The role of public culture in the construction of contemporary Australian literature

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Literature is not simply a body of texts; it is a cultural technology, affected by changing patterns of production and consumption. Witness the 'cult of celebrity', the phenomenal recent growth of literary festivals, literary internet sites, reading groups, changing patterns of literary marketing, education, employment and leisure. Academic scholarship, largely text-based, fails to engage with these public and popular phenomena. Our project develops methods for describing and evaluating how these practices construct literary value and cultural identity, in ways that will bring academic literary analysis into a more informed, more creative engagement with public and popular culture in Australia.