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Anne Jamison
  • School of Humanities and Communication Arts
    Western Sydney University
    Bankstown Campus
  • Anne is Lecturer in Literary Studies at Western Sydney University. She is also the Nancy Keesing Fellow at the State ... moreedit
Blog post for 'Vida! Australian Women's History Network': http://www.auswhn.org.au/blog/australian-women-writers/ A reflection on contemporary and historical issues surrounding Australian women's literature in anticipation of the... more
Blog post for 'Vida! Australian Women's History Network': http://www.auswhn.org.au/blog/australian-women-writers/

A reflection on contemporary and historical issues surrounding Australian women's literature in anticipation of the Australian Women's Writing Symposium at the State Library of NSW on November 3, 2016.
Research Interests:
This essay takes as its main focus the current collaboration between JSTOR and Field Day to digitize all five volumes of ‘The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing’ (1991-2002) and make these volumes available and searchable within the... more
This essay takes as its main focus the current collaboration between JSTOR and Field Day to digitize all five volumes of ‘The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing’ (1991-2002) and make these volumes available and searchable within the existing online JSTOR Ireland Collection. Its central ambition is to consider the impact of this digital transformation on our understanding of Irish literary history and, in particular, historic and current debates over the ideologies of national canon-formation in Ireland. This research argues that such transformations have the potential to significantly intervene in, and move forward, the objectives of Irish feminist historiographers and the attempt to disrupt the conventional linear alignment of Irish women’s history and literature. In doing so, new discourses are potentially opened up for thinking about digital technologies and their increasingly meaningful relationship with feminist, gender, and women’s studies within the humanities.
This essay attempts to challenge the prevailing critical narrative which surrounds children’s book history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century by arguing that the traditional divide between heavily didactic and imaginative... more
This essay attempts to challenge the prevailing critical narrative which surrounds children’s book history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century by arguing that the traditional divide between heavily didactic and imaginative approaches to children’s literature was not a clear-cut opposition. It utilises the work of Irish author, Alicia Lefanu (1791-1867), to demonstrate the ways in which some writers of the period began to blur the genre boundaries between rational and fantastic texts for children, veering between a low-key didacticism and an overt attempt to incorporate fairy tale and fantasy writing into the domain of educative literature. Lefanu’s texts, it will be demonstrated, are not only emblematic of the confluence between wider public debates over the moral and social education of children, but further champion a radical rethink of conventional female role models for children. Lefanu’s narrative verse fairy tales thus escape the confines of the realist didactic text and, in so doing, challenge both the dominance of instructional texts for children in the early nineteenth century, as well as the gender prescriptions of the period.
Jamison explores the influence of nineteenth-century science, spiritualism, and magical thinking on Mangan’s short fiction of the 1830s and 1840s, with a particular emphasis on Mangan’s ‘The Thirty Flasks’ (1838) and other explicit... more
Jamison explores the influence of nineteenth-century science, spiritualism, and magical thinking on Mangan’s short fiction of the 1830s and 1840s, with a particular emphasis on Mangan’s ‘The Thirty Flasks’ (1838) and other explicit writings on the uncanny. The chapter attempts to widen the frame of existing critical thinking over Mangan’s ideas on the unstable nature of identity, which permeate much of his short fiction, translations, and poetry, by paying attention to Mangan’s utilisation and depiction of the Oriental sorcerer figure, and the broader historical context of nineteenth-century spiritualist writing and activity. The chapter concludes with an in-depth discussion of Mangan’s interest in the tales of the Arabian Nights and his complex borrowing of characters and ideas contained in those tales.
This essay explores Kate O’Brien’s attitude towards autobiographical narrative and her quest for self-articulation. It argues that the repeated abstinence from the writing of her autobiography becomes a dominant trope in much of her... more
This essay explores Kate O’Brien’s attitude towards autobiographical narrative and her quest for self-articulation. It argues that the repeated abstinence from the writing of her autobiography becomes a dominant trope in much of her late-life writing, much of which currently remains unpublished and/or uncollected. By analysing O’Brien’s  archival material alongside her published non-fiction prose,  significant insights into O’Brien’s thinking on the processes of memory, as well as her somewhat pained and contradictory relationship with the self and its expression, are brought to light. O’Brien’s Farewell Spain (1937), Teresa of Avila (1951), My Ireland (1962), and Presentation Parlour (1963) all establish a mode of self-articulation through the relationship of the self with place (Spain), and person (her female relations and forebears). As such, this essay argues that these texts form a series of carefully averted auto/biographies and further utilises archive theory to offer a framework through which O’Brien’s autobiographical impulse can be understood. Within this theoretical paradigm, O’Brien’s quest for self-articulation finally becomes a desire to capture the anticipation of memory, opposed to direct recollection, and to seek out literary forms within which to express those memories.
This essay explores the historical relations between copyright law and authorship, and attempts to complicate postmodernist models of the author figure with a study of collaborative authors and their methodologies. In so doing, the essay... more
This essay explores the historical relations between copyright law and authorship, and attempts to complicate postmodernist models of the author figure with a study of collaborative authors and their methodologies. In so doing, the essay embraces the new wave of collaborative creativity that has emerged due to various digital technologies, as well as the copyright complications it has induced. This essay finally argues that an understanding of all three discourses – literary, legal, and technological- are increasingly necessary for our understanding of past and present literary production, as well as current theoretical notions of authorship.
This essay will focus on the unpublished legal papers relating to the 19th-century Irish women authors E. Œ. Somerville (1858 – 1949) and Martin Ross (1862 – 1915) and their case of plagiarism against the authors of By the Brown Bog in... more
This essay will focus on the unpublished legal papers relating to the 19th-century Irish women authors E. Œ. Somerville (1858 – 1949) and Martin Ross (1862 – 1915) and their case of plagiarism against the authors of By the Brown Bog in 1913. The article will begin by summarising the ways in which the introduction of copyright law in Great Britain in 1709 altered aesthetic and legal definitions of authorship, and how this new conceptualisation of the author figure effectively disenfranchised collaborative modes of creativity and literary production. In so doing, the essay will investigate Somerville and Ross's classification as popular, collaborative short story writers. The popularity of their Irish R.M. tales, it will be argued, harmed their case of plagiarism. The study will use a detailed analysis of Somerville and Ross's legal correspondence to argue for the ways in which copyright law not only defined the ‘author’, but also the term ‘originality’, which was sorely affected by aesthetic and moral conceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ literature.
This paper will consider Somerville and Ross’s legal case of plagiarism in 1913 against the authors of a collection of humorous short stories, By the Brown Bog (1913). It will argue that changing definitions of originality and plagiarism... more
This paper will consider Somerville and Ross’s legal case of plagiarism in 1913 against the authors of a collection of humorous short stories, By the Brown Bog (1913). It will argue that changing definitions of originality and plagiarism in the late nineteenth century excluded popular women’s writing, like Somerville and Ross’s Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. (1899), from the legal protection of copyright. Based on Somerville and Ross’s correspondence with their agent, publisher, and legal representation (the Society of Authors), this paper will further demonstrate how Somerville and Ross’s case was defeated by aesthetic discourses of authorship, ownership, and literary genius. These intellectual and public markers of literary value, this paper will conclude, significantly influenced the law’s attitude towards issues of plagiarism.