What America also Read: Australian Historical Fiction in the American Marketplace, 1927–48

Abstract

My title refers to Gordon Hutner's 2009 study What America Read: Taste, Class, and Novel, 1920-1960, an impressively detailed account of middle-class realist fiction and its reception United states across middle decades of twentieth century. Hutner's object of study is not genre fiction but vast middle ground of better novels that were often widely read but have largely disappeared from view both mainstream and revisionary literary histories. over recent decades, of course, an enormous amount of critical effort has gone into reclaiming texts and authors excluded from canon on grounds of gender, race, or political bias, and no less into reclaiming genre fiction, but Hutner is interested a different kind of exclusion. middle-class realist novels he analyses were not marginal; were mainstream: they occupied very center of literary landscape [. . .] widely read, easily comprehensible fiction that Americans chose for their and literary entertainment (1). final phrase expresses his argument for their reclamation, and What America Read provides a rich study of rise and fall of middle-class novels and book talk that surrounded them, the sound of culture conversing with (45).And yet what's striking, at least from an outsider's perspective, is that apart from a few passing references to British and european books, Hutner's novels are all American, as if American readers were reading only American fiction. Hutner knows this was not case; nonetheless he remarks that of most surprising things for Americanist of today is to discover abiding interest of New York Times and other papers in english literature, especially contemporary fiction-Virginia Woolf and Ford Madox Ford to be sure, but also writers whose reputations have generally not survived, like Frank swinnerton, Rose Macaulay, and Margaret Kennedy, standing side by side with Joseph Conrad (64). that it is surprising rather than just what we'd expect is testimony to force of canonization and national literary accounting; fact, presence of British American bestseller lists peaked interwar years: twenty-eight percent of annual top one hundred titles across 1920s and 1930s, with figures such as John Galsworthy appearing multiple times (sutherland 11-13). And to anticipate my own argument, this was market or book world which novels were received. Although Britishness of British was often marked for American reviewers, were reviewed less as foreign than as that might also participate conversation middle-class America was having with itself.Hutner's argument means his primary focus is fiction written for American middle-class, by American middle class, about American middle class (8). But American publishers were also publishing foreign, mostly British into this same middle-class market, and this transatlantic trade included a small but significant f low of titles that also peaked years when, for Hutner, middle-class realism was dominant. American readers, short, were also reading novels, sometimes large numbers and sometimes a way that brought them, too, into conversations American culture was having with itself. these novels seldom entered American market as literature, but rather as part of regular turnover of books of week, as more or less ephemeral sources of edification and literary entertainment. Having said that, what is striking about this period longer history of American reception of is degree to which idea of Australian literature did fact present itself to critics and reviewers.IIFrom late 1920s to mid-1940s, a series of ambitious novels were released new American editions. period stands out clearly from what had occurred earlier and what followed. …