This essay considers the expressive and figurative dynamics of Asians in science fiction in the early 20th century. Racial sentiment and policy in the era saw and defined Asians as “ineligible aliens” to exclude from immigration and citizenship. Asian figures expressed these dynamics in science fiction, adapting Orientalist tropes and Yellow Peril themes to the imperatives of the emergent genre. The invisible menace of villainous masterminds like Fu Manchu from crime and detective fiction were refigured as visible science fiction foes whose defeat redeemed the power and potential of science from its degenerate and dehumanizing application. Asian racial tropes aligned particularly with science fiction’s concern about extra-terrestrial life forms. While the term “alien” was not used in the period for such creatures, its later prominence expressed valences and associations, particularly with “invasion,” that Asians originally represented in the genre.
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Article
Philip Hobsbaum
Wystan Hugh Auden was born on 21 February 1907 in the cathedral city of York. He was the youngest of three sons of a physician, George Auden, and his wife, Constance, née Bicknell. His unusual name was a result of his father's archaeological interests, which included the editorship of the Historical and Scientific Survey of York and District (1906). St. Wystan was a Mercian prince whose martyrdom led to the foundation of the church of that name in Derbyshire. In 1908 his father left a lucrative practice to serve as the first-ever school medical officer in Birmingham. The family lived outside that industrial city in the then village of Solihull, which today is a Birmingham suburb. When Auden was eight years old, he went as a boarder to a preparatory school called St. Edmund's in Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, who was to become a close friend and also, in due course, a distinguished writer. In 1920 Auden went to the public school, Gresham's, where his parents had to pay high fees. It had developed under the headmastership of G. W. S. Howson from being a local school to a leading establishment with an interest in science. Although brought up by his mother to be a High Anglican, Auden began to lose his religious beliefs. This may have been coincidental with his recognition that he had homosexual proclivities. Robert Medley, a schoolfellow and later a noted theatrical designer, interested him in writing poetry.
Article
Paul Giles
Within the literary connections between Australia and the United States, the more traditional notion of “influence” gained a different kind of intellectual traction after the “transnational turn.” While the question of American influence on Australian literature is a relatively familiar topic, the corresponding question of Australian influence on American literature has been much less widely discussed. This bi-continental interaction can be traced through a variety of canonical writers, including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Charles Brockden Brown, through to Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry Adams, and Mark Twain. These transnational formations developed in the changed cultural conditions of the 20th and 21st centuries, with reference to poets such as Lola Ridge, Karl Shapiro, Louis Simpson, and Yusef Komunyakaa, along with novelists such as Christina Stead, Peter Carey, and J. M. Coetzee.
To adduce alternative genealogies for both American and Australian literature, Australian literature might be seen to function as American literature’s shadow self, the kind of cultural formation it might have become if the American Revolution had never taken place. Similarly, to track Australian literature’s American affiliations is to suggest ways in which transnational connections have always been integral to its constitution. By re-reading both Australian and American literature as immersed within a variety of historical and geographical matrices, from British colonial politics to transpacific space, it becomes easier to understand how both national literatures emerged in dialogue with a variety of wider influences.
Article
Andrew Milner
Climate is an important part of fictional scene setting, whether it be geographical—is the scene in the desert or in the tropics?—or seasonal—is it winter or is it summer? And this is perhaps especially true of Australian literature, where the majority of writers are still descendants of Anglo-Celtic settlers, living in more or less uneasy relationship with a distinctly non-Anglo-Celtic natural environment. Climate has thus been a characteristically Australian literary preoccupation: the titles of Vance Palmer’s Cyclone (1947), for example, or Patrick White’s Eye of the Storm (1973) speak for themselves. But “cli-fi” in the sense of the term coined by Dan Bloom in 2007 refers, not to climate per se, nor even to climate change per se, but much more specifically to fictions concerned with the effects of anthropogenic climate change, that is, to the literature of global warming. This is a much more recent preoccupation, which dates only from the late 1970s when the US National Research Council and the World Meteorological Organization first published predictions that then current levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions would result in significant increases in average global temperatures. The short history of Australian “cli-fi” can be traced from the first publication of George Turner’s The Sea and Summer in 1987.
Article
Nicholas Birns
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.
