Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture

‘A Cultural History of the Bushranger Legend in Theatres and Cinemas, 1828–2017’ is a cultural history of the bushranger legend on stage and screen from colonial to contemporary Australia. It provides a detailed analysis of the mechanisms through which bushrangers became an indelible part of the Australian cultural consciousness.

This unique study tracks the way the Aboriginal art phenomenon has mediated Indigenous/non-indigenous relations in Australia. It illuminates the utopian and dystopian currents of thought that have arisen in relation to the art, and the contradictory social and political aspirations to which it has been anchored in public culture.

Australia has a fascinating history of visions. As the antipode to Europe, Australia provided a radically different and uniquely fertile ground for envisioning places, spaces and societies. ‘The Antipodal Utopia’ evaluates this complex intellectual history by mapping out how Western visions of Australia evolved from antiquity to the modern period.

Exploring the imaginative construction of the post-colonial South by the communist East, this collaborative study of the reception of Australian literature in the German Democratic Republic has resonance for all newly global reckonings of the cultural Cold War.

‘Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White’ details the rejection of two Patrick White plays – ‘The Ham Funeral’ and ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ – by the Adelaide Festival of Arts in Australia in the early 1960s.

This book considers the political and feminist significance of non-canonical women poets, particularly those who were writing in newspapers and periodicals, in colonial Australia.

Using an innovative methodological approach, Conditions of Accessexamines how novels circulate globally through the trade in publishing rights, introduces a model by which to trade these rights and assess threats, and using Australia as a case study, provides a new account of how one nation’s literature arrives onthe international stage.

Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955)' brings together a history of race relations, pastoral boom and film-making. It is a personal account of coming to terms with a history of dispossession and colonial power relations in a place that has offered the author a strong sense of belonging and settler-colonial family heritage.

'Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema' explores gender, race and place in selected Australian films in various phases of Australian cinema: from Charles Chauvel’s 'Jedda' (1955), to the ‘period’ films of the New Wave in the 1970s, to the Indigenous filmmakers since the 1990s, and the contemporary era of transnational productions in Australia.

This book explores the history of Horwitz Publications, one of Australia’s largest post-war pulp publishers. Although best known for its cheaply produced, sometimes luridly packaged softcover books, Horwitz Publications played a far larger role in mainstream Australian publishing than has been recognised, particularly in the expansion of the paperback that took place from the late 1950s onwards. 

Australia is the planet’s sole island continent. This book argues that the uniqueness of this geography has shaped Australian history and culture, including its literature. Further, it shows how shifting understandings of the island continent shed new light on the relationship between islands and continents in the mapping of modernity.

‘Locating Australian Literary Memory’ explores sites which are explicitly connected with eleven Australian authors through material forms of commemoration such as houses, graves, statues and assorted artefacts. While acknowledging the value of literary memorials and the voluntary labour that enables their construction and preservation, it argues for an expanded repertoire of practices to recognise authors who have been overlooked.