This chapter takes up the mid-century politics of the Australian novel enacted in the terms dictated by the Cold War. Replicating the broader bipolar model of the cultural Cold War, the divide in Australia, mapped between modernism and realism, was complexly transnational, with vaunted stakes in the hot wars of the decolonising Asia Pacific and deconstructive receptions behind the Iron Curtain. The ideological debates of the cultural Cold War in Australia recall a faith in realism as a liberatory mode that is in danger of becoming unreadable. Australian post-war realism reached out to Indigenous issues, new migrants, women and working-class readers in structured and inclusive ways. Blurring into popular genres and facing strict federal censorship, realism’s traditional interest in the quotidian was mediated by its attention to topicality, or to the defining mid-century social issues motivating readers. This chapter is bookended by the scandalous court case of communist Frank Hardy for his Power Without Glory (1950), prosecuted for criminal libel in Australia’s McCarthyite moment, and Gerald Glaskin’s No End to the Way (1965), Australia’s first out gay novel, banned by the censors and marketed as ‘penetrating – honest – telling it like it is’.

As a ubiquitous but under-acknowledged setting in Australian fiction, suburbia affords the detailed representation of everyday, local places and landscapes at specific points in their history, even while adumbrating structures germane to globalised capitalist modernity – features arguably also integral to the novel itself as a morphing yet durable narrative form. Abstract dimensions like these become manifest via individual novels that evoke specific suburban places and geographies. Attending to one such geography, a sector of metropolitan Sydney conventionally known as the ‘North Shore’, this chapter works with four novels, reading them both chronologically and collectively, and proposing that, taken together, they constitute a fictional archive of an affluent, middle-class, urban subregion. Through its tight focus on one specific subregion, the chapter makes the argument that novels can be read not just singly but serially, for their sensory evocation of mundane and ephemeral place, and for their unearthing of that which is routinely suppressed by and within settler-suburbia. The novels from which this chapter forms its putative, fictional archive of Sydney’s North Shore are Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot (1961), Jessica Anderson’s The Impersonators (1980) and Fiona McGregor’s Indelible Ink (2010).

Writing by migrant authors constitutes the bulk of Australian literature, yet more often than not ‘migrant writing’ is used as a de facto label to indicate writing by non-anglophone authors. A further distinction is made with refugee writing, which is treated as a discrete subcategory within the larger field of migrant experience. This chapter restores migrant status to that of Australian settler writing, highlighting the ways in which Australian settler identity is formed through the repression of its migrant origins. It locates this impulse to distance settler identity from migrancy in the founding doctrine of terra nullius (used to justify the British colonisation of Australia), suggesting that this might be considered as a collective trauma, a mechanism that erased not only the country’s Aboriginal history but also its migrant past. Through a comparative analysis of works by Aboriginal authors Claire G. Coleman and Alexis Wright, migrant writers J. M. Coetzee and Felicity Castagna, and the refugee journalist and autobiographer, Behrouz Boochani, this chapter demonstrates the extent to which Australia has been invented by migrants and the migrant experience.

The millennial novels of Roger McDonald, Kim Scott and Alex Miller negotiate a tension between mythology and philosophy in attempting to progressively address the pernicious neocolonial mythology of the Australian tradition. All three writers have a history of work experience in rural and regional areas outside of their literary careers: one is Australian born of British heritage, another Australian born with Indigenous heritage, the other an English born migrant. Each of them has established a significant oeuvre over the last quarter century, and each has figured consistently in national and State awards. They are writers with a substantial public reputation, who have attracted the attention of the key institutions involved in curating Australian literature, and on occasion they have exceeded those spaces in becoming a topic of conversation within a broader public sphere interested in the character of a nation and the condition of its social contracts. Each of them is also deeply involved in consideration of the Australian tradition and the mythology that has expressed its identity and purpose. In this chapter the point of interest in grouping these specific texts by these specific male writers is to enquire into the extent to which they invoke, rework and displace the neocolonial mythology of the Australian tradition with familiar narratives that nevertheless predispose a wider public to a more open and inclusive accommodation of difference.

