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

文学不仅仅是文本的主体；它是一种文化技术，受到不断变化的生产和消费模式的影响。见证了对名人的狂热崇拜，文学节、文学互联网网站、阅读团体的惊人增长，文学营销、教育、就业和休闲模式的变化。学术研究在很大程度上是以文本为基础的，无法与这些公共和流行的现象接触。我们的项目开发了描述和评估这些实践如何构建文学价值和文化认同的方法，这些方法将使学术文学分析更知情、更具创造性地接触澳大利亚的公众和流行文化。

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.