This chapter considers how Australian poetry of the 1970s participated in major social changes that were fuelled by a range of factors, including greater access to higher education, the sexual liberation movement, a drug subculture and Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. It traces how Australian writers turned to America for influence and were able to utilise new technologies to generate a vibrant small press culture. The chapter outlines the surge in collaboration, collectives and overlapping literary circles. It also examines a series of anthologies that sought to feature new energies and voices, with some seeking to demarcate such poetry from earlier or more traditional forms. Lastly, it analyses the significance of the poetry workshops based at Melbourne’s La Mama Theatre, little magazines, and the development of small presses that produced poetry collections during the decade of the 1970s.

This chapter discusses early Chinese writing in Australian Chinese periodicals at the turn of the twentieth century, which was then followed largely by an absence of Asian voices in Australian anthologies until the late 1950s. It critiques the early anthologies that turned attention to Asia as either focusing only on ‘Australian’ perceptions of Asia or separated ‘Australian’ and ‘Asian’ writers along lines of ethnicity. It discusses the publication of poetry collections by Asian Australian poets as occurring in the late 1980s and 1990s and the emergence of Asian Australian studies in the 1990s in light of American Asian studies. It critiques the limitations of an ‘Asian Australian’ framework along with the tendency to homogenise migrant writers under the rubric of multiculturalism in late twentieth-century Australia. It discusses the emergence of literary magazines as forums for Asian Australian writing and as developing cross-cultural solidarities, and anthologies, criticism and writing that has foregrounded diasporic frameworks and intersectionality. The chapter then undertakes analysis of four major recent writers.

This chapter synthesises empirical methodology with detailed contextual analysis to reflect on the ways in which anthologies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century constructed or de-prioritised national, canonical and generational frames. Noting previous interpretative frameworks such as ‘new lyricism’, this chapter argues that a number of anthologies during this era reflected an ethical turn in Australian poetry and emerged out of or postulated literary communities and networks. The chapter includes an analysis of the two Best Australian anthology series and an analysis of anthologies with canonical impetus. Lastly, it considers the shift in definitional terms from the ‘modern’, ‘new’ or ‘now’ to the ‘contemporary’, as well as forms of discontent with such a term.

This chapter considers the emergence of gay and lesbian voices in the late 1960s and 1970s in relation to political activism and forums such as small press culture, the visual arts and performances. It discusses how some of these were associated with the women’s movement. It notes how an early coalitionist approach transformed into separatism between the lesbian and gay communities, followed by a return to coalitionist approaches in light of the AIDS crisis. The chapter analyses the print culture supporting gay and lesbian writing during these decades. It tracks the emergence of queer poetries that rejected identity categories, including queer Aboriginal poetry. It discusses the mainstreaming of LGBTQ+ writing, including the film adaptation of Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask. Lastly, the chapter considers the proliferation of publications by gay, lesbian, queer, trans and non-binary poets from 2010 onwards, contextualising them in light of public debates around the Australian Marriage Law postal survey, the Safe Schools Coalition, and protests around police participation in and corporate sponsorship of the Mardi Gras Parade.

This chapter analyses the role of anthologies in the documentation and shaping of feminist poetries. It considers how they perform cultural, political and aesthetic work for communities of writers and readers, and exist both within and beyond institutions. The chapter considers the engagement with feminism as developing in different generations but also as having important inter-generational connections. The chapter also undertakes close readings of major feminist poets in the late twentieth century to today.

This chapter considers how Australians have looked to South America for what they might become while Argentinians looked to Australia for what Argentina could become. It traces William Lane’s failed utopic colonies in Paraguay in the 1890s and, following her participation in one of them, Mary Gilmore’s engagement with and promotion of Latin American culture to other Australian writers. It considers Latin American migration to Australia, particularly in the late twentieth century. It discusses the role of little magazines, small presses and radio shows in encouraging poetry by Latin American migrants. It analyses their sense of marginalisation to mainstream Australian literary culture, and shifts towards decentring Australia in both writers’ transcultural movements and framings by anthologies. Lastly, the chapter examines recent encounters with Latin America by Australian-born poets and discusses competing framings of the South, including by writers such as J. M. Coetzee and John Mateer.

