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The State Library of NSW hosts their final Scholarly Musings for 2017, with Anne Jamison.

What we read as children often has a powerful and formative influence on our sense of self as adults, as well as our sense of place in the world. This talk takes as an example Australian writer and social reformer Catherine Helen Spence (1825–1910), and her short fiction for children, serialised in newspapers and national school magazines in South Australia. How did the children’s literary culture to which Spence contributed encourage and shape the formulation of national, moral and social character in 19th century Australia?

Anne Jamison is Lecturer in Literary Studies at Western Sydney University. Her research focuses on British, Irish and Australian nineteenth-century literature with a particular focus on women’s writing. She has published broadly on a variety of Irish authors, including Edith Somerville, Martin Ross, Alicia Lefanu, Kate O’Brien and James Clarence Mangan, as well as on the intersections between law, literature and authorship in the early Victorian period. She recently published a monograph with Cork University Press (July 2016) on women’s co-authorship in the late nineteenth century.

When: Tuesday 7 November 2017, 11:00am-12:00pm.
Where: Metcalfe Auditorium, State Library of NSW, Macquarie Street, Sydney
Cost: Free – register online.
Contact: 02 9273 1414


Image: Children reading – Scone area, NSW, c.1913, by James Brindley Leard, courtesy State Library of NSW.