In a review article for the West Australian in 1939, a literary critic known as ‘Norbar’ proclaimed that in the recent past, the ‘most outstanding of Australian novels ... have been novels of city life’. This was a welcome development, Norbar maintained, a sign that Australia had ‘ceased to be a mere colonial appendage to Europe ... and [was] rapidly becoming an expanding industrial nation of the south’. Much of this ‘outstanding’ literature was produced by women (Modjeska; Sheridan). In quick succession, Eleanor Dark, Dymphna Cusack, Kylie Tennant and M. Barnard Eldershaw published novels set in contemporary Sydney, capturing the city in a period of rapid development as it attempted to move from colonial chaos to modern rationality. In these novels, women’s position in urban space is unstably located at the nexus of participation and exclusion, reflecting the writers’ status as both insiders (as white settlers) and outsiders (as women) in the colonial-capitalist-patriarchal project of Australian urban modernity. This chapter shows how the architectonics of the novel and topography of the city interacted at a time in Australia when both forms were emerging into modernity.

This section introduces the structure and logic of The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel. It considers the role of the Australian novel in local, national and international contexts; its engagement as a cultural technology in the major historical events of Australia’s history; its transnational positioning; and changes over time in terms of writing, publishing, readership and genre structures. The history of publishing and of criticism of the Australian novel are described. The book’s structure from the colonial period until the present is outlined while readers are invited to read across essays for ongoing and changing thematic concerns.

This chapter explores “constellational form” in Gerald Murnane. It argues that the key continuity in Murnane’s work lies in his associative way of writing, and analyzes the motivations and philosophical convictions underlying this form. It traces these formal continuities across Murnanes work, from his early novel Tamarisk Row (1974) through to his post-hiatus fictions up to Border Districts (2017). It also considers Murnanes “idealism” and probes how this underpins his unique understanding of the ontology of characterological beings and the relationship between implied author and reader.

This chapter opens with a brief survey of suffrage literature and the scholarship it has generated before honing in on a particular example: Constance Maud’s No Surrender. This novel conforms to many characteristics of suffrage fiction, playing on romance conventions and integrating fictionalised episodes from the real-world campaign. But even as No Surrender is a campaigning novel, it is also a novel of a campaign that registers and reflects the tensions that characterised the movement. Social class was a deeply contentious issue for the campaign and is one this chapter considers with a focus on Maud’s presentation of Lancashire mill-worker, Jenny Clegg. Maud’s novel raises questions about representation, authenticity, and appropriation, questions that have troubled feminist theory and practice. This chapter suggests that a fuller familiarity with the internal debates of the campaign – particularly those between adult and woman suffragists – results in a more precise sense of how the novel works as propaganda. A corollary of such a contextual approach is that more self-reflexive and self-questioning currents in No Surrender that run parallel to its primary propagandising ones are made visible.

This chapter reconsiders midcentury Mexican literary history through the lens of the concept of bearing witness (“dar testimonio”). Taking speeches by Rosario Castellanos and Miguel Angel Asturias as its starting point, the chapter argues that the idea of bearing witness and expressing solidarity with marginalized groups shaped Latin American and specifically Mexican literature in the period 1930-80. Looking again at the Mexican canon in this period from this fresh perspective, an overlooked tradition of women authors emerges. These women write out of solidarity with and to bear witness to the experiences and sufferings of less privileged others. Women authors are often grouped together on the basis of their gender. Yet, this chapter identifies alternative connections between better-known Mexican women authors such as Elena Poniatowska, Nellie Campobello, and Rosario Castellanos and others who are less often the focus of critical attention, including Benita Galeana, Carlota O’Neill, Ascensión Hernández de León-Portilla, and Elvira Vargas. Focusing on the act of bearing witness brings to the fore the contributions of women authors and the connections between them, as well as encouraging us to consider alternative ways of writing literary history based on new categories and periodizations.

This chapter reconsiders midcentury Mexican literary history through the lens of the concept of bearing witness (“dar testimonio”). Taking speeches by Rosario Castellanos and Miguel Angel Asturias as its starting point, the chapter argues that the idea of bearing witness and expressing solidarity with marginalized groups shaped Latin American and specifically Mexican literature in the period 1930-80. Looking again at the Mexican canon in this period from this fresh perspective, an overlooked tradition of women authors emerges. These women write out of solidarity with and to bear witness to the experiences and sufferings of less privileged others. Women authors are often grouped together on the basis of their gender. Yet, this chapter identifies alternative connections between better-known Mexican women authors such as Elena Poniatowska, Nellie Campobello, and Rosario Castellanos and others who are less often the focus of critical attention, including Benita Galeana, Carlota O’Neill, Ascensión Hernández de León-Portilla, and Elvira Vargas. Focusing on the act of bearing witness brings to the fore the contributions of women authors and the connections between them, as well as encouraging us to consider alternative ways of writing literary history based on new categories and periodizations.

