Literary Adaptation and Market Value
Encounters with the Public in the Early Career of Roger McDonald
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2014.6Keywords:
Roger McDonald, literature market, topoi of canonisation, republic of lettersAbstract
In The world republic of letters, Pascale Casanova suggests that an intimate relation between politics and literature is a feature of postcolonial nations because the relative lack of literary capital on the margins prevents the autonomy that is available to writers in the great national literary spaces such as France, England and the United States. The pressing imperatives of post-colonial responsibility certainly pose a particular challenge for contemporary Australian novelists aspiring not just to local distinction, but also access to international markets and a wider reputation in the world republic of letters. In Australia, the writer’s aspiration to a wider market share and greater cultural capital has often been construed as a forlorn search for a reliable readership. An established following provides a foundation for the development of a consistent artistic oeuvre, which is in turn able to support the critical topoi of canonisation: promise, originality, development and genius.
References
Pascale Casanova, The world republic of letters, trans. M. B. Denovoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 85.
Susan Lever, ‘Criticism and Fiction in Australia,’ Overland 193 (Summer 2008), 65.
Dorothy Green, ‘Puzzling lack of passion for our own literature’, The National Times, 20 October 1979, 25. Clipping. Roger McDonald Papers NLA MS 5612 Box 15 Folder 57, Canberra.
He also edited The first paperback poets anthology in 1974 and published a volume of selected work with fellow poet Geoff Page in 1975.
Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman, The new diversity: Australian fiction 1970–88 (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989), pp. 1–10.
Roger McDonald, 1915, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1979.
Susan Lever, ‘The challenge of the novel: Australian fiction since 1950’, in The Cambridge history of Australian literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 498–516.
Roger McDonald, Slipstream, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1982.
Barry Andrews, ‘The empire strikes back: 1915 and the Australian sense of the past’, in Mirko Jurak (ed.), Australian papers: Yugoslavia, Europe and Australia (Ljubljana, Slovenia: Faculty of Arts and Science, Edvard Kardelj University of Ljubljana, 1983), p. 180.
Roger McDonald Papers NLA MS 5612 Box 15 Folder 55, Canberra.
Pictures followed in the newspapers, along with a story of how the speaker of parliament was investigating damage to the front steps caused by the enthusiastic historical impersonators. The author later paid the bill.
David Rowbotham, ‘It’s a simple and deadly tale of war’, 7 April 1979, Clipping in the Roger McDonald Papers NLA MS 5612, Series 5 1915, Folder 54.
Roger McDonald Papers NLA MS 5612. Box 17 Folder 70.
Barry Andrews, ‘The empire strikes back’.
[1915]. Gallipoli Gazette 19(12) (Aug.–Sep. 1979). Clipping in Roger McDonald Papers NLA MS 5612 Box 15 Folder 54, Canberra.
McDonald, quoted Tony Stephens, ‘Attack launches novel on Gallipoli’, Sunday Telegraph, 8 April 1979, 134. Clipping in the Roger McDonald Papers NLA MS 5612, Series 5 1915, Folder 54.
Les Murray, ‘Books of the year’, 18. Emphasis added. Murray’s view may be influenced by his experience of sharing accommodation at university with Bob Ellis. See Peter F. Alexander, LesMurray: A lifein progress(Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 61–70.
McDonald, quoted in Susan Molloy, ‘The harvest can wait: 1915’s arrived’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 November 1981, 50. Clipping in the Roger McDonald Papers NLA MS 5612 Box 15 Folder 56, Canberra.
Tom O’Regan, ‘Australian film in the 1970s: The ocker and the quality film’, Australian Film in the Reading Room, accessed 20 September 2013, http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/film/1970s.html.
Graeme Turner, National fictions: Literature, film and the construction of Australian narrative (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1984).
O’Regan, ‘Australian film in the 1970s’.
Correspondence, George Braziller to Roger McDonald, 30 October 1981, Roger McDonald Papers NLA 5612 Series 2 Folder 15, Canberra.
It might be more accurate to think of it as an assembly of different kinds of minority audiences who become a majority public in number, but not in a shared or collective interpretation.
See Richard McBride, ‘War is hell — especially for a novelist’, Bulletin, 5 June 1979, 77; Peter Pierce, ‘Minding everybody’s business: The languages of recent Australian fiction’, Meanjin 38(4) (1979), 501–9; Gavin O’Grady, ‘Poet’s approach makes a hard read’, Nation Review, 14 June 1979, 623. Though for an alternate view, see Chris Wallace-Crabbe, ‘Poets and other people’, Times Literary Supplement, 11 January 1980, 30.
1915, dir. Chris Thompson and Di Drew, Roadshow Entertainment, 1982.
Correspondence, Roger McDonald to Robert Gottleib, 22 January 1987, Roger McDonald Papers NLA MS 5612 Folder 7.
‘Correspondence with agents’, UQP Archives 198 Box 210, Fryer Library, University of Queensland, Brisbane. Also Deborah Jordan, ‘American dreams and the University of Queensland Press’, in Robert Dixon and Nicholas Birns (eds), Reading across the Pacific: Australia–United States intellectual histories (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2010), pp. 323–38. My thanks to Deborah for generously providing me with a copy of her paper.
Jordan, ‘American dreams’.
‘Correspondence with agents’, UQP Archives 198 Box 210, Fryer Library, University of Queensland, Brisbane.
David Carter, ‘Trans-Pacific or trans-Atlantic traffic? Australian books and American publishers’, in Dixon and Birns (eds), Reading across the Pacific, p. 356.
‘Correspondence with agents’.
Roger McDonald to Robert Gottlieb, William Morris Agency, New York, correspondence, 21 January 1987. Folder 7 Series 2 Business papers 1964–92, Roger McDonald Papers MS 5612 NLA.
Robert McCrum to Roger McDonald, 7 July 1982, Roger McDonald Papers NLA MS 5612 Series 2 Business papers 1964–92, Canberra.
Folder 19 correspondence with Little Brown USA publishers, Roger McDonald Papers NLA MS 5612
That is until Picador released a paperback along with a reissue of McDonald’s work a decade later, when Shearer’s Motel was published.
