‘Nation’ and literary history

Abstract

Modern histories of a nation's literature require a comprehensive, scholarly approach. A serious literary history of Australia should focus primarily on literary form and content – the stories and myths of Australians in a variety of literary genres. Relevant historical contexts will extend from local and regional concerns to Australians' links with Europe, North America and, increasingly, Asia. Colonial and post-colonial contexts provide important avenues of investigation and research, employing the scholarly disciplines of bibliography, biography and textual editing.

Keywords:

• nation
• literary history
• Australia
• decolonisation
• Asian connections

Notes

 1. Cherry Ripe, Goodbye Culinary Cringe, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1993.

 2. Cherry Ripe, ‘Advance Australia fare, folks’, The Australian, Saturday, 27 August 1994, p 15.

 3. ibid.

 4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London, 1983; revised 1991.

 5. See Simon During, in Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration, Routledge, London, 1990, p 138–153.

 6. Wang Gungwu, ‘Australia's Identity in Asia’, in Don Grant and Graham Seal (eds), Australia in the World: Perceptions and Possibilities, Black Swan Press, Perth, 1994, p 240.

 7. David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible?, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1992, p 180.

 8. Sacvan Bercovitch (gen. ed.), Cambridge History of American Literature, vols 1–2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1994.

 9. Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), Deconstruction & American History, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1986.

10. Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon, New York, 1978.

11. Dai Yin, ‘The Representation of Chinese People in Australian Literature’, PhD thesis, Murdoch University, 1994.

12. Xiamei Chen, ‘Occidentalism as Counter-discourse: “He Shang” in post-Mao China’, Critical Inquiry, vol 18, Summer 1992, pp 686–712.

13. ibid., p 688.

14. ibid.

15. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature, Routledge, London, 1989.

16. ibid., p 167.

17. ibid.

18. See Albert Gerard, Contexts of African Literature, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1990.

19. See Mary I Bresnahan, Finding Our Feet: Understanding Crosscultural Discourse, University Press of America, Maryland, 1991.

20. Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Post-colonial Mind, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1990, p 219.

21. Vicente L Rafael, ‘Nationalism Imagery and the Filipino Intelligentsia in the Nineteenth Century’, Critical Inquiry 16, Spring 1990, pp 591–600.

22. E San Juan, Jr, ‘Philippine Writing in English: Postcolonial Syncretism Versus a Textual Practice of National Liberation’, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol 22, no 4, October 1991, pp 69–90.

23. ibid., p 72.

24. ibid., p 73.

25. ibid.

26. ibid., p 75.

27. ibid., p 85.

28. ibid., p 86.

29. ibid.

30. ibid.

31. ibid.

32. See William H Epstein, ‘Counter-Intelligence: Cold War Criticism and Eighteenth-Century Studies’, ELH, 2, 1990, pp 63–99. ‘Although only some of the Cold War critics were actually trained in counter-intelligence, counter-espionage, and counter-subversion surveillance techniques, all of them participated in critical discourse as if they had been …’ (87).

33. Robert Lecker, ‘“A Quest for the Peaceable Kingdom”: The Narrative in Northrop Frye's Conclusion to the Literary History of Canada’, PMLA, vol 108, no 2, March 1993, pp 283–91.

34. ibid., p 291.

35. ibid.

36. Lloyd Fernando, ‘The Social Imagination and the Function of Criticism in Asia’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, X, 3, 1976, p 57.

37. Anne Paolucci, ‘Multi-Comparative Literary Perspectives’, Review of National Literatures, vol 15, Griffen House, New York, 1989, pp 1–29.

38. ibid., p 1.

39. ibid., p 29.

40. ibid.

41. Diana Brydon and Helen Tiffin, Decolonising Fictions, Dangaroo Press, Sydney, 1993.

42. See V K Daniels, B H Bennett and H McQueen, Windows onto Worlds: Studying Australia at Tertiary Level, Report of the Committee to Review Australian Studies at Tertiary Level, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1987.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bruce Bennett

An earlier version of this article was published in Interrogating Post-colonialism: Theory Text and Context, Harish L Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee (eds), Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 1996, and Homing In: Essays on Australian Literature and Selfhood, Bruce Bennett (ed.), API Network, Perth, 2006.