Australian Literary Studies is a fully refereed journal of Australian and international literary scholarship and criticism.

Australian popular fiction is the most significant growth area in Australian trade publishing since the turn of the twenty-first century yet it has received little sustained scholarly attention (Fletcher et al. 5). Over the last two decades, the rhetoric of…

In The Merchants of Culture, John B. Thompson remarks on the difficulties of writing about a present-day industry, where its swift evolution renders any scholarship on it in danger of ‘immediate obsolescence’ (xi). This challenge is especially familiar to…

The rise of steampunk – speculative-fiction works set in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian world marked by steam-powered technology – has led to a range of debates about what the genre is, what it does, and, more significantly for this paper…

The contemporary digital publishing sphere is one of hybridity convergence and messiness as the affordances of digital self-publishing channels allow independent producers unconnected to established publishers to enter the literary field. Texts, authors and readers move through the contemporary publishing…