The Other Empire: Australian Books and American Publishers in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Imperial networks enabled the movement of Australian books and authors to Britain and across the Empire, but the transatlantic book trade also enabled Australian books to travel to the United States and to participate in what was imagined as a shared Anglo-Saxon world. This essay explores Australian books and authors in the American publishing world of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, especially works in the transnational genres of frontier romance and South Sea tales. It examines the economic, legal and generic structures that both encouraged and constrained the movement of texts across colonial/national borders and the degree to which the trade was primarily a trade in commodities or an exchange of stories, identities and ideas.