University of Sydney / Faculty of Arts / Department of English / Staff / Academic Staff

Prof. Robert Dixon

BA (Hons), PhD (Sydney), FAHA
Professor of Australian Literature

+61 2 9036 9231

Robert Dixon is a past-President of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Reserach Interests

  • colonialism and its culture
  • Australian literature and literary criticism
  • Australian cultural studies
  • postcolonial studies
  • Australian art history.

Current Research

An illustrated edition of Frank Hurley's diaries, and the book Travelling Mass-Media Circus: Frank Hurley and Colonial Modernity, both to be published by Melbourne University Press in 2008.

Books

The Course of Empire: Neo-Classical Culture in New South Wales 1788-1860 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-Australian Popular Fiction, 1875-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Republished, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009

Prosthetic Gods: Travel, Representation and Colonial Governance (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001).

Editor of:

Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s-1960s (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2008, co-edited with Veronica Kelly)

CanonOZities: the Making of Literary Reputations in Australia. Published as a special issue of Southerly 57.3 (Spring 1997, with Delys Bird and Susan Lever).

Australian Literature and the Public Sphere (Canberra: ASAL, 1998, with Alison Bartlett and Christopher Lee).

Authority and Influence: Australian Literary Criticism 1950-2000. (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001, with Delys Bird and Christopher Lee).

Resourceful Reading: the new empiricism, eResearch and Australian literary culture. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009). (edited with Katherine Bode)

