easily capitalised upon colonial beginnings, the rise of the metropolis and a nostalgia for the bush. In this way, authors embraced crime fiction and proved the world’s most popular genre can be refashioned to offer novels that are specifically Australian.

This chapter explores the rise of an allegorical mode of imagining in twenty-first-century fiction by Australian women. Analysing a mode of literature associated with universality, ahistoricism and abstraction in such a nationalist, historical and gendered context might appear a contradictory enterprise. However, it is one necessitated by the doubleness of allegory itself, which is marked by an enigmatic and therefore productive relationship between the timeless and historical, the literal and figurative, the aesthetic and material. This chapter examines a range of novels written by Australian women and published in the twenty-first century, focusing on Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), Merlinda Bobis’s Locust Girl: A Lovesong (2015), Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015), Kathryn Heyman’s Storm and Grace (2017), and Carmel Bird’s Field of Poppies (2019). Existing in the liminal space between fantasy and realism, the allegories surveyed here intersect with various genres, such as the speculative, magical realism and Indigenous futurism, and often veer into the dystopian. They provide an uncanny and defamiliarising model for drawing attention to contemporary national problems related to gender, the postcolonial, asylum seekers and the Anthropocene.

From the 1920s through to the early 1960s, a popular genre of Australian commercial fiction focused on exploring or narrating stories about the outback and more exotic parts of Australian life and geography. Writers as diverse as Ion Idriess, F. J. Thwaites and E. V. Timms used their books to help other non-indigenous Australians engage with their ‘new’ nation. This chapter draws on a some of these novels and uses them to demonstrate how these stories brought to the fore issues of belonging, race, desire and anxiety. The analysis will focus on these texts’ descriptions of love and romance, including how and when intercultural desire was represented. The chapter explores how a settler-colonial logic based on dispossession, erasure and/or assimilation is deployed by the range of authors to mark out social as well as political boundaries of belonging. Overall, the chapter addresses two questions: first, how was Australia imagined and how were its citizens/subjects imagined as belonging to the nation in commercial fiction about race relations at this time; and second, how do stories of intimacy – mostly cis, heterosexual romance – shape these narratives of difference and national belonging? The chapter answers these questions using textual analysis and theories of difference.

From Chaucer to Shakespeare, and Virginia Woolf to Bernadine Evaristo, London as a city has always instigated the literary imagination. By the nineteenth century, it had become not just the capital of the United Kingdom, but also of a sprawling world-wide empire. This also meant that the city became host to a diverse range of stories, storytellers, and writers that have responded to both its physical and imagined dimensions. Taking a cue from Pascale Casanova’sThe World Republic of Letters, but correcting it to account for the impact of empire, this essay tracks the ways in which London emerged as the global centre of literary and aesthetic production and as a universal arbiter of taste in the early decades of the twentieth century, through the decades of decolonization in the middle of the twentieth century, and leading up to the contemporary moment in which its status as a literary capital is subject to new uncertainties that are enmeshed in the political economy of contemporary world literature.The essay focalizes this discussion through two linked tropes—the city’s “exhibitionary complex” and its “circulatory network”.

This chapter examines the history of critical interpretations of the Australian novel from the mid- to late nineteenth century through the late twentieth century. In the colonial period, poetry and drama were often held in greater esteem than the novel as literary forms, but by the late nineteenth century the novel had become a gauge of the incipient nation’s evolution towards maturity or ‘civilisation’. Debates about contemporary realism and naturalism cut across these concerns. Attempts were made across the first half of the twentieth century to define the distinctive features of the Australian novel and its role in a national literary tradition, but often in terms of their absence rather than their presence. Much of the critical discussion of the Australian novel occurred outside the universities, in a public culture of books and reading. The field was redefined from the late 1950s to the 1970s through academic criticism, and then through the radical revisions of feminist, postcolonial and other poststructuralist approaches. The novel remained firmly at the centre of such debates.

This chapter tracks the quest for ’the great Australian novel’ that would mark the consolidation of national culture occurring after World War II. It surveys major novelists from Patrick White onwards, showing the change from realist (bush) saga to modernist (urban) psychological studies to experimental ’counter-culture’ fiction, noting turns towards depicting the experiences of women, migrants and Aboriginal Australians.

This essay looks at works by the Booker Prize-winning authors Peter Carey and Richard Flanagan, with reference to other internationally acclaimed Australian writers including Kate Grenville and Alexis Wright, to consider the ambiguous position of Australian literature in the evolving discourse of the Global South. Despite its emphatically southern location, Australia is usually classified as part of the Global North, based on various economic measures, and with the shift away from postcolonialism to a decolonial understanding of invasion as ‘a structure, not an event’ in settler societies, critics increasingly question whether writers of Australia’s white settler majority are ‘writing back’ to a dominant culture or writing from within one. Yet numerous critics have found it difficult to dissociate the land ‘down under’ from underdog status, and some identify Carey and Flanagan as writers of the Global South. They are aided in this by the historical settings of these authors’ best-known novels, which foreground past hardships endured by groups whose present-day descendants are typically much better placed. Ultimately, rather than seeking to place the Australian novel in relation to the Global South, this essay finds ‘the Global South’ and ‘the Australian novel’ to be mutually destabilising terms.

