Along gender lines: reassessing relationships between Australian novels, gender and genre from 1930-2006.

Abstract

"In 1998, Elizabeth Webby professed a widely accepted account of contemporary Australian literary history. During the 1970s, Australian literature emerged from a period of 'masculinist' conservatism into a 'golden age', manifested in a marked increase in 'Australian publishing and the promotion of Australian literature' and the proliferation of authors other than White Anglo-Celtic Males or 'WACMs'. By the late 1990s, however, the combined impact of 'economic rationalism' and 'globalisation' had rendered this golden age 'well and truly over'. According to Webby, 'WACMs' lost their dominance on literature courses and publishers' lists, but 'reasserted control via the doctrine of economic rationalism at the political level'. But is this accepted - and gendered - account of contemporary Australian literary history accurate? I reconsider this history from a quantitative perspective, drawing on AustLit database records to ask simple but broad questions about the relationships between gender, genre and Australian novels from 1930 to 2006. What number and proportion of Australian novel titles published during this time were by wo/men? What genre were these novels? What trends, if any, are revealed?