Building on the turn to religious and political networks in the field of early modern women’s writing, the Introduction draws on the theory of intersectionality and the historiography of Puritan culture to argue that uses of the female voice in early Stuart England cut across lines of gender to build coalitions and undermine the essentialism on which the field is based. Challenging critics who suggest that early modern male ventriloquism leads to repression of the female voice, the Introduction offers the counter-example of Thomas Scott, who uses Esther’s words to articulate his own radical politics. Situating the present study as a necessary intervention in a field that is increasingly marginalized even as its archive has ballooned and its dispersal celebrated, this book answers the call for a larger narrative that puts the female subject and her voice at the heart of the early Stuart political imaginary.

This chapter considers the contemporary novel in French within the context of the broadly defined field of women’s writing, a diverse, engaged and vibrant space where innovative literary forms are mobilised in ways that continue to stretch the possibilities and meanings of female experience. Exploring an array of texts by award-winning, bestselling and emerging novelists, the chapter discusses three key thematic areas. In the first part, it considers the intimacy long associated with women’s writing, showing how recent novels have tended to move beyond the tropes of sentimental romance, imagining instead a distinct, female-focused erotics, or otherwise engaging themes of love with wider, philosophical and political concerns. In the second part, the chapter looks at representations of the family, focusing on the turbulent, transformative times of adolescence, on perspectives on mothering, and on new patterns of kinship, that create new dialogues surrounding the cultural ideals and social pressures embroiled within the family in twenty-first-century France. In the final section, the chapter draws attention to the intersectional conversations in recent women’s writing in French between feminist concerns, the representation of queer and trans subjectivities, social inequalities, immigration and race relations.

With the expansion of the postal system from the mid seventeenth century, there was a growing interest in epistolary writing. Like real letter writers, authors of early epistolary novels focus on the material conditions of communication by letter. The most common plot devices have to do with what can go wrong in the postal system. Letter novels typically present themselves as a collection of real letters, a packet that has been lost and found, or entrusted to a friend who arranged for their publication. Epistolary fiction appealed to readers newly fascinated with how intimate thoughts could be expressed in writing, and what pleasure, as well as utility, could be drawn from reading the private thoughts of others. The letter novel was also congenial to some of the core aspirations of Enlightenment thought: a commitment to dialogical thinking, an openness to cultural difference, the notion of a ‘Republic of letters’ formed by conversational exchange between educated people who were often geographically separated. While epistolary fiction declined in popularity in the nineteenth century, letter novels have continued to resurface as experiments in narrative form, well suited to exploring contrasting subjectivities and the endless opportunities for failed and interrupted communication in the modern world.

This chapter scrutinizes a little-known cartographic commemoration, dated 1798, of what remains the last invasion of mainland Britain, in February of the previous year. It reveals this verbal-graphic, multi-genre text to be a sophisticated inscription of the contending meanings of the invasion, its aftermath, and the wider sociopolitical context at the close of the 1790s. The chapter takes the map in question – by an otherwise unknown local land surveyor, Thomas Propert – as a test case in (the limits of) historicized literary-cartographic reading. Beginning with a discussion of the ways in which map-texts – valuative objects, deeply implicated in ideology – have become fit subjects of enquiry for a theoretically nuanced geography since the ‘deconstruction of the map’ in the 1980s, the chapter conceptualizes the events and impact of the French invasion of the Strumble Head peninsula in Pembrokeshire, Wales. It then moves to a historicized ekphrastic analysis of the ways in which the map is equally committed to the values of scientific mensuration and those of distortion, caricature, and the grotesque. A text of multiple laminations and unresolved generic conflations, the map is recursive, the tense traffic between caricature and cartography deepened by the multiple ideological positions articulated by its graphic codes.

This chapter addresses the history, evolution, and status of Irish texts for young people as well as trajectories of Irish publishing of youth literature. The significance of Irish children’s literature and the importance of a national literature produced by Irish authors for young Irish readers have been increasingly recognised and confirmed over the last four decades, for example by the establishment of the Children’s Literature Association of Ireland in the 1980s and the creation of Laureate na nÓg in 2010. Since the turn of the millennium, the emergence and commercial success of Irish young adult (YA) fiction and its exploration of adolescent turbulence have extended the imaginative territories addressed by Irish youth literature. The momentum of YA fiction has generated valuable opportunities for considering how youth is positioned within Irish society. This chapter considers what these contemporary works tell us about childhood and young adulthood from an Irish perspective.

Discussions about the state of Irish fiction during and after the Celtic Tiger often centred on the issue of cliché, as detractors criticised writers for rehearsing timeworn tropes instead of addressing the vertiginous upheavals of the boom and bust. This chapter considers the gendered and generic underpinnings of that claim. More than an aesthetic pitfall, cliché serves as a constitutive feature of post-Celtic Tiger women’s fiction. In Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz (2011) and Tana French’s Broken Harbor (2012), narrators draw upon conventions derived from post-war genre fiction in order to reinforce fraying narratives of bourgeois happiness and success. While cliché provides temporary narrative and affective ballast amid recession, it also enmeshes women novelists within ongoing debates about the value of genre in an evolving literary marketplace.