Using Frantz Fanon’s depiction of the colonial city in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) as a starting point, this chapter argues that the very disjunctiveness of Manichean colonial urban forms is key for perceiving, analysing, and indicting the colonial system, as well as for imagining paths for decolonization. Moreover, understanding the city as a site of contestation and anticolonial desires allows us to rethink the role of the urban in world literature studies. In contrast to models that assume the city as a node that endows literary value, this chapter views the (post)colonial city as a crucible in which the critical energies of decolonization emerge, take literary expression, and circulate in new ways. The chapter examines three representative literary examples, all focusing on Asian metropolises: José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere; Kim Chi-ha’s Five Thieves (Ojŏk); and Arvind Adiga’s White Tiger. Respectively, they depict a racially-divided colonial capital at the end of the nineteenth century (Rizal’s Manila); a recently decolonized, post-civil war city under dictatorship (Kim’s Seoul); and a paradigmatic conurbation of twenty-first-century neoliberal capitalism (Adiga’s Gurgaon).

From the late 1990s onwards, contemporary Australian Indigenous literary culture has expanded to include a strong body of literary fiction novels. This includes a more recent significant deepening of Australian Indigenous literary culture, as Indigenous writers use the literary novel form to express long-existing Indigenous stories, storytelling modes, knowledges, paradigms, and perspectives. Australian Indigenous literary culture is now at a nexus point, having built a strong body of fiction novels that are both important to Indigenous readers, critics and scholars, and recognised through Australian literary award lists and increasing global reach. How do we engage with this body of work in expansive ways? This chapter argues for the use of Indigenous-centred approaches – framed around Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing – to engage with Australian Indigenous literary fiction novels and thereby shift power within the majority non-indigenous literary sector.

The Moscow/St. Petersburg binary shapes Russia’s symbolic geography. Moscow is the self-styled inheritor of Kyivan Rus’, the medieval Slavic state located in what is now Ukraine (where, at the time of writing, the Russian Federation is waging a bloody war of conquest). By “absorbing” the Kyivan heritage, the state now governed from Moscow has at times effected Ukraine’s symbolic erasure, moving the “center” of East Slavic culture five hundred miles to the east. And yet Moscow’s supposed centrality derives meaning largely from the peripheralness of anothercapital, St. Petersburg, foundedin 1704 by the coercively westernizing emperor Peter the Great. For two centuries Petersburg—a center situated on a geographic periphery, the capital of an outward-looking empire—was everything Moscow was not: new, bureaucratic, “western,” symbolically masculine, ethnically hybrid. This opposition has worked to dilute the meanings attached to “provincial” places, i.e., virtually all places located outside the two capitals butnotin exotic non-Russian borderlands like the Caucasus. Taking as examples Tatiana Tolstoya’s “Fakir” (1986, Moscow) and Evgeny Zamiatin’s “The Cave” (1920, Petersburg), this chapter examines how the Russian worldview—particularly Russians’ anxious perception of themselves as provincials—can inform World Literature debates around centers and peripheries.

This chapter argues for the need to view Paris unexceptionally. It acknowledges and moves beyond universalising or celebratory tendencies of Paris-centric theories of world literature. Exploring the literary expression of what I term migrant-flânerie, the chapter analyses forms of epistemic encounter and intimacy found in three novels of migration to Paris by Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Mbella Sonne Dipoko and Gauz. These texts reinvent and recycle the nineteenth-centuryflâneurand his leisured navigation of the city. The writing engages themes of alienation,ennui, and freedom in relation to racialised, masculine experiences of the city. In contrasting ways, these African-centred narratives of Paris ‘unworld’ the city space by giving literary form to encounters that disrupt resilient critical claims to aesthetic or epistemic universalism. They present experiences of migrant-flâneriecompressed into specific everyday spaces (the bourgeois apartment; student digs; the department store; the café; a boat on the Seine; security checkpoints) and delineated narrative temporalities (diary form; coming-of-age narrative; ‘a few nights and days’). These formal devices evoke recurrent tensions between abstract, aestheticised promises of freedom and everyday experiences of racism and coloniality.

On and off the map of “the world republic of letters,” literary Beijing, from exotic configurations to multivalent self-portraits, has unfolded, historically and geopolitically, as an ancient capital of traditional China, a Republican city of new thoughts and everlasting memories, a fallen city under Japanese military control, a socialist capital of Maoist ideology, and a rejuvenated and cosmopolitan megacity in the post-Cold War era and the new millennium. This chapter situates Beijing writing in the intertwined contexts of Chinese literature and World Literature in terms of evidenced influences, implicit connections, and paralleled representations. The methods of imagining Beijing have formed in the multilayered city-texts by writers across different historical times, which entailed variegated genres, ideas and trends, places and spaces, emotions and materiality, and cultural chronotopes. Entangled with Beijing narratives created by authors across the globe, the city’s imageries in Chinese literature prompt intriguing dialogues, in both visible and invisible ways, with World Literature. Together, this tapestry of urban writing encodes and decodes Beijing as a real, imagined, mythical, metaphorical and semiotic city surviving barbarianism, exoticism, Orientalism, (mis)understanding, (over)interpretation, and (un)translatability.

