(To be continued.)

March 1, 2018 3:05 PM

To be continued...The Australian Newspaper Fiction Database, developed by Katherine Bode and Carol Hetherington, is a full-text, user-editable database of "over 21,000 novels, novellas and short stories published in early Australian newspapers." In addition to many Australian novels hitherto unknown to scholars, the database also indicates the extent to which British, American, and Continental fiction circulated in Australia during the nineteenth century. The corpus is drawn from the National Library of Australia's outstanding Trove digitization project.

See also the important AustLit database, which includes scholarship as well as primary texts

More on the history of nineteenth-century Australian illustrated newspapers

Some of you may remember the recent rediscovery of Walt Whitman's newspaper serial The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle

Newspaper serials are amongst the most difficult novels for us to study and recover: they were frequently anonymous or pseudonymous, often abandoned midstream if they failed to move copy, and almost never reprinted in volume form.

posted by thomas j wise (2 comments total)

Thanks for posting this! I realize lesser-known work is what's important here, but just as a way of connecting it to things I'd heard of, I thought of Fergus Hume as someone likely to be in the archive. TBH I think I first learned about him from some article on LitHub ("Crime and the City: Melbourne, Venerable Town of Vice"?)--and then over the past year I've noticed on Project Gutenberg's Twitter feed that they've been busy adding a lot of his work. A search for his name didn't disappoint. Interesting stuff to see in context.
posted by Wobbuffet at 4:29 PM on March 1, 2018

This is great, thanks for the post!
posted by languagehat at 5:29 AM on March 2, 2018