The period from the end of World War II has seen at least three major transformations of the Australian literary field. In the 1950s, cultural institutions dedicated to Australian literature or Australian books were still relatively underdeveloped, while publishing and bookselling operated within an established set of relationships with the British publishing industry. In the decade from the late 1950s, local publishing of Australian books expanded, gradually at first, and then rapidly as local branches of British firms developed Australian lists. New and more diverse institutions dedicated to Australian books and authors emerged, as did a generation of writers and readers with new orientations towards both literature and the nation. By the mid-1970s Australian literature was defined through a set of relatively autonomous institutional sites in universities, publishing, criticism, bookselling and professional associations. The presence of contemporary books expanded dramatically, and for the first time something like the literary heritage was available to contemporary readers through numerous reprint series and an increasingly rich critical literature. In the new century, however, some of these achievements seem less secure. Although a mature infrastructure has been established, it exists within a newly globalised international literary system that poses once again some of the recurrent questions for Australian culture: its independence, its national significance, and the role of literature (or books and reading) in those equations.

The literary field

The terms literary ‘field’ and literary ‘system’ refer to the network of cultural institutions, industry structures, professional identities, public policies and social practices that determine how books get to readers and how readers get to books or to any other source of literature and literary talk. They include publishing and bookselling; magazines and book reviews; libraries, schools and universities; professional bodies like the Australian Society of Authors; editors and literary agents; informal associations such as writing and reading groups; and the literary festivals and prizes that have become a feature in the national literary landscape since the mid–1990s.