Brought to book: Textual-editorial studies and the methodology of book history with a scholarly edition of Charles Harpur's complete poetry. Australia will possess reliable access for the first time to accurate versions of all of the verse of our most important colonial poet, Charles Harpur. Study of his manuscripts and publishing history will reveal the poet's place in society as a cross-section of Imperial-colonial relations. A Harpur website with collaborative interpretation will serve as a m ....Brought to book: Textual-editorial studies and the methodology of book history with a scholarly edition of Charles Harpur's complete poetry. Australia will possess reliable access for the first time to accurate versions of all of the verse of our most important colonial poet, Charles Harpur. Study of his manuscripts and publishing history will reveal the poet's place in society as a cross-section of Imperial-colonial relations. A Harpur website with collaborative interpretation will serve as a model for future projects. There will be benefits for students and the wider public through free electronic access to facsimiles and transcriptions of Harpur's manuscripts. Print-on-demand technology will ultimately allow coursebooks for student syllabuses to draw on the material.Read moreRead less
Marcus Clarke's Bohemia: Literature, Popular Culture and Urban Experience in Colonial Melbourne. This study will contextualise Marcus Clarke's career in terms of the material culture of nineteenth-century Melbourne, producing the first complete and theoretically informed monograph on Australia's most important colonial prose writer. Clarke's self-conscious bohemianism highlighted the increasingly commercialised nature of nineteenth-century writing, the centrality of mass entertainment to urban l ....Marcus Clarke's Bohemia: Literature, Popular Culture and Urban Experience in Colonial Melbourne. This study will contextualise Marcus Clarke's career in terms of the material culture of nineteenth-century Melbourne, producing the first complete and theoretically informed monograph on Australia's most important colonial prose writer. Clarke's self-conscious bohemianism highlighted the increasingly commercialised nature of nineteenth-century writing, the centrality of mass entertainment to urban life, the circulation of cultural capital between Europe and Australia, and the emergence of Australian literary nationalism in a larger imperial context. His career is thus uniquely positioned to elucidate the hitherto under-explored but pivotal relationship between literature and commodified popular culture in the specific context of an Australian settler-colony. Read moreRead less