Research Group

Nineteenth-Century Studies

Chapters in Books

  • ‘A “Complicated Joy”: The Aesthetic Theory of Associationism and its Influence in Early Tasmanian Culture’, in Michael Roe, ed., The Flow of Culture: Tasmanian Studies. Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1987.
  • ‘Colonial Newsreel: James Taylor's Panorama of Sydney’, in Daniel Thomas, ed., Creating Australia: 2000 years of Australian Art 1788-1988. Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 1988.
  • ‘Public and Private Voices: Non-Fictional Prose to 1855’, in L.T. Hergenhan, ed., Penguin New Literary History of Australia. Ringwood: Penguin, 1988.
  • ‘Nostalgia and Patriotism in Colonial Australia’, in Alan Frost and John Hardy, eds. Terra Australis to Australia. Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1989.
  • ‘The Boundaries of Civility: Colonial Discourse in Popular Fiction of the First Commonwealth Decade’, in Margaret Harris and Elizabeth Webby, eds. Reconnoitres: Essays in Australian Literature in Honour of G.A. Wilkes. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992.
  • ‘The New Woman and the Coming Man: Gender and Genre in the “Lost-Race” Romance’, in Susan Magarey, Sue Rowley and Susan Sheridan, eds, Debutante Nation: Feminism contests the 1890s. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993.
  • ‘The Unfinished Commonwealth: Boundaries of civility in popular Australian fiction of the first Commonwealth decade’, in Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, eds. De-Scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and textuality. London: Routledge, 1994.
  • ‘Unfamiliar Selves: Ion L. Idriess’ Torres Strait Trilogy’, in Caroline Guerin, Philip Butterss and Amanda Nettlebeck, eds, Crossing Lines: Formations of Australian Culture. Adelaide: ASAL, 1995.
  • ‘Unfamiliar Selves: Ion L. Idriess and Melanesia’, in Gerry Turcotte, ed., Masks, Tapestries and Journeys. Wollongong: Centre for Cultural and Textual Studies, University of Wollongong, 1996. pp. 161-71.
  • ‘Introduction’ to Delys Bird, Robert Dixon and Susan Lever, eds, CanonOZities: the making of literary reputations in Australia, a special issue of Southerly 57.3 (Spring 1997): 5-15.
  • ‘Literature and Melodrama: 1851-1914’, in The New Oxford History of Australian Literature, edited by Bruce Bennet and Jennifer Strauss. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998, Chapter 4, pp. 66-88.
  • ‘Deregulating the Critical Economy: Theory and Australian Literary Criticism in the 1980s’, in Alison Bartlett, Robert Dixon and Christopher Lee, eds, Australian Literature and the Public Sphere. Canberra: ASAL, 1998, pp.194-201.
  • ‘Cannibalising indigenous texts: headhunting and fantasy in Ion L. Idriess’ Coral Sea adventures’, in Body Trade: Captivity, cannibalism and colonialism in the Pacific, edited by Jeanette Hoorn and Barbara Creed. London and Sydney: Routledge in association with Pluto Press, 2001, pp.112-25.
  • ‘Introduction’. Authority and Influence: Australian Literary Criticism 1950-2000 edited by Delys Bird, Robert Dixon and Christopher Lee. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001.
  • ‘Frank Hurley’s Pearls and Savages’: Travel, representation and colonial governance’, in In Transit: Travel, Text, Empire, edited by Helen Gilbert and Anna Johnston. New York: Peter Lang, 2002, pp. 191-216.