Article
Peter Kirkpatrick
When situating 20th-century Australian poetry within world literary space, critical histories often map it against the Anglo-American tradition and find it wanting. In particular, and despite the strong reputations that poets such as Judith Wright and A. D. Hope continue to enjoy, there is a tendency to regard Australian poetry from the Second World War until the mid-1960s as variously complacent, insular, or retrograde: representative of what John Tranter in his introduction to The New Australian Poetry in 1979 called “a moribund poetic culture.” Certainly, there was a turning away from avant-garde experimentalism in the immediate postwar period (as there was in Britain and the United States), but in Australia, this has been linked to a discrediting of modernism as a result of the Ern Malley hoax. In the Malley “affair,” as Michael Heyward dubbed it, two conservative poets hoodwinked the editor of the avant-garde journal Angry Penguins with a suite of poems written by a wholly invented working-class surrealist. As a result, according to Wright (among others), Australian poets became less adventurous in favor of more traditional forms. On top of this, recent revisionist accounts of the hoax have virtually canonized “Malley” himself as a bona fide modernist and so exacerbated a sense of lost opportunity after the mid-1940s. Yet modernizing impulses may take many forms, and it is an overstatement to suggest that innovation had ceased, or that the poetry of this period was somehow disengaged from the rest of the world or from international literary-political debates. A reassessment shows that Australian poets were keenly engaged with the questions of their time but also dealt with the persistent, unresolved problem of how to become “unprovincial,” overcoming a cultural cringe that now gravitated away from Britain and toward America. In fact, for Australian literature prior to the emergence of Patrick White, poetry, rather than beating a retreat, actually led the way forward. It is time, then, to reconsider the poetry of the postwar era within its own cultural ecologies, acknowledging that Australian poetic modernism, while it remains contested, may also be distinctive.
Article
Anna Johnston
Travel writing has been an important form through which Australians learned about their own culture and their place in the world. Indigenous cultures of place and travel, geographic distance from the imperial metropole, and a long history of immigration have each made travel a particularly influential cultural practice. Nonfictional prose narratives, based on actual journeys, have enabled travelers in Australia and from Australia abroad to explore what was distinctive and what was shared with other cultures. These are accessible texts that were widely read, and that sought to educate and entertain their audience. The period from the inauguration of the Australian nation in 1901 to 1960, when distance shrank because of technological innovation and new forms of identity gained ascendance, shows the complex ways in which Australians defined their country and its global contribution. Writing about travel to Britain and other European locations helped authors to refine the Anglophone inheritance and a sense that Britain was Home. Northern-hemisphere travels also made some writers intensely feel their national identity. Participation in global conflicts during this period shifted Australian allegiances, both personal and governmental. At the same time, a new tourist industry encouraged Australians to travel at home, in order to learn more about remote areas and the Asia-Pacific region. Travel writing both abroad and at home reveals how particular forms of emotional allegiance and national identity were forged, reinforced, and maintained. This has been a particularly influential genre for a nation based on colonial migration and indigenous displacement, in which travel and mobility have been crucial.
Article
Ann Vickery
“Women’s poetry” as a marketing and pedagogic category emerged in the 1970s alongside second-wave feminism. To map the emergence of women’s poetry in and of Australia requires exploring the role of gender in poetic authorship and how the field of Australian poetry has changed in light of feminist movements and theories. Women have used poetry to cross between public and private spheres, to assert an individual and often collective voice, and to critique gender’s intersection with other constitutive identities such as nation and race. While poetry has provided a highly significant means of linguistic transformation and social activism, it has sometimes been viewed as too limiting for feminist writers. Similarly, while the category of “women’s poetry” was strategically empowering in particular periods, it has also been viewed as generating exclusions and marginalization. Feminism has developed both historically and culturally, with the valency of various feminisms in Australia being tested through processes of institutionalization and social change at both a local and global level.
Article
Susan Sheridan
Women seem barely visible in the lively Australian literary scene of the 1950s and 1960s. Popular wisdom has it that after the war women were sent home and imprisoned in domesticity, but this was not entirely true. Significant numbers earned a living, and gained popular success, writing historical fiction, children’s stories, feature journalism, and radio and television scripts, but the growing separation of literary from popular writing meant that their work lacked serious critical attention, and still does. Others did not achieve publication for years, while those who did were rarely recognized as significant artists. As a writing generation, these women, in particular the novelists, were eclipsed from view, both at the time and in subsequent histories. One reason for this is that they tended to be detached from prevailing debates about national identity and from traditional Left-Right oppositions. Their sense of the social responsibility of writers led them to explore topics and ideas that were outside the postwar political mainstream, such as conservation, peace, civil liberties, and Indigenous rights. Four case studies offer some illustration of the range of literary activities undertaken by these women writers, and allow a consideration of the ways in which they engaged with their social and cultural milieux: Kylie Tennant (1912–1988), Nancy Cato (1917–2000), Judith Wright (1915–2000), and Kath Walker/Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1993).
