Introduction: republics of letters and literary communities by Peter Kirkpatrick and Robert DixonPart 1: sites of sociability, scenes of reading 1. Literary community, cultural hierarchy and 20th-century American readers by Joan Shelley Rubin 2. The ‘federation of literary sympathy’: the Australasian Home Reading Union by Kyle Mirmohamadi 3. Communities of readers: Australian reading history and library loan records by Julieanne Lamond 4. Pacifying Brisbane: The Muses’ Magazine and the 1920s by Patrick Buckridge 5. Books and debate about the Australian government’s policies towards asylum seekers by Jan ZwarPart 2: republics of letters – local, national and international literary communities 6. Scenes of reading: is Australian literature a world literature? by Robert Dixon 7. Modernising Anglocentrism: Desiderata and literary time by David Carter 8. Jindy modernist: the Jindyworobaks as avant garde by Peter Kirkpatrick 9. Bobbin Up in the Leseland: Australian literature in the German democratic republic by Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel 10. An American introduction: perfect readers, unread books and Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children by Fiona Morrison 11. Connectivity, community and the question of literary universality: reading Kim Scott’s chronotope and John Kinsella’s commedia by Philip MeadPart 3: sociality, gender and genre 12. The great parenting tradition: charting a history of parenting-book writers and readers in colonial Australia by Michelle de Stefani 13. Reading publics, watching audiences: Lady Audley’s Secret in 19th-century Melbourne by Susan K. Martin 14. ‘I must be my own director’: Cynthia Reed, Elisabeth Lambert and Read & Harris, Publishers by Jane Grant 15. ‘Opposing all the things they stand for’: women writers and the women’s magazines by Susan Sheridan 16. Seven writers and Australia’s literary capital by D’Arcy RandallPart 4: unsettlements – emerging literary communities 17. ‘Networking, bumping into, sucking up to, catching up with, meeting, greeting, chatting, joking, criticising’: the emerging writers’ community as respublica literaria by Keri Glastonbury 18. An unsettled community: Harpur’s carnival, Harris’ assonance, Mackellar’s code by Michael Farrell 19. The beginners guide to being an Australian: John O’Grady’s They’re a Weird Mob by Lindsay Barrett 20. ‘He lacks almost all the qualities of the novelist’: G.M. Glaskin and his Australian contemporaries by Jeremy Fisher 21. Anthologies and the anti-republic of Australian gay and lesbian poetry by Ann Vickery 22. ‘All the village was running’: some voices from young refugees in western Sydney by Lachlan Brown 23. Distance by Bonny CassidyContributorsIndex