Atherton and Dean shortlisted – AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship

on being shortlisted for the 2021 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship.

Australian University Heads of English (AUHE) is a peak body drawing together English departments at more than 30 universities as well as existing literary associations. We aim to be a forum in which the present and future of literary studies in Australia is discussed and shaped and will address issues such as the relationship between English in secondary and tertiary education, quality assurance in teaching, research funding, enrollments, curriculum as well as pedagogic strategies for teaching literature in English.

AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship in 2021

There was a far greater number of nominated books than had been anticipated, and the panel was impressed by the considerable range and quality of the submissions. It has been a privilege to read all of these illuminating contributions to the field of literary studies.

In alphabetical order of authors’ surnames, the shortlist is as follows:

Anne Collett and Dorothy Jones, Judith Wright and Emily Carr: Gendered Colonial Modernity (Bloomsbury)
Tanya Dalziell, Gail Jones: Word, Image, Ethics (Sydney University Press)
Andrew Dean, Metafiction and the Postwar Novel (Oxford University Press)
Paul Giles, The Planetary Clock: Antipodean Time and Spherical Postmodern Fictions (Oxford University Press)
Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton, Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton University Press)
David McInnes, Shakespeare and Lost Plays (Cambridge University Press)
Matthew Sussman, Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction (Cambridge University Press)

Cassandra Atherton’s book Prose Poetry: An Introduction, co-authored with Paul Hetherington, is listed as: An engaging and authoritative introduction to an increasingly important and popular literary genre

Prose Poetry is the first book of its kind—an engaging and authoritative introduction to the history, development, and features of English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. Poets and scholars Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton introduce prose poetry’s key characteristics, chart its evolution from the nineteenth century to the present, and discuss many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today’s most inventive writing.

Andrew Dean recently launched Metafiction and the Postwar Novel which is described as: a full-length reassessment of one of the definitive literary forms of the postwar period, sometimes known as ‘postmodern metafiction’. In the place of large-scale theorizing, this book centres on the intimacies of writing situations – metafiction as it responds to readers, literary reception, and earlier works in a career. The emergence of archival materials and posthumously published works helps to bring into view the stakes of different moments of writing.

Emily Potter’s Writing Belonging at the Millennium: Notes from the Field on Settler-Colonial Place (Intellect) was shortlisted in 2020.