This chapter describes the dynamics of publishing novels in twentieth-century Australia through selected case studies and an analysis of changing industry, legal and cultural contexts. Publication in book form was more challenging for authors located in Australia due to the dominance of the British publishing industry and its control of territorial copyright for the Australasian market. Australian authors had few options but to seek the interest of overseas publishers, despite the local activity of Angus & Robertson, the NSW Bookstall Co. and other short-lived enterprises. In the early twentieth century, Joseph Furphy declared ‘Aut Australia aut nihil’ and published Such is Life (1903) with the Bulletin Newspaper Company. Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901) took another route and was published by Blackwood in Edinburgh. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the publishing history of Australian novels was often seen as a tale of three cities: London, Melbourne and Sydney. But New York, Philadelphia and Boston also beckoned, creating a broader and much more complex literary marketplace. Changes in the international rights market and local publishing significantly increased the possibilities of publishing in multiple markets by the end of the twentieth century.

Regional literature plays a bigger part in the ‘national story’ than is generally acknowledged in Australia; indeed, paying attention to regional writing intervenes in prevailing ways of thinking about national literary history. Regional literature does not sit inside a broader national frame, but instead intersects in dynamic ways in the production of Australian regions that map across local, national and even global coordinates. This chapter engages with the regional novel in Australia as an historic, contemporary and future-making force with diverse community investment. It maps the rich history of regional writing in Australia and assembles an account of regional literary scholarship, from the literary history of the Western Australian Wheatbelt, to Queensland’s mining towns, to Tasmania and the Northern Territory, to Gippsland and the Mallee in Victoria. It considers the scope of different studies of regional literature, and the ways in which regional literature has been conceived and received. While regional literary histories have often sought to highlight neglected or little-known literary works, some have also perpetuated narrow narratives of place through traditional definitions of what counts as regional writing. This chapter advocates an expanded view of the regional novel from the nineteenth century to today, acknowledging the ancient histories of storytelling and extending the coordinates of what ‘counts’ as regional. It seeks to affirm the influence of works of genre fiction which frequently have clearly defined regional settings but are not always included in national histories of literature. Broadening definitions of the regional novel allows a more inclusive account of Australian writing, bringing into visibility more diverse Australian places and texts.

Australian novelist George Turner’s 1987 novel The Sea and Summer is one of the world’s first climate fiction novels, although James Edmond’s 1911 story, ‘The Fool and His Inheritance’, is a precursor to the genre. The early emergence of Australian climate fiction is not surprising given the country’s vulnerability to anthropogenic climate change. This chapter investigates the 35-year history of Australian climate fiction through an analysis of six novels, contemplating how environment, history and culture shape the use of genre, form and theme. It examines slow violence and flooding in The Sea and Summer; the intertwining of colonisation, environmental destruction and dispossession in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013); the use of the uncanny to explore the impact of ‘settlement’ in Jennifer Mills’s Dyschronia (2018); the effect of a changing climate on generations in James Bradley’s Clade (2015); and the psychological ramifications of the 2019–20 bushfires, evident through motifs of missing bodies and an invisible menace in Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) and Inga Simpson’s The Last Woman in the World (2021). These novels, which are shaped by their production in a country with a fragile environment and a history of colonisation, offer varying visions of hope and despair.

This chapter examines how women’s writing has shaped the Australian novel. It suggests that the novel and women’s particular contributions to the form serve as significant flashpoints for discussions over the directions of the national culture. The chapter proceeds from the knowledge of Aileen Moreton-Robinson, an Indigenous woman of the Goenpul tribe, part of the Quandamooka nation: namely, that speaking about ‘women’ as though their presumed shared identities, experiences and representations ‘as Australians’ hinged on gender alone, has been a significant faultline in non-indigenous feminisms. Further, writings by Indigenous women underscore that ‘the novel’ is a freighted form that turns critical attention to the many strategies historically practised in Indigenous cultures and communities, that unsettle any presumption that ‘the novel’ (and indeed ‘the nation’) is a category or genre to be taken for granted. This chapter seeks to come to an understanding of how women’s novel writing in Australia is therefore a category of reception with complex histories and effects. It has a particular interest in the production and reception of ‘women’s novel writing’ in terms of the practices of individual authors; the creation of cultural and literary fields; complications of gendered identities; and the construction of readerships.

This chapter asks what challenges the cartographic imaginary of literary nationalism might present to readers of three representative novels of the pre-Federation era: two of Ada Cambridge’s novels serialised at the time of Melbourne’s Centennial International Exhibition in 1888, A Black Sheep (later published as A Marked Man) and A Woman’s Friendship, and Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl (1890). The aim is to wrest these late colonial texts back from the moment of Federation and its continental scale, relocating them once more in that earlier time, before the nation, whose cartographic imaginary was intra- and inter-colonial rather than national, albeit located within broader transnational or trans-imperial horizons. The point is to see the work of these late colonial writers not through the singular lens of literary nationalism, as harbingers of a unified national ethos, but as evidence of what historian Alan Atkinson has called the ’jigsaw work’ of Federation, with its multiple scales of knowable community and its two-way mirrors of transnational identity formation.