This chapter examines the ways in which Shelley’s works and reputation were mediated to Victorian audiences. It argues that the Victorians’ Shelley was to a large extent the Victorians’ creation; his reception in this period differed from both earlier and later understandings of his life and work. The chapter pays particular attention to the role of women such as Mary Shelley and Lady Jane Shelley in shaping the poet’s posthumous reception. It surveys several sites of reception, including editions, anthologies, sermons, statues, and Chartist meetings, to show how Shelley and his writings were appropriated, reimagined, and redeployed in a variety of new contexts by people with divergent aims and concerns. It briefly examines sculpted memorials to Shelley by Henry Weekes and Edward Onslow Ford. The chapter concludes that the Victorian understanding of Shelley was no more monolithic than the ‘Victorians’ themselves.

This chapter outlines how the 1970s brought radical expression, new explorations of poetic persona, and increasing belief in the poet’s role to advocate for rights and freedoms. It argues that anthologies seeking to capture the zeitgeist failed to do so, sometimes due to using frameworks borrowed from North America that elided local diversity. The chapter asserts that small press culture constituted a provisional, heterogeneous commons that undid traditional definitions of authorship and form, and offered a space to air the previously taboo. It traces the turn to America as well as to popular culture, other media, and documentary. Through an examination of Michael Dransfield’s reception, it demonstrates how umbrella terms delimit complex individual poetics while demonstrating affiliations in Dransfield’s self-examination with contemporaries like Pam Brown, Nigel Roberts, and Vicki Viidkikas. The chapter also considers the impact of the first anthology of women’s poetry, Mother, I’m Rooted. It redresses the elision of its editor, Kate Jennings, from other anthologies and critical framings of the period, as well as the marginalisation of Kevin Gilbert.

This chapter examines the literary institutions that helped American short fiction to flourish in the twentieth century and maintain its visibility today. These institutions, from the Best American Short Stories and the New Yorker, to the Pushcart Prize and the National Book Award, form a kind of patchwork canon of American short fiction, a record of the writers most celebrated in their moment and most remembered since. Despite the persistent notion, espoused by artists and scholars alike, that the short story is “the art form best suited for the description” of a diverse and “heterogeneous culture,” these institutions also testify to the fact that the genre has, until very recently, underrepresented women and overlooked racialized writers. This chapter documents the writers that these organizations have consecrated, examining how that patchwork canon has often failed to live up to the ideals of cultural pluralism at the heart of the American short story tradition.

This chapter considers the popularity of the genre of the short story in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores, in particular, a class of magazine stories for which the terms of approval followed the lines of reading for amusement and entertainment. Surveying critical accounts of the short story, and the burgeoning interest in anthologies and handbooks for aspiring writers, the chapter considers what follows if we not only accept but accentuate the notion of the genre as an artistic commodity in a gendered marketplace defined by overabundance. Special consideration is given to the subgenre of “storiettes” published alongside a column covering “the latest fads” in Munsey’s magazine. The essay argues that the style of the period’s short story developed in tandem with ideas about it as a fashionable and consumable commodity, and even as something of a fad.

The canon of British First World War poetry seems well established and beyond dispute with a set of key ‘representative’ poets referenced continuously. Yet these poets have been selected and promoted over the decades for various reasons. Moreover, how representative were they of the British experience and reaction to the events 1914–1918? Using a quantitative study of the poets and poems appearing in anthologies during and after the war, this essay reconsiders the true canon of the British poetical response to the war charting the rise (and fall) of certain poets and why this might be so. It also considers the hidden canon of poetry that focuses on other theatres of war, at sea and in the air.

Although Langston Hughes remains one of our most widely published authors, few attempts have been made to chart the circulation of his works across dozens of anthologies during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Yet an examination of 180 collections published over more than ninety-five years shows how editors collectively made Hughes a representative and at the same time exceptional black writer. The authors of this chapter use data management and analyses to understand a variety of patterns associated with the extensive processes of anthologizing Langston Hughes from 1923 through 2020. Their project reveals how Hughes reprints make him a statistical outlier, not merely widely published, and further, their research indicates the importance of incorporating quantitative approaches into the study of African American publishing history.