  • ‘Kingsley’s Geoffry Hamlyn and the Art of Landscape’. Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism vol. 107, edited by Edna M Hedblad and Russel Whitaker. Acton, Mass: Gale, 2002, pp.239-250. [Reprint of article originally appearing in Southerly 37.3 (September 1977)].
  • ‘Travelling in the West: The Writing of Amitav Ghosh’. In Tabish Khair, ed. Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003, pp.9-35. [Reprint of article originally appearing in Journal of Commonwealth Literature 31.1 (1996)].
  • ‘Neoclassicism and Early Colonial Australia’, in Lectures La Fontaine. St Petersburg: University of St Petersburg, 2004.
  • ‘Two Versions of Australian Pastoral: Les Murray and William Robinson’, in Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New New World, edited by Judith Ryan and Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2004. 285-304.
  • ‘Boundary Work: Australian Literary Studies in the Field of Knowledge Production’, in The25th Anniversary Collection: Australian Studies Centre, The University of Queensland, edited by David Carter and Martin Crotty (St Lucia: Australian Studies Centre, University of Queensland, 2005), pp. 20-37. Reprint of ‘Boundary Work: Australian Literary Studies in the Field of Knowledge Production’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 3 (2004).
  • ‘The Sandline Mercenaries Affair: Postcoloniality, Globalization and the Nation-State’, in Five Emus to the King of Siam: Environment and Empire, edited by Helen Tiffin, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007: pp. 131-48.
  • ‘Australian vernacular modernities: people, sites, practices’ (with Veronica Kelly), in Impact of the Modern: vernacular modernities in Australia 1870s-1960s, edited by Robert Dixon and Veronica Kelly (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2008), xiii-xxiv.
  • ‘Pictures at an Exhibition: The Exhibitionary Context of Early Australian Cinema and Photographic Culture’, in Creative Nation: Australian Cinema and Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Amit Sarwal and Reema Sarwal. New Delhi: SSS Publications, 2009, 385-404. Revised reprint of ‘Pictures at an Exhibition: Frank Hurley’s In the Grip of the Polar Pack Ice (1919) and the exhibitionary context of early cinema’. Journal of Australian Studies 78 (2003).
  • ‘Australian Fiction and the World Republic of Letters: 1890-1950’ The Cambridge Literary History of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
  • ‘Australian Literature and the Cultural Dimensions of Globalization’, edited by David Carter, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
  • ‘Resourceful Reading: A New Empiricism in the Digital Age?’ (with Katherine Bode), in Katherine Bode and Robert Dixon, eds, Resourceful Reading: e-research, the new empiricism and Australian literary culture. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009.
  • ‘Australian Literature in the Translation Zone: Robert Dessaix and David Malouf’, in Katherine Bode and Robert Dixon, eds, Resourceful Reading: e-research, the new empiricism and Australian literary culture. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009.
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Refereed Articles