This chapter draws on dozens of interviews with Australian crime, fantasy and romance fiction writers and publishing professionals conducted for the ‘Genre Worlds’ project on contemporary Australian popular fiction (2016–19). It analyses features of the genre worlds of Australian fantasy, crime and romance fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Key focal points include Australian genre fiction’s role within large and small publishing houses, its uptake of self-publishing technologies, the use of social media for networking and marketing, and the importance of festivals, conventions and associations. The chapter demonstrates how the specific textual, social and industrial conventions of Australian genre fiction developed over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This chapter will lay out a potted account of the literature of New York and its relationship to world literature braiding two main themes: first will be that of New York as a center of self-invention, a place that was primarily commercial at its inception but progressively expanded to embrace diverse forms of ethnic, cultural, sexual, and urban interactions. And second will be to focus on the significance of neighborhoods and sweatshops as the spatial vectors through which immigrants and diasporics gain a sense of New York. The bulk of the chapter and will be devoted to a close analysis of the chronotopes of the neighborhood and the sweatshop in Toni Morrison’sJazzand Melissa Rivero’sThe Affairs of the Falcónsrespectively as a means of grasping the relationship between localized foci of individual mobility, identity, and alienation in the literature of New York and the ways in which we might also discern these as key organizing principles of world literature.

This chapter explore the dynamic relationship between two distinct forms of representing urban space. These more or less follow the path of the subject or that of the object, as the more subjective itinerary (i.e., an image of space that emerges from the individual subject’s perception or experience of places) necessarily elides much of what the abstract, apparently objective map (a “God’s-eye view” or “view from nowhere” that established as non-subjective overview) can reveal. Finding one’s way through urban spaces involves something more like an itinerary than a map, the latter involving some sort of supra-subjective perspective, and yet both forms are essential to the experience of metropolitan space. In situating oneself in a given place, and in moving from place to place, one traces out an itinerary that may be more or less useful, but one also must have some more abstract sense of the overall spatial array of which that itinerary is merely one part. Cognitive mapping, in this sense, combines the two at all times. I argue that every literary cartography—every work of creative writing, in fact—of the city must also put into play both modes to create a more dynamic mapping project.

Lagos has always been an exceptional site in the Nigerian, African and world imaginary. Both the colonial capital and present-day economic centre of Africa’s most populous nation, Lagos is itself a world. It is therefore no surprise that the city has become a key site through which the world literary imaginary has unfurled, with numerous depictions, projections and imaginative instantiations of the city functioning as a fulcrum around which the contours of world-formation (mondialisation) and contestation have emerged. This chapter explores this rich literary history, conceiving of Lagosian space as a limit case for the wider operations of world-formation in World Literature across the long twentieth century. The chapter is attuned to the articulations and registrations which obtain between the material evolution of the city and its literary image, as well as the larger economic, political and social fields which subtend a range of literary forms. As a mega-city amongst mega-cities, Lagos functions as a setting particularly apt to a wide and often-incongruous range of worldly projections and world formations which lend considerable nuance to the map of World Literature.

A complex tapestry of interwoven themes spanning many centuries, Istanbul is a kaleidoscopic patchwork, a city of polar contrasts, and we are not lost for ways to explore the city and its denizens of times past. Istanbul is a city of the mind, an imaginary space that spurred writers and poets to document it in not only Turkish literature but also literature from many other cultures. Ottoman-Turkish literature alone portrays the rich andheterogeneous imagery of Istanbul ina variety of genres, including poems, plays, chronicles, memoirs and novels, and this article explores that literary tradition. It draws upon selected works that range from the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1453 up until the early 19th century, and then beyond that time when a burgeoning print culture grew, when new literary forms arose such as novels, plays and short stories. Authors of the selected texts comprise writers and poets such as Latifi, Zaifi, Fikri Çelebi, Gelibolulu Ali, Veysi, Evliya Çelebi, Nedim, Badr al-Din al-Ghazzi, Muhammad Kibrit, Tevfik Fikret, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, İlhan Berk and Orhan Pamuk. Most of these authors’ works suggest that, unlike other great cities of the world, one’s perception of Istanbul is rooted somewhere within one’s soul.