This chapter surveys the formation of German vernacular literature between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. Instead of one single beginning, from which all the rest flows, we encounter a series of inaugural gestures and moments of inception, not all of which extended into posterity. The great monuments of Old High German literature, produced in the ninth century, are isolated works that did not give rise to continuous traditions of textual production; for that development, we have to wait until the second half of the eleventh century, when an astonishingly self-assured and formally sophisticated literature – now linguistically Middle High German – burst onto the scene. In the course of the twelfth century, religious genres were joined by secular ones, and the pragmatic functions of informing and instructing the public were supplemented by an interest in the potentialities of poetic language and distinctly literary modes of cognition. Finally, by the early thirteenth century, a palpable sense had emerged among collectors and authors that German literature has both a canon and a history; the constitution of manuscript anthologies and literary genealogies represents a further beginning in the formation of German literature as a dynamic system, as well as itself positing beginnings.

This essay reflects on how Indigenous communities have maintained their own literary canons, often outside the mechanisms that literary scholars tend to associate with canonicity: large institutional archives, formal publishing and republishing, placement in major anthologies and college syllabi. The essay argues that Indigenous canonicity is not a static tradition from which texts can be either lost or added; it is not a privatized or extractive business. Rather, it is a collective, contributive process in which tribal members share in the multiple functions of editing, archiving, writing, reading, interpreting, and publishing. These community-based processes and conversations turn up a wealth of essays, poems, recipes, and histories that haven’t typically attracted the attention of settler teachers, publishers, or collecting institutions – perhaps because they were not written for settlers. The Indigenous literary histories that Indigenous communities remember and cherish, instead, document and imagine who the people are, where they come from, and where they are going. The essay concludes with a reflection on Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks’s notion of “the gathering place” – referring to any collective exercise of Indigenous cultural authority and exchange – as a model of Indigenous writing and canon making.

How to compile a collection of essays or an anthology and find a publisher for it.

establishes Speght’s position within a Calvinist community of writers, preachers, and printers that included her father and husband. Like Whately’s sermons, Speght’s A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617) deploys domestic and biblical rhetoric to give “good councell” in the political realm. If, for Speght, the doctrine of male superiority becomes a manifesto of the obligations of the ruler, the wife is authorized to enforce those obligations as a significant influence on her husband’s ability to exercise good government. In her later work Mortalities Memorandum (1621), Speght offers a prefatory Dreame in which a distinctively female voice provides a Calvinist framework for the pursuit of godly knowledge that draws on the Song of Songs. Mortalities Memorandum, the lengthy poem that follows, capitalizes on this voice to deliver a significant religious and political message to English men and women at a crisis point in their history.

The ability of Irish poetry to secure a place in the canon is intimately tied to structures of power and authority – structures with a strongly gendered character. Historically, the Irish tradition has been fractured by numerous traumas and the programmatic exclusion of poetry by women. Anthologies are key drivers in canon formation, but have been heavily slanted against equal representation of male and female poets. Often, women will achieve representation in one anthology only to disappear from view in the next; and applying a historical overview, we find that the twentieth century is often worse in this regard than previous eras. A number of case studies are considered, with close attention to questions of group dynamics, literary movements, citationality, and the role of the academy and the anthology.

Whether in its pre- or post-Troubles incarnations, the tradition of Northern Irish poetry has been largely male. In the early days of Northern Ireland, women would publish in journals but struggle to achieve publication in book form, as in the case of Barbara Hunter, the co-editor of the influential journal Rann. Poets such as Elizabeth Shane and May Morton reinvigorate the ballad tradition and feminise the landscape then being argued over in largely masculinist terms by John Hewitt and other critical ideologues. The figure of Freda Laughton stands out, publishing one collection and vanishing from print. Her coolly mysterious poems have become emblematic of a mid-century Northern modernist moment that failed to achieve traction. The post-Troubles generation that followed were no less slow to number any women in their ranks, but in restoring these marginalised voices to the record a different picture of Northern Irish poetry in its true diversity is possible.