  • ‘Kingsley's Geoffrey Hamlyn and the Art of Landscape’. Southerly 3 (1977): 274-299.
  • ‘Mopping and Mowing in the Mulga’. Hemisphere (December 1978): 6-11.
  • ‘Hostilities between the Month and the Empire: 1857-58’. Southerly 4 (1979): 394-416.
  • ‘Charles Harpur and John Gould’. Southerly 3 (1980): 315-29.
  • ‘Ralph Rashleigh: A History of Civil Society in New South Wales’. Southerly 3 (1981): 300-316.
  • ‘Scenic Tours in New South Wales: The Nineteenth-Century Travel Essay’. Southerly 3 (1982): 324-337.
  • ‘Rolf Boldrewood's War to the Knife: Narrative Form and Ideology in the Historical Novel’. Australian Literary Studies 12.3 (May 1986): 324-334.
  • ‘The Great Australian Emptiness Revisited: Murray Bail's Holden's Performance’. Australian Literary Studies 15.1 (May 1991): 26-37.
  • ‘Closing the Can of Worms: Enactments of Justice in Bleak House, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and The Tax Inspector’. Westerly 2 (Summer 1992): 11-19.
  • ‘Filling up this emptiness: Neoclassicism and Colonial Discourse’. Bulletin of the Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies (1993): 11-21.
  • (with Philippa Kelly) ‘Meaningless Chatter: Hybridisation in Two North Queensland Texts’. Journal of Australian Studies 41 (June 1994): 79-87.
  • ‘Travelling in the West: The Writing of Amitav Ghosh’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 31.1 (1996): 3-24.
  • ‘Playing Tarzan: Australian Photography and Travel Writing about Melanesia, 1920-1945’. Australian Journal of Art 13 (1996): 133-43.
  • (with Philippa Kelly), ‘Brave Myth-takes: Re-Writing Romance in Tim Winton’s The Riders and Amanda Lohrey’s Camille’s Bread’. Westerley 42.2 (Winter 1997): 49-49.
  • ‘Prosthetic Gods: The Australian colonial body and Melanesia 1930-1950’, Southern Review 30.2 (1997): 130-145.
  • ‘James McAuley’s New Guinea: Colonialism, Modernity, Suburbia’, Australian Literary Studies 18.4 (October 1998): 20-40.
  • ‘Captives and Inmates: Captivity Narratives, Torres Strait Islanders and the Aborigines Protection Acts.’ Australian Studies: Journal of the British Australian Studies Association. 13.2 (Winter 1998): 41-54.
  • ‘The Sandline Mercenaries Affair: Postcoloniality, Globalisation and the Nation-State’. The UTS Review, 5.2 (November 1999): 85-100.
  • ‘The Prosthetic Imagination: Frank Hurley and the Ross Smith Flight’. Journal of Australian Studies: Vision Splendid 66 (2000): 1-22, 250-1.
  • ‘Citizens and Asylum Seekers: Emotional Literacy, Rhetorical Leadership and Human Rights’. Cultural Studies Review 8.2 (November 2002): 11-26.
  • ‘Pictures at an Exhibition: Frank Hurley’s In the Grip of the Polar Pack Ice (1919) and the exhibitionary context of early cinema’. Journal of Australian Studies 78 (2003): 122-37; 217-8.
    ‘Australian Literary Studies and Post-colonialism’. AUMLA 100 (November 2003): 108-121.
  • ‘Boundary Work: Australian Literary Studies in the Field of Knowledge Production’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 3 (2004): 27-43.
  • ”Where are the dead?” Spiritualism, photography and the Great War’, History of Photography 28.3 (Autumn 2004): 247-60.
  • ‘Cosmopolitan Australians and Colonial Modernity: Alex Miller’s Conditions of Faith, Gail Jones’s Black Mirror and AL McCann’s The White Body of Evening’, Westerly 49 (November 2004): 122-37.
  • ‘Internationalizing Australian Studies: Non-Fiction 2004-2005’. Westerly 50 (2005): 123-38.
  • ‘Tim Winton, Cloudstreet and the field of Australian Literature’. Westerly 50 (2005): 238-53.
  • ‘Travelling Mass-Media Circus: Frank Hurley’s Synchronised Lecture Entertainments’, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film 33.1 (Summer 2006): 60-87.
  • ‘What Was Travel Writing? Frank Hurley and the Media Contexts of Early Twentieth-Century Australian Travel Writing’, Studies in Travel Writing 11.1 (2007): 59-81.
  • ‘Spotting the Fake: C.E.W. Bean, Frank Hurley and the making of the 1923 Photographic Record of the War’, History of Photography 31.2 (Summer 2007): 165-79.
  • ‘Australian Literature-International Contexts’, Southerly 67: 1-2 (2007): 15-27.
  • ‘Cosmopolitanism and Australian Studies’, Australian Studies (Journal of the British Australian Studies Association) 19.2 (Winter 2004; published 2007): 67-77.
  • ‘Australian Literature and the New Empiricism: A Response to Paul Eggert, “Australian Classics and the Price of Books’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL): The Colonial Present (Special Issue 2008): 158-162.
  • ‘Tim Winton, Cloudstreet and the field of Australian Literature’. Westerly 50 (2005): 238-53. Reprinted in AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource On-Line Anthology of Australian Literary Criticism. 2008. www.austlit.edu.au
  • ‘Ghosts in the Machine: Modernity and the Unmodern in Gail Jones’s Dreams of Speaking’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL) 8 (2008): 121-37.
  • ‘Home or Away? The trope of place in Australian literary criticism and literary history’, Westerly 54.1 (July 2009): 12-17.
  • ‘Ray Lawrence and Peter Carey’s Bliss (1985): Fiction, Film and Power’, Studies in Australasian Cinema 3.3 (in press 2009).
  • ‘Travelling Mass-Media Circus: Frank Hurley and Colonial Modernity’, Arts: The Journal of the Sydney University Arts Association (in press 2009).
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Entries in Reference Books

