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date: 13 February 2025

Australian Fiction, the 1980s, and the US Trade Paperbacklocked

Australian Fiction, the 1980s, and the US Trade Paperbacklocked

  • Nicholas BirnsNicholas BirnsSchool of Professional Studies, New York University

Summary

The emergence of the trade paperback in the 1980s crucially transformed the way in which Australian literature was received in North America. The publication history of Patrick White on the one hand and Glenda Adams and Peter Carey on the other shows how younger writers actually made more of a cultural impact, despite White’s Nobel Prize, because the form in which they met the reading public was one freed from the modernist binary between high and low culture. The 1980s saw the emergence of a more globalized and more culturally pluralistic world—though also one much more pervaded by multinational capital—in which Australian writers flourished.

Subjects

  • North American Literatures
  • Oceanic Literatures
  • Fiction
  • 20th and 21st Century (1900-present)

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