SOURCE: Carter, David, and Gillian Whitlock. “Institutions of Australian Literature.” In Australian Studies: A Survey, edited by James Walter, pp. 109-35. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989.

In the following excerpt, Carter and Whitlock analyze the content, style, and public role of the Bulletin in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

… Just as literature has played a major role in discussions of national identity, so too have questions of national identity played a key role in determining how people have read and discussed Australian literature. Literary texts have been read with such questions in mind as: How ‘Australian’ is this book? What does it tell us about the ‘national character’? What does it tell us about the nation's growth towards cultural ‘maturity’? Looking at literature this way, through the ‘spectacles’ of national identity, has given rise to a number of totalizing approaches to Australian literature and literary history. By...