Australian literature and the world republic of letters

In this talk I want to explore a paradox: that while Australian literature itself is now and always has been influenced by international contexts, the study of Australian literature, especially by Australians, has tended to take a national perspective only. The nation is itself an 'imagined community' - and therefore to some extent an artificial construct. It follows from this that the nation is only one of many such imaged communities with which we identify. The nation remains one of our most important imagined communities, but for writers and readers alike it is wide open to a series of influences from other kinds of imagined communities that are both smaller and larger than the nation itself, from the local or sub-national to the transnational.