Article
In the interwar and Second World War periods, women writers took the lead in the Australian literary scene in an unprecedented way, producing a number of significant novels, plays, and works of nonfiction that interrogated issues of colonialism, nationalism, gender relations, and Australia’s place in the world. Many of these works had period settings or were engaged in some way with Australia’s settler colonial past. While the historical writings of Australian women writers vary greatly in terms of literary style, genre, cultural value, political affiliation, and the degree to which they either contest or reify ideas of national progress, these works represent a substantial contribution to the reimagining of the nation’s past in the period from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s. Furthermore, many of the fictional works of these women writers traveled beyond national borders due to the new mobilities of publication and distribution available to Australian writers at the time. Two major case studies reveal the ways in which Australian women writers contributed to the writing of Australian history in both national and international contexts in the interwar and Second World War years: M. Barnard Eldershaw, the pseudonym for the literary collaboration between Marjorie Barnard (1897–1987) and Flora Eldershaw (1897–1956), and Eleanor Dark (1901–1985).
Article
John Frow
Questions of authorship bring into play many of the central questions of literary theory: questions as to what constitutes the unity and coherence of texts, the interpretive relevance of authorial intention, the relation of oral to literate cultures, the regulation of writing by church and state, the legal underpinnings of literary property, the significance of forgery and plagiarism, and so on. At the heart of many of these questions is a distinction between two different orders of phenomena. Writers are not necessarily authors: authorship requires recognition and attribution, and these depend on institutional processes of publication, textual stabilization, criticism, education, and appropriate legal, regulatory, and economic conditions. Those processes and conditions vary from culture to culture, as do the particular historical forms that authorship takes. In the contemporary world authorship tends to be cast as though it were directly expressive of a personality, an inner core of selfhood, that underwrites the coherence of the texts attributed to it; the commercialization of that form gives rise to a cult of the author in both academic and popular culture.
Article
Leah Henrickson
Natural language generation (NLG) refers to the process in which computers produce output in readable human languages (e.g., English, French). Despite sounding as though they are contained within the realm of science fiction, computer-generated texts actually abound; business performance reports are generated by NLG systems, as are tweets and even works of longform prose. Yet many are altogether unaware of the increasing prevalence of computer-generated texts. Moreover, there has been limited scholarly consideration of the social and literary implications of NLG from a humanities perspective, despite NLG systems being in development for more than half a century. This article serves as one such consideration.
Human-written and computer-generated texts represent markedly different approaches to text production that necessitate distinct approaches to textual interpretation. Characterized by production processes and labor economies that at times seem inconsistent with those of print culture, computer-generated texts bring conventional understandings of the author-reader relationship into question. But who—or what—is the author of the computer-generated text?
This article begins with an introduction to NLG as it has been applied to the production of public-facing textual output. NLG’s unique potential for textual personalization is observed. The article then moves toward a consideration of authorship as the concept may be applied to computer-generated texts, citing historical and current legal discussions, as well as various interdisciplinary analyses of authorial attribution. This article suggests a semantic shift from considering NLG systems as tools to considering them as social agents in themselves: not to obsolesce human writers, but to recognize the particular contributions of NLG systems to the current socio-literary landscape. As this article shows, texts are regarded as fundamentally human artifacts. A computer-generated text is no less a human artifact than a human-written text, but its unconventional manifestation of humanity prompts calculated contemplation of what authorship means in an increasingly digital age.
Article
Susan Balée
We are living in an autobiographical era, as readers all over America can readily attest. Jay Parini, in his introduction to the Norton Book of American Autobiography (1999), deduces that “the immense interest in this form of writing owes something to a moment when our culture as a whole has turned introspective, interested in (some might say obsessed by) self-definition” (p. 19). According to Paul Gray, writing in an April 1997 issue of Time, memoirs have now replaced novels as the major American publishing product, with hundreds published every year, many by first-time writers. These recent memoirs deal with topics once reserved for fiction—child abuse, alcoholism, mental illness, incest—and some critics wish that fiction is where such “taboo” subjects would stay. Those who deplore the upsurge in self-writing note its emphasis on narcissism and self-pity: one such critic even titled his review of the new memoirs “Read about Why I Love Me and How Much I've Suffered.”
