Since its publication in 1938 critics have generally read Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia as a nationalist novel, even when its nationalism is seen to be structured by contradiction. But little attention has been given to the ways in which Herbert’s complex, multifarious and heteroglossic novel exceeds and challenges the very possibility of coherent national space and a coherent national story. This essay considers moments and spaces in Herbert’s novel where the national is displaced and unravelled. Drawing on Rebecca Walkowitz’s idea of cosmopolitan style and Suvendrini Perera’s work on Australia’s insular imagination I identify a critical cosmopolitanism that inheres in the novel’s geographical imagination and its literary form, particularly the narrative voice which retains a critical distance from the nationalist sensibility of various characters and plot lines, performing a detached and restless homelessness that I identify with the cosmopolitan. Ultimately I ask how the novel’s spatial and environmental imagination displaces its nationalist agenda, making space for a different kind of social imagination—one that does not confine itself to the terms of the nation or organise itself around a central figure for the nation.

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The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Remapping Capricornia: Xavier Herbert’s Cosmopolitan Imagination

Cosmopolitan Cordelia: Jane Addams’s Industrial Parables

In Great Expectations, the lawyer’s clerk Wemmick tells Pip, “the office is one thing, and private life is another.” That distinction between the professional and the personal remains as crucial to twenty-first-century students as it was to the Victorians. To explore the difference, each student creates two profiles, on Facebook and on LinkedIn, for a character from an assigned novel. Basing their profiles on evidence from the text builds their literary analysis skills, while learning the expectations of LinkedIn will get students ready to prepare their own digital resumes. The assignment thus both teaches students about Victorian culture and prepares them for their post-college lives.

“The Office Is One Thing, and Private Life Is Another”: Social Networking with the Victorians

Joyce's Census: Character, Demography, and the Problem of Population in Ulysses

We study temporal networks of characters in literature focusing on "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865) by Lewis Carroll and the anonymous "La Chanson de Roland" (around 1100). The former, one of the most influential pieces of nonsense literature ever written, describes the adventures of Alice in a fantasy world with logic plays interspersed along the narrative. The latter, a song of heroic deeds, depicts the Battle of Roncevaux in 778 A.D. during Charlemagne's campaign on the Iberian Peninsula. We apply methods recently developed by Taylor and coworkers \cite{Taylor+2015} to find time-averaged eigenvector centralities, Freeman indices and vitalities of characters. We show that temporal networks are more appropriate than static ones for studying stories, as they capture features that the time-independent approaches fail to yield.

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Citations

Remapping Capricornia: Xavier Herbert’s Cosmopolitan Imagination

Cosmopolitan Cordelia: Jane Addams’s Industrial Parables

“The Office Is One Thing, and Private Life Is Another”: Social Networking with the Victorians

Joyce's Census: Character, Demography, and the Problem of Population in Ulysses

Temporal Network Analysis of Literary Texts

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