AustLit

'The work of the German missionaries on South Australian languages in the first half of the nineteenth century has few contemporary parallels for thoroughness and clarity. This commentary on the grammatical introduction to Pastor Clamor Schürmann’s Vocabulary of the Parnkalla language of 1844 reconstructs a significant amount of Barngarla morphology, phonology and syntax.'

'It should be seen as one of a number of starting points for language-reclamation endeavours in Barngarla, designed primarily for educators and other people who may wish to re-present its interpretations in ways more accessible to non-linguists, and more suited to pedagogical practice.'

'Up until the late 1960s the story of Australian literary magazines was one of continuing struggle against the odds, and of the efforts of individuals, such as Clem Christesen, Stephen Murray-Smith, and Max Harris. During that time, the magazines played the role of 'enfant terrible', creating a space where unpopular opinions and writers were allowed a voice. The magazines have very often been ahead of their time and some of the agendas they have pursued have become 'central' to representations, where once they were marginal. Broadly, 'little' magazines have often been more influential than their small circulations would first indicate, and the author's argument is that they have played a valuable role in the promotion of Australian literature.' (Publication summary)

'Augustus Short was a pioneer in every sense of the word. A diligent priest, a gifted teacher and a determined advocate of social reform, his appointment as the first Anglican bishop of the tolerant and progressive colony of South Australia was to have a far-reaching impact on the community in his adopted home. Short’s story has been recorded in several biographies, and his legacy looms large in the Anglican Church and in The Collegiate School of St Peter, but his pivotal role in establishing the University of Adelaide has remained largely unexplored.'

'The rediscovery of Short’s vision for a great university — free from any test of religious affiliation, with an internationally-focussed staff, a diverse, enlightened student mix, and open to every capable person, regardless of wealth — is inspiring a new generation of students and teachers. Michael Whiting’s study of Short’s contribution to education in South Australia, and especially the founding of the University of Adelaide, is a story about transformation, possibility and opportunity that still rings true after 140 years.'  (Publication summary)

'The Kimberley Arafuran language Worrorra was spoken traditionally on the remote coastline and precipitously beautiful hinterland between the Walcott Inlet and the Prince Regent River. The language described here is that attested by its last full speakers, Patsy Lulpunda, Amy Peters and Daisy Utemorrah. Patsy Lulpunda was a child when Europeans first entered her country in 1912, and Amy Peters and Daisy Utemorrah both grew up on the Kunmunya mission. This comprehensive and detailed grammar provides as well an historical and cultural context for a society now drastically altered. In the 1950s Worrorra people left their traditional land and from the 1970s the number of people speaking Worrorra as their first language declined dramatically.'

'Worrorra is a highly polysynthetic language, characterised by overarching concord and a high degree of morphological fusion. Verbal semantics involve a voicing opposition and an extensive system of evidentiality-marking. Worrorra has elaborate systems of pragmatic reference, a derivational morphology that projects agreement-class concord across most lexical categories and complex predicates that incorporate one verb within another. Nouns are distributed among five genders, the intensional properties of which define dynamic oppositions between men and women on the one hand, and earth and sky on the other.'

'This volume will be of interest to morphologists, syntacticians, semanticists, anthropologists, typologists, and readers interested in Australian language and culture generally.' (Source: Publisher's website)

'From the tentative beginnings of European settlement to today’s flourishing writing scene, Adelaide has always been a literary city. Novelists, poets and playwrights have lived here; readers have pored over books, sharing them and discussing them; literary celebrities have visited and sometimes stayed; writers have encouraged each other and fought with each other.

Adelaide is literary, too, in the sense of having been written about—sometimes with love, sometimes with scorn. Literature has been important not only to the city’s cultural life but to its identity, to the way it has been seen and, most importantly, to the way it has seen itself. Adelaide: a literary city broadens and deepens our understanding of Adelaide as a city of creativity and culture.' (Publisher's website)

'The dominant form of the nineteenth-century novel was the Bildungsroman, a story of an individual’s development that came to speak more widely of the aspirations of nineteenth-century British society. Some of the most famous examples — David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre — validated the world from which they sprang, in which even orphans could successfully make their way.

Empire Girls: the colonial heroine comes of age is a critical examination of three novels by writers from different regions of the British Empire: Olive Schreiner’s The Story of An African Farm (South Africa), Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Daughter of Today (Canada) and Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom (Australia). All three novels commence as conventional Bildungsromane, yet the plots of all diverge from the usual narrative structure, as a result of both their colonial origins and the clash between their aspirational heroines and the plots available to them. In an analysis including gender, empire, nation and race, Empire Girls provides new critical perspectives on the ways in which this dominant narrative form performs very differently when taken out of its metropolitan setting.' (Publisher's website)

'The essays in this collection examine how both colonial and British authors engage with Victorian subjects and subjectivities in their work. Some essays explore the emergence of a key trope within colonial texts: the negotiation of Victorian and settler-subject positions. Others argue for new readings of key metropolitan texts and their repositioning within literary history. These essays work to recognise the plurality of the rubric of the 'Victorian' and to expand how the category of Victorian studies can be understood.' (Publisher's website)

'Catherine Helen Spence was a charismatic public speaker in the late nineteenth century, a time when women were supposed to speak only at their own firesides. In challenging the custom and convention that confined middle-class women to the domestic sphere, she was carving a new path into the world of public politics along which other women would follow, in the first Australian colony to win votes for women.

'She was also much more -- a novelist deserving comparison with George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; a pioneering woman journalist; a "public intellectual" a century before the term was coined; a philanthropic innovator in social welfare and education, with an influence reaching far beyond South Australia; Australia's first female political candidate. A "New Woman", she declared herself. The "Grand Old Woman of Australia" others called her.' (From the publisher's website, 2010 edition.)