Article
Lynn Orilla Scott
Slave narratives are autobiographical accounts of the physical and spiritual journey from slavery to freedom. In researching her groundbreaking 1946 dissertation, Marion Wilson Starling located 6,006 slave narratives written between 1703 and 1944. This number includes brief testimonies found in judicial records, broadsides, journals, and newsletters as well as separately published books. It also includes approximately 2,500 oral histories of former slaves gathered by the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s. The number of separately published slave narratives, however, is much smaller. Although exact numbers are not available, nearly one hundred slave narratives were published as books or pamphlets between 1760 and 1865, and approximately another one hundred following the Civil War. The slave narrative reached the height of its influence and formal development during the antebellum period, from 1836 to 1861. During this time it became a distinct genre of American literature, and achieved immense popularity and influence among a primarily white, northern readership. A few, in particular The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself (1845), displayed a high level of rhetorical sophistication. With the end of slavery, however, interest in the narratives declined sharply. Furthermore, one consequence of the social and political repression of the black population following Reconstruction was the “loss” of the slave narratives for sixty years. During the last few decades of the twentieth century, scholars recovered, republished, and analyzed slave narratives. Both historians and literary critics came to value their importance to the historiography of American slavery and to the development of African-American autobiography and fiction.
Article
Lynn Domina
In the decades immediately following the Civil War, and even to some extent throughout the years of actual battle, hundreds of Americans published memoirs describing their experiences during this cataclysmic event. Such an outpouring of autobiographical material following the war is not surprising, since otherwise ordinary individuals are often prompted to write their life stories after extraordinary experiences. Because the American Civil War was arguably the most extraordinary event in this nation's history, as attested to by the debate that raged (occasionally even to this day) over its proper title—the Civil War, the War between the States, the War for Southern Independence, the War of Northern Aggression—the personal experiences of Americans who lived through it retain substantial contemporary interest. Many of these autobiographers were men, soldiers who had fought with Grant or Lee or Sherman and who often identified themselves with these heroes in their titles. Yet women also wrote of the war, in diaries and memoirs, describing their experiences as the mothers and sisters who stayed home or became refugees, as nurses in military hospitals, as spies, even as soldiers. This essay discusses several diaries composed during the war itself as well as memoirs published soon after the war's end. While such memoirs continued to be published for decades, the writers' goals shifted—and their memories became less reliable—as Reconstruction ended. (By 1900, for example, very few writers claimed to have supported slavery.) These writers consistently return to similar questions: What exactly is an appropriate role for a patriotic woman during a war? What is the enemy like, and how does one respond when he quite literally steps onto one's front porch? What will or should happen to the thousands of slaves whose very existence is so peculiarly entangled with the war itself?
Article
Hywel Dix
Since the term autofiction was coined by Serge Doubrovsky in the 1970s, a key scholarly debate has been whether autofiction is a genre in its own right, a subvariant of autobiography, or whether it is better approached along lines other than generic. Although researchers have approached this question in different ways, many agree that autofiction is a form of writing that responds to the specific cultural conditions of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including the relationship between celebrity and everyday life, a variety of scandals and controversies, and forms of public confession.
Because writers of autofiction often frame their work either as a form of confessional writing or as writing produced in the aftermath of a traumatic experience, they have typically taken a serial approach to life writing. In some cases, this entails splitting aspects of their lives across separate published works, while others return several times to a single experience in various written texts as part of the process of repetition and working through that marks the aftermath of trauma. Among writers from postcolonial societies, the process of representing trauma is often imbued with a testimonial function, bearing witness to the conflicts and injustices of the colonial era. Autofictional techniques can be used to allow writers to appear as minor characters in narratives that are not ostensibly about them, to activate this testimonial function. In another variation, writers narrate historical incidents that occurred before they were born but which nevertheless concern their community, ancestry, or family. Since these cannot be entirely separated from the life story of the author, to tell the story of those ancestors is also, in a meaningful sense, to narrate an aspect of one’s own history: autofiction at one remove.
Renée Larrier has used the dance martial art danmyé as a suggestive metaphor for how Caribbean writers merge individual with social and historical interests in bearing witness to the legacies of the colonial period and slavery. Among various innovations, this use of dance raises the possibility of autofiction existing in media other than print—including graphic novels, fine art, documentary film, and television. By this point, a new generation of media-savvy autofiction writers has emerged capable of using interactive media to promote and extend their published work. Just as the growth of reality genres represented television reversing its own belatedness with regard to literature, so transmedia emanations of autofiction re-reverse this trend, pointing to a complex interaction between what happens in literature and what happens in other media.