The national epic takes very different forms across different cultural and historical contexts. At the beginning of twentieth-century Australian literary history stands the tragic narrative of a failed individual, in Henry Handel Richardson’s trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917, 1925, 1929). In the mid-twentieth century, large-scale fictional narratives, also in the form of trilogies, were used by some realist writers to write epics of settlement. In the case of Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land trilogy (1941–53) the narrative is about the catastrophic contact between Aboriginal people and the invading white settlers, and the subsequent beginning of expansion across the continent. Written at the same period, however, are two trilogies of nation-founding that, like Richardson’s, are centred on later mining history: Katharine Susannah Prichard’s goldfields trilogy (The Roaring Nineties, 1946; Golden Miles, 1948; Winged Seeds, 1950) and Vance Palmer’s overlapping Golconda trilogy, begun at the same time as his national mythography, The Legend of the Nineties (Golconda, 1948; Seedtime, 1957; The Big Fellow, 1959). These trilogies are shaped by the history of mineral extraction in Australian-settler political, environmental and economic history. This chapter analyses the under-recognised meaning of mining in narratives of settlement and nation.

Australian novels of recent decades, canonical and lesser-known works, created by both Indigenous and non-indigenous writers, have been telling stories the nation and its readers have not wanted to hear for most of Australia’s colonial history. While novelists did engage, prior to the 1980s, with Indigenous presence on the continent, such engagement was sporadic and mostly peripheral to grander stories of pioneering bravado, white achievement and the battle with nature on the frontier. Now, peripheral stories have moved to the centre, for Australia was not an empty land settled peacefully by the British. The land was already occupied by sovereign nations of people. Storied, sung place was invaded with orchestrated violence; the land was taken, not ‘taken up’. Indigenous peoples now demand that their ‘ancient sovereignty’ be allowed to ‘shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood’ via constitutional amendment and treaty. Read against the backdrop of relatively recent developments – land rights, the Mabo decision, Stolen Generations, History Wars – this chapter examines work by non-indigenous authors like Kate Grenville and Andrew McGahan as well as Indigenous writers such as Alexis Wright and Tara June Winch, in tracing the rise of the postcolonial novel in Australian fiction.

Mumbai has always been in and of the world. There has never been a time in the history of the city when it hasnotbeen cosmopolitan whatever level of urban analytics one applies to it. While the city of Mumbai has name recognition in discussions of world literature through a handful of recognized writers and mainly through prose (Salman Rushdie, Suketu Mehta, Vikram Chandra), their presence sometimes constitutes the brightly-lit space beyond which lies further unexplored territory of loss and living, a different “duniya” that is unseen in the world. This essay looks at alternative constructions of multiple, contradictory and diverse worlds in multiple genres, but mainly in the multilingual poetry of Bombay writers, especially in the hidden locations of embattled lives that emerge in the poetry of the Dalit poets of Mumbai.

World War II is widely understood as the endpoint of the progressive narrative of ’World History’. The conventional critical narrative of Australia’s post-war literature, however, identifies a dominant mythopoeic tendency of quest, often bound up with narratives of colonial discovery and settlement. Through this lens, Australian literature of this period appears to be driven by the outmoded teleologies and linear imperatives that underpinned the obsolete narrative of World History. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, however, the apparent retrogression of Australian literature appears more complex. Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land (1941) provides a blistering critique of the Bildungsroman in the context of colonialism and the failed quests of Patrick White’s eponymous hero in Voss (1957) and of Stephen Heriot in Randolph Stow’s To the Islands (1958), which do not repeat the narrative of European discovery so much as expose and exhaust its operations. Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, published in 1980 but set in the period immediately after World War II, makes this process explicit and provides, inter alia, a framework for reconsidering the Australian post-war novel as a reckoning with World History that links the practices of colonialism with the catastrophe of the war.

The introductory chapter explores the way attention to cities and urban literatures expands the typical nodes of World Literary production. It does so, we argue, by activating not just a broader spatial imaginary or geographical reach for the field, but multiplies the historical and linguistic formations of potential literary world systems. The chapter offers three starting propositions about World Literature: that it seeks literary frameworks beyond the nation; it tends toward systematicity and totality; and it activates an interest in decolonizing literary systems. Given that urban centers are typically highly networked at regional, national and global scales, we then consider the way cities have typically functioned as cultural “switchboards” regarding the commingling of peoples, cultures, goods and ideas. Instead of offering a singular new theory of World Literature to supersede previous ones, our volume proffers accounts of world-connecting circuitry that depends upon the complex dialectics of urban materialities and worldly imaginations.