University of Wollongong Research Online Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive) Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities 2010 Seen through other eyes: Reconstructing Australian literature in India Paul Sharrad University of Wollongong,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Sharrad, Paul, Seen through other eyes: Reconstructing Australian literature in India 2010, 1-15. https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/1075 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library:
[email protected] Seen Through Other Eyes: Reconstructing Australian Literature in India PAUL SHARRAD University of Wollongong Australian Literature (as a body of intellectual inquiry and curriculum) had its beginnings in nationalist self-assertion against the cultural domination of this country by British texts and colonialist attitudes. Since then, we have complicated the idea of national culture and literary canons by recognising the existence of ‘migrant’ and then ‘multicultural’ and ‘Aboriginal’ writing, along with critiques and remodelling of the literary corpus from popular culture, gender and sexualities frameworks. One marker of this shift was the Bicentenary revision of Geoffrey Dutton’s The Literature of Australia (1964) as The Penguin New Literary History of Australia (1988) edited by Laurie Hergenhan. ‘Aust. Lit.’ was consolidated and institutionalised in a historical moment of conjunction between publishing markets, politics and educational reforms, and carried with it certain hidden assumptions of hegemonic structures at that time (as illustrated in Leigh Dale’s The English Men, 1997).