Locating Australian Literary Memory

(Hardback)

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An exploration of sites explicitly connected with Australian authors through material forms of communication.

Locating Australian Literary Memory explores the cultural meanings suffusing local literary commemorations. It is orientated around eleven authors Adam Lindsay Gordon, Joseph Furphy, Henry Handel Richardson, Henry Lawson, A. B. 'Banjo' Paterson, Nan Chauncy, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Eleanor Dark, P. L. Travers, Kylie Tennant and David Unaipon who have all been celebrated through a range of forms including statues, huts, trees, writers' houses and assorted objects.

Brigid Magner illuminates the social memory residing in these monuments and artefacts, which were largely created as bulwarks against forgetting. Acknowledging the value of literary memorials and the voluntary labour that enables them, she traverses the many contradictions, ironies and eccentricities of authorial commemoration in Australia, arguing for an expanded repertoire of practices to recognise those who have been hitherto excluded.

Reviews

Brigid Magner explores this strange and idiosyncratic feature of Australian cultural expression, in an informative study of literary heritage, offering a comprehensive account of the ways in which Australians remember ten now absent authors, beginning with Adam Lindsay Gordon and moving through a range of writers, to finish with a focussed consideration of monuments to David Unaipon, one at Raukkan in South Australia and another still in the making, to be installed at Tailem Bend. Anne Pender, University of Adelaide,https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/14655/12940, accessed 19 August 2020

Brigid Magners fascinating study sets out the ways in which a nation can build an identity by actively constructing a literary memory, and then using those memories to paper over the deep history of our First Nations and their stories. In doing so she helps us understand both how fragile Australian culture is and also the ways in which literature is a powerful force.Sophie Cunningham

"Magner's book is an innovative addition to Australian literary studies, and will hopefully inspire further efforts to memorialise more recent Australian authors. Webby, Elizabeth. Review of Locating Australian Literary Memory, by Brigid Magner. Australian Literary Studies, vol. 35, no. 2, 2020, doi: 10.20314/als.d589b6304"

Author Bio

Brigid Magner is senior lecturer in literary studies and founding member of the non/fiction lab research group at RMIT University, Australia. She has contributed to a range of publications on topics relating to Australian and New Zealand literary culture with a particular focus on publishing, authorship, cultural heritage and tourism.