Transnationalism and the Literary Reception of Australian Women Writers’ Fiction in the US, 2010–2020: Three Case Studies

Abstract

The following article examines how Australian literary fiction by women is received in the United States. In particular, it considers how books are positioned by publishers, reviewers and authors as relevant to an American audience as well as to what extent Australian literary fiction’s appeal is borne out in reviews and in an online forum, Goodreads. To address these questions, I examine the US reception of three diverse literary novels by Australian women: Waanyi author Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (Atria Books, 2016), Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend (Riverhead, 2020), and Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (Little, Brown, 2013). I argue that recent Australian literary fiction by women makes an appeal to US readers through a combination of “transnational orientation”—or ideas, characters and settings that a novel evokes to address a global readership—which are leveraged by publishers in book design and endorsements, and “authorial disambiguation”, in the form of essays and websites written by authors and addressed to local and global readers. Efforts to draw attention to a novel’s currency for a US audience are unevenly evident in reviews in broadsheets and trade publications, as well as on Goodreads.