Early Career Fellow in Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies"

October – November 2024

Prizeworthiness: Kinship Beyond Literary Nationalism

This project explores the relationship between value, literary canon formation and kinship. By interrogating this relationship from the margins—exploring the narratives and authors who are included and the narratives and authors who are excluded—this project will produce new understandings of how literary prizes and the notion of prizeworthiness underpin the complicated project of literary nationalism, and yet also how prizeworthiness debates may challenge both literary nationalism and the production of a national literary character by creating new (i.e. transnational and transtemporal) webs of community. Dane will interrogate canonical Australian texts—canonised by way of national literary awards—to explore questions of national character, the nature of a national identity formation and the relationship between prizeworthy books and prizeworthy ideas. This work will engage with the notion of the performativity of literature and the ways in which books, and book culture, can act as an intermediary between people to forge new connections and communities.

Alexandra Dane is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne. Her research explores the notion of inclusion and exclusion in contemporary book cultures, community publishing activities and literary counter-publics. She is the author of White Literary Taste Production in Contemporary Book Culture (2023 Cambridge UP) and Gender and Prestige in Literature: Contemporary Australian Book Culture (2020 Palgrave Macmillan).