SOURCE: Jarvis, Douglas. “The Development of an Egalitarian Poetics in the Bulletin, 1880-1890.” Australian Literary Studies 10, no. 1 (May 1981): 22-34.

In the following essay, Jarvis explores the literary values of the Bulletin and their significance to Australian society in the 1880s.

In the period 1880 to 1890 the Bulletin was formulating the editorial policy and the literary attitudes for which it was later to become notorious. The literary attitudes expressed in the columns of dramatic and other criticism and in articles with titles like ‘Literature in Australia’ are significant both as developments of attitudes and preoccupations originating in the mid-century and, taken as a whole, as the poetics of that kind of writing which came to be known as the production of ‘the Bulletin school’. This is not to suggest that there was a consistent or homogeneous line of development in the literary communities which was reflected in the Bulletin or...