Location: UNSW Canberra City, Reid, ACT
Thursday, August 20 – Friday, August 21
Eventbrite Link: Polar Imaginaries and Combative Poetics: Australia’s Literary Cold War Tickets
A Symposium examining mid-twentieth-century Australian literary cultures, especially realism and its political, social, and aesthetic stakes.
The postwar decades saw a flourishing of small magazines, journals, writers’ groups, and publishing initiatives committed to representing the lives of working-class Australians. These efforts intersected with broader global ideological tensions, producing a charged literary field shaped by surveillance, censorship, and competing visions of culture and society.
Polar Imaginaries and Combative Poetics brings together more than twenty scholars to discuss the literary cultures and conflicts of Australia’s Cold War. Bringing renewed attention to mid-twentieth-century realism and its political, social, and aesthetic stakes, the event will explore the vibrant cultural infrastructure of the organised left and its role in shaping Australian literary production.
The in-person Symposium is hosted at UNSW Canberra City as part of an ARC Discovery Project led by Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel focused on the Australasian Book Society. The project aims to highlight the literary works, forms and lives produced by polarised forms of cultural infrastructure during Australia’s Cold War.
The Symposium will be held across 2 days:
- Thursday 20 August from approx. 4pm – Keynote Speaker and Presentation by UNSW Rare Books Team (tbc)
- Friday 21 August – Full-day Symposium featuring 20 speakers
A HDR/ECR Masterclass is currently being planned for Saturday 22 August to coincide with the Symposium.
Registration is free for all parts of the event. A full program will be provided to registrants.