Article
Clint J. Terrell
Jimmy Santiago Baca is a poet, memoirist, novelist, essayist, filmmaker, and activist who began his literary career in Florence State Prison, Arizona, where he was incarcerated from 1974 to 1979. Baca spent most of his adolescent years between orphanages, stints of homelessness, and time in juvenile detention facilities. He credits learning to read and write in prison as the galvanization of his journey from illiteracy to worldly poet, and his endorsement of literacy as an avenue for individual and community empowerment echoes the black nationalist political thought of Malcolm X. In addition to an overarching theme of literacy, he also maintains a critical awareness to the politics of land ownership. He is of Chicano and Apache descent and often draws on his Indigenous heritage, as well as his prison experience, to critique the colonial settler ideology that associates private property with personal liberty. He is among the gallery of canonized Chicano pinto (prisoner) poets like Ricardo Sánchez and Raúl Salinas who discovered their talents while incarcerated. His poetry and prose are in harmony with prisoner discourse that indicts the state for economic injustices and contextualizes crimes as economic necessity instead of demonizing the individual. Similar to Sánchez and Salinas, Baca’s poetic voice can be both figural and visceral in the same breath. But distinct from these pinto poets, Baca’s poetic introduces a proliferation of personas that go back and forth between a poet who wants to love and make peace and a pugnacious identity that was nurtured by the violence of life in various state institutions, particularly prison. He has published eighteen books that include poetry, memoir, fiction, creative non-fiction, essay collections, and chapbooks. He is an active writer and frequently has additional publications in various stages of production, showing us that the negotiation of his traumatic past is never fully complete. Indeed, he continues to push his boundaries as a writer and challenges any preconceived notions about the literary limits of a prison cultivated intellectual.
Article
Greg Miller
As a teenager James Baldwin abandoned the pulpit after a year and a half, but it would be fair to say that he always remained a preacher. For Baldwin, the life of an artist was a higher vocation, and he plunged into that life with inexhaustible, at times desperate, fervor. While he insisted that the writer's primary responsibility is to his or her craft, he was equally adamant that the writer has an obligation to serve as witness for society; in doing so, the writer plays an essential role in the construction of a better future. Baldwin certainly demanded of himself this double purpose, and when the two are in accord—often in his essays, occasionally in his fiction—it is easy to see his work as among the most important in twentieth-century American literature. For many, though, Baldwin's early promise as a novelist was never fully realized; according to this not entirely unsound perspective, the tumult of the 1960s took a heavy toll on the writer and rendered his fiction didactic and disheveled. His reputation sagged, not least among black radicals who considered Baldwin to have been co-opted by the (white) literary establishment. Years after his death, opinion is still divided over the merits of Baldwin's fiction and even his later essays. What Baldwin wrote in his essay, Alas, Poor Richard (1961), published after the death of Richard Wright, could be said of himself: “The fact that [Wright] worked during a bewildering and demoralizing era in Western history makes a proper assessment of his work more difficult.”
Article
Lani Wolf
Russell Banks's short stories and novels portray working-class people trapped in mundane lives filled with violence and trauma. His themes include the cycle of violence from father to son and the exploration of the difference between the psyches of women and men and between those of people of varying races and economic classes. In Banks's world, these dichotomies lead to conflict, the outcome of which is most often tragic, and to a crushing sense of personal guilt. Redemption, however, is always hard-bought. In addition, Banks's work offers one of the most severe indictments of the American dream ideology in contemporary literature. His characters reach after what they think will make them happy, striving for self-transformation and “successful” lives. All but a few, however, find themselves thwarted.
Article
Norma E. Cantú
During the first decade of the 21st century, a political movement based in Arizona sought, through legislation, to ban the use of certain books and the teaching of certain authors and concepts in high school classrooms in the Tucson Unified School District. HB 2281 was signed into law in May 2010 on the heels of one of the strictest anti-immigrant legislative acts, SB 1070. These two bills would become intertwined in the imagination of the country and would elicit protests and generate actions by activists, writers, and teachers as they wound through the legal battles that ensued. This article explores the consequences of the law and the impact both locally and nationally of such actions by focusing on two key events: The Poets Against SB 1070 and the Librotraficante project led by Houston activist Tony Díaz. Moreover, it contextualizes such a historic event within the larger history of educational disenfranchisement of Latinx in the United States.
