German Images In Australian Literature From The 1940s To The 1980s

This cross-cultural study examines German-Australian relations by tracing patterns of representation in Australian writing. The imagological approach enables comparisons to be made among a wide range of texts and of authors as diverse as Martin Boyd, Dymphna Cusack, Thomas Keneally, David Martin, E.O. Schlunke, Patrick White. The most common German images and stereotypes found are those associated with rural environment and romantic imagination on the one hand, and with savagery and barbarity represented by Nazism on the other. The significance of such images often links up with Australian perception of the 'Old World' and its cultural legacy, thus being part of the process of Australian self-definition and self-understanding.

An account of fraught and complex cross-cultural literary exchange between two highly distinct - even uniquely opposed - reading contexts, Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic has resonance for all newly global reckonings of the cultural Cold War. Working from the extraordinary records of the East German publishing and censorship regime, the authors materially track the production and reception of one country’s corpus as envisioned by another. The 90 Australian titles published in the GDR form an alternative canon, revealing a shadowy literary archive that rewrites Australia’s postwar cultural history from behind the iron curtain and illuminates multiple ironies for the GDR as a ‘reading nation’. This book brings together leading German and Australian scholars in the fields of book history, German and Australian cultural history, Australian and postcolonial literatures, and postcolonial and cross-cultural theory, with emerging writers currently navigating between the two cultures.

Draws on scholarship from leading figures in the field and spans Australian literary history from colonial origins, indigenous and migrant literatures, as well as representations of Asia and the Pacific and the role of literary culture in modern Australian society.

From Terra Nullius to Land of Opportunities and Last Frontier, the European dream has constructed and deconstructed Australia to feed its imagination of new societies. At the same time Australia has over the last two centuries forged and re-invented its own liaisons with Europe arguably to carve out its identity. From the arts to social sciences, to society itself, a complex dynamic has grown between the two continents in ways that invite study and discussion. A transnational research group has begun its collective investigation project of which this first volume is the outcome. The book is a substantial multidisciplinary collection of current research and offers critical perspectives on culture, literature and history around themes at the heart of the Imagined Australia project. The essays instigate reflection, discovery and discussion of how reciprocal imagining between Australia and Europe has articulated itself and ways and dimensions in which a relationship between communities, imagined and not, has unfolded.

These essays and papers constitute a first comprehensive and authoritative stock-taking of German-Australian relations since the end of the Second World War. Studies by scholars, diplomats, artists and public servants address themselves to a wide range of subjects, including German-Australian Political Relations, Foreign Policy Perspectives on the Australia-Germany Partnership, German Migration to Australia, German-born Artists and Academics on the Fifth Continent, The Reception of Aboriginal Art in Germany, German-Australian Academic Relations, Comparisons of the Political Economies of Germany and Australia, German Business and Business German in Australia, Images of Australia in German Cinema and a Critical Review of the Role and Future of Germanistik at Australian Universities.