‘James Tucker’ and ‘Henry Savery’. The Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1994

‘Richard Sydney Porteous’. Australian Dictionary of Biography Volume 16 1940-1980 Pik-Z.

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Reviews

  • Review of Ken Goodwin, A History of Australian Literature. London: Macmillan, 1986. LiNQ, 1 (1986): 73-75.
  • Review of Peter Chapman, ed., The Diaries and Letters of G.T.W.B. Boyes. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1986. Tasmanian Historical Research Association: Papers and Proceedings, June (1986): 82-84.
  • Review of Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. LiNQ, 3 (1988): 103-108.
  • Review of Elizabeth Webby, ed., Colonial Voices: Letters, Diaries, Journalism and Other Accounts of Nineteenth-Century Australia. St Lucia: UQP, 1989, LiNQ, 1 (1990): 151-155.
  • Review of Susan McKernan, A Question of Commitment: Australia Literature in the Twenty Five Years After the War. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989. LiNQ, 2 (1990): 121-125.
  • Review of Peter Carey, The Tax Inspector. St Lucia: UQP, 1991, LiNQ, 2 (1991): 135-143.
  • Review of Giovanna Capone, ed. European Perspectives: Contemporary Essays on Australian Literature. St Lucia: UQP, 1991; Gillian Whitlock and David Carter, eds, Images of Australia: An Introductory Reader in Australian Studies. St Lucia: UQP, 1992; Sneja Gunew and Kateryna O. Longley, eds Striking Chords: Multicultural literary interpretations. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992. LiNQ, 19.2 (1992): 156-61.
  • Review of Richard Fotheringham. In Search of Steele Rudd: Author of the classic Dad and Dave stories. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1995. Coppertales 3 (1996): 107-110.
  • Review of Beverley Ely. Ion Idriess. Sydney: Imprint ETT, 1995. Coppertales. 3 (1996): 117-119.
  • Review of Ken Stewart, ed., The 1890s: Australian Literature and Literary Culture. St Lucia: UQP, 1995. Journal of Australian Studies, 50/51 (1996): 174-6.
  • Review of David Goodman. Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1994. Australian Historical Studies 28.108 (April 1997): 150-1.
  • Review of Michael Ackland. Henry Kendall: The Man and the Myths. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995. Australian Historical Studies 28.108 (April 1997): 161-2
  • Review of Chris Healy, From the Ruins of Colonialism: History as Social Memory. Cambridge: CUP, 1997. Southerly 57.2 (Winter 1997): 206-13.
  • Review of Ernest Favenc, Tales of the Austral Tropics, ed. Cheryl Taylor, Colonial Texts Series. UNSW Press, 1997. Coppertales 4 (1997): 133-6.
  • Review of Michael Wilding, Studies in Classic Australian Fiction. Sydney: Shoestring Press, 1997. [i||Margin]] 44 (April 1998): 13-17.
  • Review of Ian McLean, White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). Southerly 58.2 (Winter 1998): 224-31.
  • Review of Bryce Courtenay, Jessica (Ringwood: Penguin Viking, 1998), The Age Saturday Extra 12 December 1998, p.7.
  • Review of Louisa Atkinson, Gertrude the Emigrant; A Tale of Colonial Life, ed. Elizabeth Lawson, Colonial Texts Series. Canberra: School of English and Australian Scholarly Editions Centre, University College, ADFA, in association with Mulini Press, 1998. Coppertales 6 (2000): 112-5.
  • Review of Patricia Clarke, Rosa! Rosa!: A Life of Rosa Praed, novelist and spiritualist. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1999. Coppertales 7 (2001): 111-4.
  • Review of David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850-1930. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999. Australian Studies (Journal of the British Australian Studies Association) 2001
  • Review of Paul de Serville, Rolf Boldrewood: A Life. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000. Historical Studies 32. 116 (April 2001): 176-78.
  • Review of Alfred J Gabay, Messages from Beyond: Spiritualism and Spiritualists in Melbourne’s Golden Age 1870-1890. Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2001. Journal of Australian Studies Review of Books. Issue 2 (September 2001): http//www.api-network.com
  • Review of Andrew Hassam, Through Australian Eyes: Colonial Perceptions of Imperial Britain. Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2000. Journal of Colonial History 4.1 (April 2002): 110-13.
  • Review of Rudolf Mrazek, Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Social History (New York) 28.3 (October 2003): 401-403.
  • Review of Richard Nile, The Making of the Australian Literary Imagination. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2002. Australian Book Review No.248 (February 2003): 45-6.
  • Review of A History of the Book in Australia, 1891-1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market, edited by Martyn Lyons and John Arnold. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 97.3 (September 2003): 400-1.
  • Review of Legacies of White Australia: Race, Culture and Nation, edited by Laksiri Jayasuriya, David Walker and Jan Gothard. Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 2003. Studies in West Australian History 24 (2006): 133-35.
  • Review of Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture, edited by Stephanie Trigg. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006, Australian Historical Studies 38.129 (April 2007): 163-4.
  • Review of Australian Plays for the Colonial Stage 1834-1899, edited by Richard Fotheringham (The Academy Editions of Australian Literature) St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2006; and The Collected Verse of Mary Gilmore. Volume I. 1887-1929, edited by Jennifer Strauss (The Academy Editions of Australian Literature) St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2004, Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, Centre for British Studies, University of Bamberg, Germany, 2008: 196-8.
  • Review of Contact: Photographs from the Australian War Memorial Collection, by Shaune Lakin. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2006. History of Photography 31.3 (Autumn 2007): 307-309.
  • Review of Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism. Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2007, by Graham Huggan. Ariel: (in press 2009)
  • Review of Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia, edited by Ann Stephen, et al (Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah, MUP, 2009). Modernism/Modernity (in press 2009)
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